|
Who is the author? Ahlem
is a writer who hides through her novels a fantastic father who
"haunts" her feather.. While he does not actually hold
the key to her novels, it is clear that he has completely transferred
to her the immense burden of his personal history, which merges
in its magnitude with the history of Algeria. |
 |
She felt very close to her father. Through him, and also through the " uncle ", who was considered as his older brother, she was already experiencing the political upstarts of post-independence, which led her to discover another facet of the Algerian wound: Colonel Houari Boumediene’s coup and the attempted coup d'état of Colonel Tahar Zbiri. The “Algerian wound” had become a part of her life, through the life of her father, a militant of the P.P.A. (the Algerian People’s Party) who had experienced French prisons following the demonstrations of May 8, 1945 in Constantine, when Algerians openly claimed their independence. Ahlem is no stranger to this present scene, so fresh in the memory, nor is she stranger to those political scenes of the past that still bear their grip. She still suffers these scenes emotionally; her father’s presence is everywhere in her writing, even when he does not appear in ink.
When the Algerian war broke out, her two elder cousins, Azzedine and Houba, had already begun to seize the slightest opportunity to show solidarity with the Algerian "Moudjahidine", notably by taking part in the student demonstrations in the city of Tunis. They had eventually joined, in 1955, the underground movement of Aurès. Ahlem never loses, until now, the memory of this period. Her father’s house had become, in this crucial phase of the revolution, a place from where the moudjahidine converged, those who were leaving to join the underground movement or even those who returned and needed to be taken care of. She remembered especially what had happened to Azzedine, who later became a superior officer of the ALN.
The high-ranking father was to fall ill in 1967, following a stressful
period generating partly from his incapacity to manage the conflicts
of the clan, and the political capers that resulted from the coup d'état
of the president, Houari Boumediene.
The stress that was affecting him had led, step by step, to consultation at the psychiatric center of the military hospital. Ahlem was adolescent at the time. She was in high school, at the Aïcha Secondary School, and being the eldest sister of a family of four children, she was attributed " the honour " of visiting her hospitalized father at least three times a week at the ANP hospital, in Bab el Oued. To her, the illness she saw her father suffering reflected the illness of Algeria.
The father’s illness had been predictable; he had become involved in each and every event and activity that was taking place. Besides daily engagements, which led him to carry on several missions inside the country, he animated a radio show (in French), dedicated to problems concerning the implementation of agricultural self-management. (Ahlem was very proud to listen to her father’s show ... Some years later she followed in his footsteps). Furthermore, and still within the framework of voluntary service, he had dedicated more of his spare time to the development of tools for the elimination of illiteracy. He had become one of the pillars in the campaign for the elimination of illiteracy, launched by President Benbella. Every evening he had opened his briefcase and, making sure his children were asleep, he had begun working. When the young Ahlem (at 18) presented her successful radio show "Hamassat", when she was publishing articles in the newspapers, and when she graduated from high school, her father was still hospitalized. This continuation of his suffering caused her own suffering….all that Algeria was experiencing was through pain and suffering.
At the beginning of the seventies Ahlem was in Paris, married to a Lebanese journalist who had, moreover, a lot of sympathy for Algeria. She seemed to have almost broken off with any intellectual activity, and was subjected to the role of homemaker. It was at the beginning of the eighties that she began to reconnect with literature, first by working on her doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne, then by collaborating seriously in the magazines of which her husband was editor in chief. One may observe that Ahlem, though belonging to a new generation of writers, nevertheless carries in her writings a quarter of a century of history, through the fields of literature and journalism.
Parallel to her ambition as a woman writer, she aspires to offer the
Algerian literary award, “Malek Haddad”, an alibi to her love
of contemporary literature.
She is convinced that Algeria is endowed with infinite capacities, and
is capable of magnificent achievements if granted trust and a guiding
hand. When the day comes for her pen to rest, her joy will not be greater
than when learning how someone, somehow, will be able to write thanks
to her award. Is this not the most beautiful of dreams ....... ?
PS: I do not intend for the "Internet readers" to think that inadvertently, throughout these paragraphs, I have placed the father at the front of the stage, and that to Ahlem I have almost attributed a second role. Please trust me how, as the father becomes merged with the history of contemporary Algeria, Ahlem fits, for her part, into the history of the father, not only to take place through him as the witness of an era, but also to immortalize him through infinity… ...
Mourad Mosteghanemi