Tribune. Boualem Sansal, a free man

Arrested in Algiers on November 16, 2024, the Franco-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal has since been detained in Algeria.

Boualem Sansal deliberately excluded himself, as dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Alexander Zinoviev (1) did during the USSR. If he went to Algeria, it was not through imprudence, as some of his friends and defenders might have thought. He knew perfectly well the mechanisms of the Algerian dictatorship.

"I am neither the first nor the last to suffer the arbitrariness of the Algerian regime," he says in his letter, which has made headlines on social media. His Russian predecessors demonstrated that the more the Gulag extended its grip on the people, the weaker the regime became. History and literature are rich in testimonies establishing that freedom is reinforced by constraint. Didn't the creative power of the two dissidents I just mentioned reach its greatest extent when they were deprived of their freedom? Boualem Sansal's letter is in line with these precedents.

By his free decision to go to Algeria, his home country, Boualem Sansal told the world that his jailers cannot confiscate his freedom. Today, from his cell, where the air is thin and the light enters only to remind prisoners that they are still alive but never free, he confesses that his body is betraying him and that illness is eroding his strength.

It is well known that he is not the first Algerian to be arbitrarily arrested for acts of conscience. Among the many who preceded him, I have a moral and ethical obligation to once again cite Ahmed El Khalil, whose family has entrusted me with his defense. A Polisario leader living in Algeria, he had denounced the regime's financial misappropriation of aid provided to his community. Although a Moroccan national, he was arrested in 2009 and never tried, and remains detained. No member of his family, not even his lawyer, has been allowed to meet with him.

By emphasizing the exemplary strength of Boualem Sansal's character, I may have put his victimhood and his fragility as an elderly, sick man in the background. This is because he does not give in, like the great Russian writers of the last century. He stands up as a conqueror: "I am suffering, yes. My body is betraying me, the illness is eroding my strength, and the regime hopes I will leave in silence." He then immediately confronts them: "But how wrong they are! My voice, even in chains, does not belong to them. If it can still reach the outside world, it is to say this: do not believe their facade of respectability. This power is not a state, it is a grinding machine."

He emerges stronger from the humiliating trials he is subjected to. By opposing them with his human dignity, he teaches that the strength of the heart cannot be chained. He wants to be unshakeable, resilient, solid, at the same time as he feels that his body is betraying him. Extreme modesty of words!

This is the part of the great writer. The novel of words opens, I have often said and written, onto the absolute of freedom. Let us meditate on those who follow: “Fear is a prison larger than the one I find myself in, and it is harder to break. But I know that one day, the wall will fall. […] I will continue to write […] because writing is the only freedom they cannot confiscate, and it is through it that we will survive.”

(1) “So I voluntarily excluded myself,” Alexander Zinoviev, “Notes of a Night Watchman,” ed. L'Âge d'homme, 1979, p. 11.