Saïd Khatibi is the author of the novel The End of the Sahara, now available in an English translation by Alexander E. Elinson. Khatibi, who writes in Arabic and French, was born in Algeria and lives in Slovenia. His other books include Sarajevo Firewood.
Q: What inspired you to write The End of the Sahara?
A:
I am interested in the question of violence in human society. How ordinary
people can become powerful, and at a certain moment, turn into criminals.
I was inspired by one family story. When I was a child, I had a disabled neighbor. He used a wheelchair, but I never knew why.
Twenty years later, I learned that he had been shot, and that the bullet made him disabled. This happened during the events of October 5, 1988, in Algeria. On that day, Algerians went out into the streets to protest against socialism and the one party system.
It was the first time that socialism had truly been shaken, one year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was a major event in contemporary history, yet one that is little known. I feel that this memory has been erased, and that the novel can save the memory of a people.
Q: The novel is set in an Algerian city--how important is setting to you in your work?
A: I was born and raised in the Algerian desert, under the sun. I know this geography well. The Sahara is not a postcard or a movie set, it is a place full of reality and hardship.
In the novel, I do not name the city, but readers will easily recognize it. I do not name it because all Algerian cities were similar in the 1980s under socialism. We watched the same television, listened to the same radio, ate the same food, and wore the same clothes.
Life was in black and white, boring, and boredom can also lead to
radicalization and then to violence.
Q: How did you research the novel, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: There was very little documentation about this period, but the novel is a work of fiction, and fiction can repair history.
Q: What role do you see the 1919 novel The Sheik playing in your own book?
A: The Sheik is a novel whose story takes place in my city in southern Algeria, and E. M. Hull mentions my city in her travel journal about Algeria. She wrote a beautiful novel, but unfortunately it is full of stereotypes about the local people.
I wanted to enter into dialogue with her, a dialogue made with love, to say
that literature is not a postcard, that the Algerian Sahara is not only an
orientalist image, and that there were people there who had the right to exist,
instead of being erased in favor of landscapes.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I published a new novel in Arabic last year, and at the moment I am thinking about another project that goes back to the time of the Second World War.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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