Ahlam Mosteghanemi
| Ahlem Mosteghanemi | |
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Ahlem Mosteghanemi at Beirut Book Fair 2012
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| Born | Tunis, Tunisia |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Language | Arabic |
| Nationality | Algerian |
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| Website | |
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Ahlam (or Ahlem) Mosteghanemi (Arabic: أحلام مستغانمي), is an Algerian writer who has been called "the world's best-known arabophone woman novelist".
Ahlem was born in Tunis. She is the daughter of a militant political activist who was forced into exile during the Algerian liberation war. In the wake of independence, her family moved back to Algeria, where her father, an intellectual and a humanitarian, occupied high positions in the first Algerian government. He launched an alphabetization campaign all over the territory and supervised the distribution of agricultural land to the poorest.
In the 70s, following the assassination attempt during the Boumediene coup d’état, and the consequent hospitalization of her father, who was also targeted, Ahlem, as the eldest sibling, took up the responsibility of providing for her family as a radio host. At the age of 17, she became a household name in Algeria with the poetic daily show Hammassat (Whispers) on national radio. While publishing in 1973, Ala Marfa al Ayam (To the Days’ Haven), Ahlem also became the first woman to publish a compilation of poetry in Arabic, which put her on a thorny and untraveled path. It was followed in 1976 by the release of Al Kitaba fi Lahdat Ouray (The Writing in a Moment of Nudity). At the time, she was part of the first generation to acquire the right to study in Arabic after more than a century of prohibition by the French colonization.
The Arabic language, encouraged by her French-speaking father as if in revenge, provided her with a sense of liberation since her family had not mastered the newly reacquired Arabic language. But, at the time, the Algerian society was rebuilding its identity and recovering from a colonial past that resulted in the death of over a million and a half. It was not prepared to see a girl express herself freely on subjects such as love and women’s rights. It was even less prepared to see her do it in the sacred Arabic language. This is where Ahlem’s battle begins against sexism. Although women had fought alongside men during the revolution, in the postwar period they were generally relegated to their traditional roles; they were denied the freedom to express themselves and to aspire to success. After she received her B.A in Literature, the board of directors of the University of Algiers refused her enrolment for a Masters under the pretence that her freedom of expression had a negative impact on students. She was also expelled from the Union of Algerian Writers for not conforming to the political line of her time.
In Algiers, Mosteghanemi met Georges. A Lebanese journalist and historian with a deep knowledge of Algeria, Georges was preparing a thesis about “Arabization and cultural conflicts in independent Algeria”. They were married in 1976 in Paris and settled there. Ahlam pursued her university studies at the Sorbonne, where in 1982 she obtained a doctorate in Sociology. Her thesis explored the misunderstanding and malaise between both sexes in the Algerian society. The doctorate was under the guidance of Jacques Berques, an eminent orientalist, who also wrote the preface of her thesis (published in 1985 by L’Harmattan as Algérie, femmes et écriture). During the fifteen years she spent in Paris, Ahlam contributed to various magazines, and during time stolen from her new role as a mother of three young boys, wrote fragments of what turned out after four years to be a novel. Ahlam justified her transition from poetry to prose by saying: «When we lose a love, one writes a poem, when we lose our homeland, one writes a novel». Algeria is never far from her mind: «There are countries that we live in and countries that live in us».
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