Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Ahlam Mosteghanemi

Ahlam Mosteghanemi is an Algerian poet and writer, born on 13 April 1953 in Tunis, Tunisia. Her family came from Constantine in eastern Algeria, and her life was shaped early by Algeria’s struggle for independence and the political shocks that followed it. She became the first Algerian woman to publish both poetry and fiction in Arabic, a distinction tied closely to her generation: the first in Algeria able to study and write in Arabic after more than a century of French prohibition.

Her father was an Algerian nationalist who was imprisoned after the 1945 Sétif riots, in which two of his brothers were killed. Released in 1947, he moved the family to Tunis and continued supporting Algerian independence. After Algeria gained independence in 1962, he held prominent posts in the government of Ahmed Ben Bella. The 1965 Boumediene coup removed Ben Bella from power, and Mosteghanemi’s father suffered a mental breakdown and was hospitalized in Algiers. With him absent, she helped support the family as the eldest sibling, working as a radio host. At seventeen, she became popular in Algeria through her daily poetic program, Hammassat or Whispers.

Mosteghanemi’s first poetry collection, Ala Marfa al Ayam or To the Day’s Haven, appeared in 1973. It was followed in 1976 by Al Kitaba fi Lahdat Ouray, translated as The Writing in a Moment of Nudity. She earned a degree in Literature from the University of Algiers, but after her involvement in women’s rights activism, she was denied entry to a master’s program there. The board said her freedom of expression would negatively affect other students. She was also expelled from the Union of Algerian Writers for not following the established political line. She then pursued doctoral studies in France and received a PhD in sociology from Sorbonne University. Her thesis was later published in 1985 as Algérie, femmes et écritures, on women’s representation in Francophone and Arabic literature.

During fifteen years in Paris, Mosteghanemi wrote for magazines and moved from poetry into prose. In 1993 she settled in Lebanon and published her first novel, Zakirat el Jassad, known in English as Memory of the Flesh or The Bridges of Constantine. The book became her best-known work. It won the Naguib Mahfouz Prize in 1998 and the Nour Prize for best female work in Arabic, and by 2008 it had reached its nineteenth edition and sold more than 130,000 copies. She followed it with two sequels: Fawda el Hawas or The Chaos of Senses in 1997, and Aber Sareer or Bed Hopper in 2003.

Her later books widened her audience. Nessyan.com, also known as The Art of Forgetting, appeared as a break-up manual for women and brought her closer to female readers. In 2012 she published El Aswad Yalikou Biki, or Black Suits You So Well, about a young Algerian teacher whose singer father had been killed by terrorists opposed to art and joy. The novel also addresses the force of money and the media. In 2001, Mosteghanemi founded the Malek Haddad Literary Prize to encourage more Algerians to write in Arabic. Since June 2008 she has served as a United Nations goodwill ambassador, and in 2016 she was named UNESCO Artist for Peace.

Mosteghanemi’s work carries the pressure of history, language, exile, family duty, and political disappointment. Her books grew from a life lived between Algeria, France, and Lebanon, and from a commitment to Arabic at a time when that choice held special meaning for Algerian writers. She married Lebanese journalist Georges El Rassi in Paris in 1976; they have three sons and live in Beirut. Her words continue to speak to readers because they join private feeling with public memory, and because they give literary form to a generation’s losses, hopes, and unfinished questions.