The Sacrifice of Literature. Ups and Downs of a Literary Commitment after 1988

Before killing the man, the civil war killed the writer. A major Algerian writer of the 1980s, Rachid Mimouni sacrificed literature in the 1990s on the altar of the political struggle against the Islamists. Between L'Honneur de la tribu in 1989 and La Malediction in 1993, the delicate balance between literature and politics, which until then had characterized his work and his intellectual struggle, has been broken in favor of raw political commitment through authoritarian fiction.