Biography
Bachir Hadj Ali was born on 10 December 1920 in the Casbah of Algiers. He left school at nineteen and joined the Algerian Communist Party at the end of 1945. In 1948 he became editor-in-chief of Liberte, then received a two-year prison sentence before the outbreak of the war of independence.
After the start of the national liberation war, he helped Saddek Hadjess organise "les combattants de la liberte" and took part in talks with the FLN. After the 1965 coup, he founded the Organisation de la resistance populaire with Hocine Zehouane. He was arrested a few months later and tortured.
Work and context
In prison he wrote L'Arbitraire, published by Editions de Minuit in 1966. Lucette Hadj Ali later said the manuscript was written in Lambese prison on toilet paper, then slipped into cigarette paper and passed to her during visits. Hadj Ali spent years in prison and under house arrest until 1970.
Once free, he returned to intense intellectual work, giving lectures and writing essays. Illness later kept him bedridden for several years. He died on 8 May 1991, leaving a body of poetry, essays and testimony tied closely to Algerian political and cultural memory.
Selected works
- Chants pour le 11 décembre
- Notre peuple vaincra
- Culture nationale et révolution
- L'Arbitraire
- Que ma joie demeure!
- Le Mal de vivre et la volonté d'etre dans la jeune poesie algerienne d'expression francaise
- Memoire-clairiere
- Actuelles Partitions pour demain
- Soleils sonores