The Strange Case of Sansal
Words in Chains
I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: Oh Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. And God granted it.
― Voltaire, Letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville, May 16, 1767
At the center of this story is an old man with prostate cancer. Boualem Sansal—novelist, former civil servant, engineer, economist, and heretic—landed at Algiers airport on November 16, 2024, and vanished into the machinery of the state. His crime? A sentence. Or rather, too many of them. Words stacked like accusations. Paragraphs that disobey. Novels that remember.
In Algeria, remembering is not permitted. Not in that way. Not with clarity. Not with irony. Certainly not with doubt.
Sansal had never fit the mold. Not the colonial wound narrative, not the glorious revolution catechism, not the postcolonial pantomime of victimhood, not the antisemitic psychosis. He was too secular, too ironic, too French, too blunt. He had long refused to chant the national liturgy: that Algeria is always the victim, that France is always the aggressor, that Islamism is pure. He believed in none of it. And he wrote 2084 to say so.
2084: The End of the World was not a metaphor—it was a diagnosis. In the empire of Abistan, language is stripped of meaning, memory is criminal, and worship is mandatory. It is a world where faith becomes surveillance, and forgetting is the highest virtue. Sansal didn’t invent this place—he recognized it.
Everyone in Algeria knew what they were looking at. It wasn’t a dystopia. It was a reflection.
So the regime did what regimes do when confronted with clarity: it smashed the mirror.
The state banned his books, smeared his name, and then—when the political winds shifted—declared him an enemy. In an interview with a French outlet, he had commented, offhand, that France had redrawn Algeria’s colonial borders to include territory historically belonging to Morocco. It was a historical observation. The state read it as treason.
But this is Algeria: a regime that behaves like the sadistic narcissist—corrupt, paranoid, hostile to all its neighbors—yet insists it is always the victim. It provokes, represses, and isolates, then demands sympathy for its self-inflicted wounds. The borders must never be questioned, the revolution never re-examined, the narrative never disturbed. To suggest otherwise—even in passing—is not an opinion. It is blasphemy.
Suddenly, Boualem Sansal became a character in a novel he might have written—a man accused of “endangering national unity,” “collaborating with foreign entities,” and spreading “Zionist propaganda.” Officially, his trial was about security. In reality, it was about symbolism.
Sansal had become a stand-in. He was not on trial alone. The idea of a secular, critical, post-Islamist Algerian identity was on trial with him. An identity that refuses the reflexive antisemitism embedded in state media, that does not conflate France with original sin, that does not treat decolonization as a permanent moral license.
Sansal was the figure who said: The revolution is over, and we are responsible for what we have become. That, above all, was unforgivable.
There is no room for Boualem Sansal in the postcolonial church of permanent grievance. He is the wrong kind of Arab: rational, unrepentant, skeptical of the decolonial gospel. In a nation that builds its moral legitimacy on sacred suffering, Sansal committed apostasy. He asked what comes after liberation.
And so, the regime cast him in the role it reserves for all its devils. He became the antichrist of the republic. The man who desecrated the holy narrative. The one who wrote novels instead of slogans, who saw memory not as weapon but as burden. The system that had once tolerated him as a fringe intellectual now framed him as a foreign agent—French, Jewish-adjacent, a traitor.
His lawyer, François Zimeray, faced visa denials. There were whispers—undeniable, documented—that he should be replaced with someone “non-Jewish.” Not because of anything he said or did. Just the name. Just the fact. In Algeria’s paranoid cosmology, a Jewish lawyer defending a secular Arab novelist could only mean one thing: conspiracy. The state didn’t want justice. It wanted purity—not legal, but ethnic. Not civic, but sectarian. A ritual cleansing of the courtroom from any trace of the Jew.
And the tragedy is, this didn’t scandalize the French left.
Where were the heirs of Voltaire, the self-declared defenders of liberté and laïcité? Nowhere. While Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, Wole Soyinka, and Annie Ernaux rose in defense of Sansal, many of France’s left-wing intellectuals looked away, abstained, or even voted against the European resolution calling for his release. Historian Benjamin Stora accused him of hurting “Algerian national feelings.” Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s party couldn’t be bothered. For them, Sansal didn’t fit the script.
He wasn’t oppressed in the right way. He didn’t flatter the Third Worldist imagination. He refused the role of noble victim. He rejected postcolonial sanctimony and said, instead, that Algeria was sick—not because of France, but because of what it had become.
Algeria thrives in obscurity; it slips beneath the headlines, and that quiet has been its cover—enough to censor, to conspire, and to tighten its grip unnoticed.
He should have been treated like Voltaire—a man imprisoned for speech, punished for reason, attacked by church and state alike. Instead, they let him rot, because he made the wrong enemies and said the wrong truths.
On March 27, 2025, the sentence came: five years in prison, 500,000 dinars. Not for actions, but for doubts. A punishment that made it clear: in this regime, thought is a crime—and critique is unforgivable.
Sansal was ill. His cancer treatment stalled. He may have stopped eating. The world protested. Algiers shrugged.
Algeria isn’t afraid of the world. It’s afraid of the page. A regime sealed in its own mythology, it panics at the sight of unfiltered truth. Boualem Sansal didn’t shout—he wrote. And that was enough. He turned memory into a weapon. In Algeria, a novel is never just a novel. It’s a breach in the silence. A sentence too clear is treated like sabotage. Truth, once put in writing, becomes a threat the state can’t afford to tolerate.
Boualem Sansal did not break the law. He broke the illusion. That’s what he’s in prison for.
The strangest part? A francophone writer, shaped by the ideals of liberté, cast adrift by the very culture that taught him to speak. When the illusion shattered, so did the loyalty— Many in Paris didn’t defend him; they looked the other way, and in some corners, they applauded.
Great again, Zineb! Sadly, this is the way Mexico has gone too - blaming Spanish colonialism for its failures when in fact its been free in a continent remarkable opportunity.
Beautifully expressed. Thank you.