ABSTRACT
Leïla Sebbar was born on November 19, 1941, in Aflou to an Algerian father who was a primary-school teacher and a French mother “from France,” as the author frequently stresses in interviews, making her different from an Algerian-born French person. She was not a “Pied noir” and consequently did not display the predictable range of colonial and racist attitudes to be found in most of the French population born in Algeria. She left Algeria in 1958, four years before the proclamation of independence, and completed her studies in France, where she became a teacher, following in her father’s footsteps. She has been living in Paris for more than twenty years, where she first became very much involved in the intellectual circle of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Her first works were published by Les Temps Modernes in the seventies when the famous Sartrian review was at its peak. Her first publication was an essay that bears witness to Sartre’s influence. It is related to a field that the philosopher explored in the late forties in a study called “Orphée noir” and is called “Le mythe du bon nègre au XVIIème siécle.” De Beauvoir’s influence is no less strong and can be seen in the feminist orientation that Leïla Sebbar soon developed in essays like “On tue les petites filles” and also “Si je parle la langue de ma mére,” the latter also published in the review directed by Sartre. The feminist inspiration remained the main component of Sebbar’s literary work as she moved gradually to fictional creation, devoting herself to writing mainly novels, with occasional short stories. In the eighties she became an important figure in what was called, maybe not very appropriately in her case, “Beur” literature. She is presently continuing her career as a novelist, producing a new novel every two or three years under the banner of Stock editions.
