ABSTRACT
Haddad, Malek b. 1927, Constantine, Algeria; d. 1978, Algeria novelist and poet Promoting the notion of an Algerian homeland while concurrently expressing
profound unease over cultural identity, novelist and poet Malek Haddad’s writings describe the struggles of a generation of writers to create a literature that was truly Algerian. In Sadness in Danger (Le Malheur en Danger) (1956), arguably his most prominent collection of poetry, Haddad’s work displays its militancy in its revalorization of Algerian history and celebration of human liberty. The themes expressed in the collection reflect the author’s political efforts during the Algerian war and his involvement in the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN). Concurrently, however, Haddad’s texts betray both a profound despair over the violence of war and a pervasive sense of cultural alienation, manifest at the level of language. For Haddad, the French language could not adequately represent thoughts and concepts that were Arab-Berber in origin. As his fiction and his essay Zeros Turn Round (Les Zéros tournent en Rond) (1961) describe it, the French language became, for Haddad, an emblem of the disjuncture between a nascent Algerian national identity and a rich ArabBerber cultural history.
