Malek Alloula

In December 1953, Father Alloula, auxiliary mounted gendarme, retired after 27 years of service. He leaves the village of Oranie where he spent 11 years of his last assignment and takes his family to Oran. The Alloula family settled in the large western city in July 1954 in a two-room apartment. The father's retirement pension was not enough, he needed a job to supplement the family's income. The father ends up finding “something”. He had, in fact, rented a shop on a popular street in the city to set up a public writer's office. In the 1955-56 school year, young Malek began his final year of philosophy in a high school in Oran. But in May 1956, he responded to Ugema's call for a strike.

He is expelled from high school. Malek Alloula begins to help his father. The latter acquires an aura of seriousness and efficiency reinforced by the acquisition of a typewriter. Little by little, young Malek, learning from his father, himself becomes the titular public writer of sorts. The father leaves the shop to his son. Rodé has the “poetic art” of minutes, the father imposes on his son “the tyranny of the spare and expeditious style”.

“The short, three-headed sentences (subject, verb, complement) were intended to articulate a thought geared towards obtaining a criminal record or a marriage certificate, in short, any official document bearing some seal and initials.”

Malek Alloula will study modern literature at the Faculty of Algiers, then at the Sorbonne in Paris where he did his thesis on Denis Diderot and the 18th century. He lived and worked in Paris where he settled permanently in 1967. He is the author of several collections of poetry. “He is a discreet and essential figure in Algerian literature,” we can read on the page dedicated to the poet, on the website of his Algerian publisher Barzakh, who has republished the entire work of this Oranese poet.

Alloula's poetry, published in Paris and the Maghreb, is characterized by elegant writing, rich in metaphors and symbols. These have as themes the city, nature, women of which he will be a deconstructor of the mental universe of colonial exoticism as shown by his work on colonial photos of Algerian women.

Writer, literary critic, poet, Malek Alloula chairs the association which helps to publicize the work of his brother assassinated in 1994, the playwright Abdelkader Alloula. He married the woman of letters Assia Djebar in 1980, then from 1999 until his death, he lived with the Belgian designer Véronique Lejeune. Among his books, we will cite "Cities" (poems, 1069), "Cities and other places" (poems, 1979), "The Colonial Harem, images of a sub-eroticism" (illustrated essay by photographs, 2001), "Dreamers/Sepultures followed by L'Exercice des sens" (poems, 1982), "Measures du vent" (poems, 1984), "Les Festins de l'exil" (essay , 2003) and "Access to the body" (poems, 2003).

Malek Alloula died on February 17, 2015 in Berlin where he was the host of the DAAD (Berliner-Kuenstlerprogramm.de).