Literary and political strategies in a literary field: The case of Tahar Ouettar

Becoming a central Arabic-language writer

Tahar Ouettar, born in 1936 into a family of Arabic literary notables, was sent to a ‘modern’ but non-French school, the Ibn Badis Institute of the ‘reformist’ Association of Algerian Muslim Ulema in Arabic, and then to the Mosque-University Zitouna in Tunis to become a man of religion. His primary socialization was thus similar to that of other conservative intellectuals of his generation. However, living in the newly independent Tunisia in 1956, he broke with the reformists who only joined the Algerian independence movement latterly, and became part of the National Liberation Front (FLN) after the student strike of 1956. In particular, by becoming a Marxist he broke with religious circles. He interrupted his studies, and unlike many reformist writers and intellectuals, did not resume them. Hence, arguably his earlier proximity to religious circles does not sufficiently explain his political stance in the 1990s.

The mass departure of Europeans from Algeria (to France) after independence led to a vacuum that provided exceptional opportunities for social promotion to the limited number of Muslim graduates. Participation in the War of Independence as part of FLN governing bodies also made it possible to penetrate the structures of the independent party-state. Consequently, it was less his academic capital than his nationalist and later socialist activism that led to Ouettar’s political and intellectual promotion within Algerian state structures. He was very politically committed, founding several newspapers upon independence, occupying political positions under different governments, and ultimately serving as the national controller of the FLN until his retirement in the 1980s. Ouettar was simultaneously a member of the Clandestine Communist Party (PAGS), which had adopted the strategy of offering ‘critical support’ to President Boumediene after his socialist turn in the 1970s (nationalization of hydrocarbons, agrarian reform), and had consequently been partially co-opted by the state apparatus.

Ouettar began to write short stories and theatrical plays in Tunisia, but did not enter the literary field until 1974, with his novel Al-Lāz (The Ace), published by SNED (National Society for Publishing and Distribution) and considered a seminal text in contemporary Algerian literature. From a literary standpoint, it was one of the first Arabic-language Algerian novels employing modern Arabic and abandoning the heaviness of religious intertextuality. He also introduced ‘socialist realism’ into the subfield of Arabic-language Algerian literature. From a political angle, Al-Lāz broke the mythical unity of the national liberation movement through the figure of Zidane, a pure and good communist activist who was murdered by his nationalist-religious comrades. Even though it was published by the state publishing house SNED, the text was perceived as highly subversive and dangerous for its author, though Ouettar did not experience any trouble. This political stance, on the edge of subversion, this kind of literary ‘critical support’ that resembles the ‘critical support’ of the Communists to the regime, contributed to Ouettar’s success. He distanced himself from the nationalist literature that was developing at the time, while remaining acceptable to President Boumediene, who was seeking the support of the Communists to implement his agrarian reform policy.

Two other novels were published in 1974, Al-Zilzāl (The Earthquake) by SNED in Algeria and Dār al-’Ilm lil-Malāyīn in Beirut, and Al-Ḥawwāt wa-l-Qasr (The Fisherman and the Palace) in the weekly newspaper Al-Šaʽb al-ṯaqāfī, which he edited at the time, before being dismissed due to his overly leftist tone. This triple publication was not a coincidence. President Boumediene wanted to take advantage of the 20th anniversary of the start of the Algerian War of Independence (1954) to strengthen Algeria’s international position, one year after the Congress of the Non-Aligned Movement was held in Algiers. On the cultural level, Algeria was about to host the Congress of the Arab Writers Union, and revived the Algerian Writers Union (AWU) for that purpose. Significant efforts were made on this occasion to have SNED publish at least as many titles in Arabic as it did in French. As one of the few left-wing Arabophone writers, Tahar Ouettar was pushed by the political power to the forefront of both the Algerian and international Arab scenes.

Ouettar’s literary rise was thus the result of his break with both nationalist literature and with the religious codes of Arabic prose. It was also shaped by his political connections (nationalist and later socialist), which propelled him onto the national and international level while allowing him critical latitude. His strategy was at the same time literary and political.

Rachid Boudjedra’s competition

Ouettar’s position in the Arabic-language literary subfield was nevertheless challenged in the 1980s, as his aesthetic practice and conception of political commitment was devalued. In 1982, the writer Rachid Boudjedra (born in 1941), who had been publishing in French in France since the success of his novel La Répudiation (Denoël) in 1969, publicly displayed his change of tack by publishing his ensuing novels in Arabic first. He rejected the ‘socialist realist school, which does not interest [him]’, ¹ and sought to be an innovator in the Arabic novel (‘Not just in Algeria, but in Arabic’). In the 1980s, as religious conservatives returned to power in Algeria at the expense of Marxists, Boudjedra, himself a communist, wanted to be politically committed – clearly, vigorously and subversively – against the ‘three taboos’ of religion, sexuality, and (to a lesser extent) political authority. At the same time, he questioned ‘committed literature’ based on a clear political message, and imported the narrative techniques of the French Nouveau Roman, including its break with linearity and its extreme literariness (very elaborated style, fragmented narration . . .).

Tahar Ouettar lagged behind on all of these points, putting him on the defensive. Boudjedra’s strategy of freeing literature from moral or political dictates, all while enjoying international recognition, pushed Ouettar towards the literary field’s opposite pole. Ouettar, who until then had occupied a middle point between literature and politics, between national and international recognition, was pushed towards the field’s political and national pole. His response during a 1986 interview to a question about the ‘forbidden triangle’ was very conservative when compared to Boudjedra’s (Labter, 1986). He offered a conventional denunciation of the bourgeoisie, believed that one must respect religion, and considered the woman above all as ‘a symbol, an ideal’. He also directly quoted his competitor’s literature, bringing it down to the level of pornographic cinema: ‘With modern technological means it is possible to record any sexual scene, and to bypass novels that describe such scenes, such as Rachid Boudjedra’s novel.’ Faced with the ‘creation of new forms’ that resulted from Boudjedra’s emergence in the subfield of Arabic-language literature, Ouettar said that while he was a ‘partisan of modernity’, one cannot ‘start from scratch’. He reaffirmed in this interview his roots in ‘the literary school of socialist realism’, and denounced the tendency to ‘denigrate . . . committed literature’. In sum, the sudden irruption of Boudjedra pushed him into more conservative positions in politics and literature.

Moreover, several young Arab-language novelists born in the 1950s were being inspired by Boudjedra. Ouettar’s virulent attacks against the young pretenders of Arabic-language literature are the expression of his relegation: ‘It is difficult for us to determine whether what is being written – especially short stories – can be called literature’ (Belhadjoudja, 1987). The October 1988 crisis, with popular riots that led to the end of the FLN’s one-party rule, only accelerated his marginalization in the Arabic-language literary scene. At a conference in 1990, Amin Zaoui (born 1956), a young academic and Arabic-language writer close to Boudjedra, stated:

The ‘Ouettar phenomenon’ in Algeria no longer has any reason to survive after 5 October 1988, since the exclusively ideological function of his work has ceased to provide his readers avid with ‘subversive’ some ‘release,’ when the simple purchase of Ouettar’s novels was a ‘militant’ gesture by which the reader exteriorized his feelings towards the political system, a system within which Ouettar nevertheless occupied an official role. (Agence Presse Service [APS], 1990)

Ouettar’s marginalization was caused not only by aesthetic choices, but also by the value of his political stance of ‘critical support’, as he was confronted by the progressive autonomization of the literary field from the FLN authorities. In a context of the gradual liberalization of the cultural sector (in particular the creation of private publishing houses, where Ouettar refused to publish), young writers, all trained in the left-dominated period of the 1970s, criticized the one-party system more publically and frequently, while at the same time becoming ever less politically explicit in their literary output. Also the opposition of this new generation to Ouettar was based on differences in their literary capital, which was less linked to domestic political power than to international recognition. Like Boudjedra, the younger writers are all bilingual, usually have a doctorate in literature, and have studied in France or in the Near East, where they have also published.

Aesthetic strategy: Discreet adjustment

Ouettar’s first type of literary strategy consisted of a discursive and aesthetic readjustment of his work. From a discursive point of view, he gradually redefined ‘socialist realism’ and ‘committed literature’. Recourse to the notion of ‘socialist realism’ was all the more surprising, because his literary practice was much more complex than that (Cox, 1997, p. 103). In fact, he took part in the global movement in Arab literature that questioned the realistic model. This contradiction can be interpreted as a strategy to affirm his role in the socialist and revolutionary Algeria of the 1970s, which also had an international level. All translations of his works, starting at the beginning of the 1980s, were made within the international communist network (e.g. USSR, French communist publishing houses). That is one of the reasons that might explain why he kept using this label in the 1980s, despite its progressive loss of value in the political and literary spheres (see also Olivera, 2003). However, towards the end of the decade, he took into account the criticisms of Boudjedra and his followers (Belhadjoudja, 1987). Responding to a question about what label he would accept for himself, he gave a vague answer: ‘One should instead speak of the label that special conditions make you endorse.’ On this occasion he also changed his understanding of commitment. While in 1985 Ouettar offered a definition that made the writer a relay for the agenda of political authorities (Ouettar, 1985), this time he gave a looser definition:

For me commitment is, at the risk of generalizing, fidelity to the principles that one has set in life; fidelity to a guideline in writing, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. . . . Since the 1950s I have been following intellectual, philosophical, and political guiding principles, without any political authority or other person changing my course. (Ouettar, 1985)

Ouettar redefined the notion of ‘commitment’ as relating to autonomy from ‘political authorities’, mixing politics with literary, intellectual and philosophical concerns. However, he simultaneously asserted his support for a national culture, and refused to have any ‘relations with private publishers’. This redefined strategy allowed him, after discreetly leaving behind the notion of ‘socialist realism’, to maintain a certain consistency in his literary trajectory. It also enabled him to adapt his political position to the regime’s internal changes, all while keeping a certain distance through a new form of ‘critical support’. From an aesthetic point of view, his novel Tağriba fi-lʽušq (Experience of Passion), published in late 1989, directly responded to the critiques from modernists, through its rupture with linearity:

I oblige myself to invent a form that conforms to the subject, like a language that is in harmony with the atmosphere. . . . The madman at the centre of the novel passed his madness on to me, and perhaps caused me to adopt an unusual method: the chapters intertwine with each other; you can pick them up randomly, just as you can read them in one way or another, or even dispense with logical sequences entirely. ²

Even though this type of writing was very much valued among the Arabophone avant-garde, the strategy was a failure, insofar as the novel was not a success among Ouettar’s Algerian peers (Ouettar, 1990a).

Alliance strategy: Towards Francophones

His second strategy was one of alliances. While Boudjedra’s trajectory could be described as a move from the Francophone subfield to the Arabophone one, Ouettar’s was, as it were, in the opposite direction. A central figure in the Arabic-speaking literary subfield, he secured his renown partly thanks to the support of a left-wing Francophone literary network, and relied increasingly on young Francophone writers.

Tahar Djaout was one of the writers who worked the most for Tahar Ouettar’s recognition within the French-speaking literary subfield. Born in Kabylia in 1954 and trained in both French and Arabic, he worked as a cultural journalist in the 1980s. In his review (Djaout, 1980) of the short story collection The Martyrs are Coming Back this Week (Al-Šuhadā’ yaʽūdūna haḏa al-usbūʽ), the young poet boasted of the simplicity and starkness of Ouettar’s style: ‘Instead of pulling his subjects out of some box of prestidigitation or forcing his style through some labyrinthine detour, Tahar Ouettar prefers to write on the edge of journalistic prose.’ These remarks also make sense in the Francophone literary subfield, and the rejection of a ‘labyrinthine detour’ can be read as a reference to Rachid Boudjedra’s very sophisticated Nouveau Roman influenced Ideal Topography for a Characterized Aggression (Denoël, 1975). While Tahar Djaout’s first book, L’Exproprié (SNED, 1981), was marked by Boudjedra and Kateb Yacine’s highly fragmented aesthetics, Tahar Djaout’s review of Ouettar’s book was an outline of the aesthetics he himself would develop in Les Chercheurs d’os (Paris: Le Seuil) in 1984. Instead of Boudjedra’s ‘box of prestidigitation’, Djaout chose a simple and realistic subject, but like Ouettar slips into the marvellous: ‘the shift from the real to the imaginary takes place outside our conscious awareness’. Djaout’s tone is melancholic and ironic, in the same manner as Ouettar’s, about whom he wrote: ‘Tahar Ouettar gets straight to the point, mixing humour and smiling allusion to unveil the reality.’ As a matter of fact, the young Francophone Tahar Djaout used the Arabophone Tahar Ouettar to compete in a literary subfield dominated by Boudjedra’s generation. The Arabophone sociologist Mustapha Madi offered the following explanation:

Tahar Ouettar was initially frowned upon by the Arabists because he was a communist. He was poorly looked upon. Then the Francophones started talking about Tahar Ouettar in the 1970s, the agrarian revolution, Algeria was the revolutionary country, so the Francophones adopted Tahar Ouettar. At the time of the single party, there was a Francophone press network that could create an Arabophone novelist from nothing. ³

After his texts were translated into French in the early 1980s, support for Ouettar also came from Francophone academics. Ouettar relied on this left-wing Francophone network to counter the ascendancy of Rachid Boudjedra and his followers in the Arabophone subfield. For instance, in 1988 he stated:

Unquestionably there is a return of writing in French. Between the late 1960s and the 1970s, there was ‘progress’ in Arabic writing. Today it is in decline. With Rachid Mimouni, Tahar Djaout, it is the renewal of the French language. . . . What I like about Algerian writers who write in French is their modesty. For the Arabists it is the spirit of ‘being present’. . . . They are too pretentious and I hate it. (El-Djazaïri & Smati, 1988, p. 29)

Institutional strategy: El-Djahidhia vs Algerian Writers Union

Ouettar’s third strategy was institutional, one that was successful for him when he served as the editor of Al-Šaʽb al-ṯaqāfī in the mid-1970s. A few months after October 1988, he founded the cultural association El-Djahidhia, named after the Arabic man of letters Ğāhiḏ, considered one of the founding father of Arabic prose. Ouettar used this reference to call for a modernity that was inscribed in the Arabic tradition. Nevertheless, he relied on his French-speaking networks, writers and academics who participated in El-Djahidhia’s activities. In 1990, the association’s second major event was a tribute to the Francophone writer Mohammed Dib, who lived in France. Ouettar thus tried to define an intermediary position between the two linguistic subfields, and the national and international poles. In doing so he preceded Rachid Boudjedra, who was seeking to reform the Algerian Writers Union (AWU) by freeing it from the FLN’s tutelage, which was achieved only in 1991. Ouettar took note of the decline of the erstwhile single party, and made El-Djahidhia independent of the FLN; but his political contacts within it enabled him to quickly obtain financing. Instead of Boudjedra’s frontal strategy, Ouettar favoured one of circumvention, which he learned while operating under the single party regime.

Although many writers circulated between El-Djahidhia and the AWU, these two literary institutions still epitomized the competition between Boudjedra and Ouettar. The former, who was bilingual, relied – as the Secretary General of the AWU – on a younger generation of bilingual Arabic-speaking communist writers; the second, who was Arabophone, relied, among others, on a young bilingual French-speaking network.

Between old strategies and new tactics

His support for Islamists at that juncture has often been presented as opportunism, coming at a time when they were about to seize power. Some Islamists, referring to his communist past, saw his ‘moderation’ as a ‘form of opportunism and flattery towards armed groups to avoid a decision of assassination’ (Ouettar, 1994b). While not to be dismissed, this attitude was also part of a longstanding logic and trajectory connecting literature and politics, which subsequently enables us to speak of a strategy.

First, he tried to regain his position as an intellectual ‘guiding the social practices’ of the ‘people’:

If I organise a conference with a researcher in literature for example, I don’t draw 100 people, but if I have a speaker to explain for example the Surah ‘El Asr’ [al-‛aṣr], I will for instance have 5,000 people. The position of the intellectual [illegible term] has become problematic, he cannot orient or influence. . . . I say that because as intellectuals, and I include myself, we are cut off from society. We are like a satellite moving away from the orbit: some of us end up lost in Paris or elsewhere, others die here or lose confidence. (Ziane, 1994)

In consequence, Ouettar took note of the disjunction experienced by (left-wing) intellectuals during October 1988, after their progressive devaluation during the 1980s. With regard to himself, Ouettar said: ‘Tahar Ouettar has constants and he has variants. What is constant is the working class and its interests’ (Ouettar, 1995). The variants included more systematic consideration of the question of Islam and the Arabic language, as a new way to come closer to the ‘people’. In this strategy, the argument according to which democracy was flouted by a military coup was, nevertheless, purely tactical. It was not until 1993 that he considered the interruption of the electoral process as an ‘insult to democracy’ (Ouettar, 1994a), although he saw it more as a ‘tactical error’ than as a political mistake, since for him ‘democracy is not the answer’ (Ouettar, 1993). During the June 1990 municipal elections, when he was still hostile to the FIS, he declared: ‘We do not practice democracy like that. In saying that the FIS is the majority, everyone forgets the 45% who did not vote.’ On the other hand, he believed that ‘the country needs a leader, a zaaim [zaʽīm]. . . . The Algerian people need a father . . . like all peoples’ (Ouettar, 1990b).

Second, his previous experience had taught him that political activism, especially in the form of ‘critical support’, could grant him some centrality. In the overpoliticized context of the civil war, the importance of political logic in the literary field was even more profitable than in the 1970s. A few days before the end of the electoral process (Ouettar, 1992), he admitted his attachment to Abassi Madani, one of the FIS leaders: ‘He reminds me of my grandfather, a history to which I belong to.’ Yet this was also a way of rejecting the radical Salafist tendency personified by the young Ali Belhadj: ‘There is a conflict between the FIS leaders and me. It is a problem of yajouz and la yajouz [mandatory/forbidden, expressions used by the Islamists], which I contest violently. No one has the right to dictate his conduct to anyone’ (Ouettar, 1992). His political stance was above all cautious. While being one of the few intellectuals of importance to denounce the interruption of the electoral process, the violence of the resulting military state and the prohibition of the FIS, he never clearly supported them ideologically. After considering that the murdered intellectuals were ‘kamikazes’ for having ‘conspired with those in power against the majority’, just after the murder of his friend Youcef Sebti in 1994, he said that he discerned no ‘difference between this murderer and that one, between the violence of those in power and the violence of fundamentalists’ (Ouettar, 1994b). He nevertheless reinterpreted his work in light of the social value ascribed to Islam: ‘All my writings follow this line. I have never fought against the religious or believers’ (Ouettar, 1995). The figures in his novels from the 1990s are sincere believers, generally Sufi (Elmarsafy, 2012), the opposite of political Islam. In Al-Walī al-Ṭāhar yaʽūd ila maqāmihi al-zakī (El-Djahidhia, 1999), explicit and positive references are made to Aïssa Lhileh, a poet and jihadist fighter with the Islamic Salvation Army. Ouettar, nonetheless, indicated in the preface that his novel was based on a legal debate from the early days of Islam, on the legitimacy of a caliph to murder a poet. Far from being ideologically straightforward, this novel interrogates the major political issues of the time.

For all that, wagering on the victory of the Islamist movement was risky, and we have seen that ‘critical support’ was a widespread phenomenon in the literary field, to varying degrees. The reason why Ouettar was one of the few left-wing writers to support the Islamist movement is connected to his central position in the literary field, which called for a readjustment of strategy in times of political crisis and rumour.

Field effect, rumour: From literature to politics

I showed elsewhere that the major political opposition between writers during the civil war (majority of anti-Islamists, minority of pro-Islamists) can be explained by the transnational character of the literary field (Leperlier, 2018). Pro-Islamist writers, no matter their social status and generation, share a position at the extreme national pole of the field. They consider literature as a national task (educating the people according to national values that are also moral and religious ones) and are recognized mostly by national institutions. This national pole is therefore also tendentially the most heteronomous, and tendancially the more Arabophone one since Arabic is at the time the sole official language. Tahar Ouettar, at first representative of the international autonomous pole (even if writing in Arabic), came in time closer to the national heteronomous one. Ouettar’s shift towards supporting the Islamist movement can be understood as the result of a ‘field effect’ (Sapiro, 1996) connected to his competition with Rachid Boudjedra, as well as a response to political hearsay.

In a context of a crisis which gradually politicized literary endeavours, El-Djahidhia and the AWU contributed to the political polarization of the literary field. Following his subversive stance against religious forces, Boudjedra, who still proclaimed himself a communist, used his AWU platform to denounce the rise of the FIS, for which he received death threats. In the small interconnected world of intellectuals in Algeria, most of whom were still left-wing, Ouettar’s ‘measured’ position put him in an awkward situation, prompting rumours about his real views and pushing him progressively towards the Islamist pole. For instance, his decision to create Radio Quran in 1990 (he was the director of the National Radio at the time) quickly sparked controversy. It was not recognized as a way to break the Islamist monopoly on the interpretation of the sacred text as Ouettar claimed (Ouettar, 1993), but instead as a declaration of allegiance, especially after the violence of the 1991 FIS General Strike: this was followed by Ouettar’s dismissal. Also, as they could not be part of an AWU spearheaded by the anti-Islamist Boudjedra, Ouettar gave young literary groups like Ibdaâ, who were close to the Islamists, access to El-Djahidhia’s premises. This earned the latter the nickname of El-Jihadya, a reference to jihad, which offended the association’s secretary and Ouettar’s friend Youcef Sebti (Ouettar, 1991). These acts, which could have been perceived a few months earlier as ways to protect the autonomy of culture from politics (everyone should be able to find a place for one’s literature, no matter one’s political convictions), now took on a political dimension. A young writer, who was close to the Islamist association Ibdaâ at the time, said: ‘So most of the “left-wing” writers, they left Djahidhia. That’s why we young people were tolerated a bit in Djahidhia.’ ⁴ In a context of political crisis, it is difficult to determine the origin of rumours, and therefore impossible to conclude whether Ouettar supported the Islamist movement at the time. However, this objective shift, which brought him closer to the Islamists, allowed Ouettar to take advantage, like Sartre did in 1968 France, of a ‘cross-relegitimation’ (Gobille, 2005). A new generation of Arabophone writers, younger than those supporting Boudjedra, started to support Ouettar, and often reminisced sympathetically of Ouettar. By denouncing the interruption of the electoral process, Ouettar clearly assumed the pro-Islamist position that had gradually been both ascribed to and built by him.

Thus, a field effect, in this context of overpoliticization, brought Ouettar closer to the pole of the field populated by the Islamist: the national and heteronomous one. At the time, his commitment in favour of the Islamists accelerated his shift of position in the literary field. But this political stance was nevertheless, in itself, independent from purely literary concerns: this changed a few months after. In tune with the national-heteronomous pole of the field, Ouettar started to use politics directly as a way to compete within the literary field. His strategy thus became more political.

Indeed, in July 1992, Ouettar was invited by his younger Francophone colleague Tahar Djaout (see above) for a conference in Paris, celebrating the 30th anniversary of Algerian independence. One of the two Arabophones who were invited, Ouettar felt humiliated at several stages of the conference (at first, it was held solely in French), especially when he realized that he was not among the authors chosen by Djaout in the anthology published for the occasion, on the pretext of translation difficulties. One must recall that Ouettar’s internationalization had first been political, with national support for his diffusion in Arabic countries, and within the international Marxist network (also present in France), which was falling apart at the time. As he acknowledged between the lines, Ouettar lacked literary recognition in Paris, which would be necessary for prominence within the Algerian literary field.

Back in Algeria, in the context of debates on the generalization of Arabic to all state administrations, Ouettar took over the linguistic argument of ‘Hizb Fransa’ (Party of France) against Francophone writers, and even spoke of ‘civilizational war’. This puts in context his words after Djaout’s assassination: ‘It’s a loss for France’ (Seddon, 1994).

The linguistic argument seems to be, nevertheless, a bridge between a literary position (that would acknowledge the major issue of the literary field, its transnational structuring, opposing a national and an international pole) and a mere political one (which at the time opposed anti- and pro-Islamists). His shift towards the national-heteronomous pole of the field was certainly reinforced, but was not complete. Thanks to the political ‘moderation’ of Ouettar, and to the explicit objective of his association El-Djahidhia to be purely literary, the latter became the almost only literary institution left in Algiers. Moreover, younger writers, even though at first affiliated with Ibdaâ, were free there to do literary experimentation far from the conservatism of this Islamist association. Ouettar’s literary works during the 1990s also never lost complete autonomy, as I have mentioned earlier. He continued experimenting with new forms of non-linear, fragmented narrations, in tune with literary productions in the late avant-garde of the Near East. He certainly lost total recognition in the Occident but gained some in Arabic countries, where he started to be published and read beyond the Pan-Arab and socialist political networks that he initially belonged to.

Still, while Ouettar and Boudjedra were both initially fairly close – as reformers of the Arabophone literary subfield recognized both nationally and internationally, given their belonging to the elite and contacts in left-wing circles – it could be argued that the crisis pushed them towards the literary representatives of opposing political poles. This can be understood through their trajectories in the literary world. While Rachid Boudjedra’s literary recognition was initially international and later national (in the 1980s), shifting from the Francophone towards the Arabophone subfield, Ouettar’s trajectory followed the opposite arc. The crisis, which polarized the literary field, pushed them back, in a sense, to where they originally belonged. When it became too dangerous for Boudjedra to publish in Algeria, even with the support of the military regime, he left the AWU, and published again in French in France. Conversely, thanks to his prudence towards the Islamists and the regime, Ouettar was able to occupy, unopposed, a leading position in Algeria’s Arabic-language subfield.

Ouettar’s shift from the left towards Islamism was certainly not a purely opportunistic and political tactic, nor the narrow consequence of social provenance. His religious training, from which he had also detached himself earlier, was common in his generation. His concern for being close to the ‘people’, like the shock of being cut off from them in 1988, was also shared by a great majority of Algerian writers, often educated in socialism or communism. Between individual leeway and objective constraints, ‘strategy’ can be a useful heuristic tool, giving sense to an individual’s trajectory through the lenses of a specific issue: competition within a field. Strategies vary according to the position occupied in the field, and according to its structuring. Ultimately, I argue that Ouettar’s political shift can be explained by the logics of the literary field, where he tried to regain a central position, adapting his earlier experience to a new context. His interventions are linked to his challenged position (especially by Boudjedra), in accordance with his long-term trajectory, in a transnational and bilingual field, and in the context of a political crisis. While during periods of increasing liberalization and autonomy of the cultural field, Ouettar adopted purely literary strategies, in times of political crisis he once again employed a strategy that had worked for him in the 1970s, one that was both political and literary. Politics can be thus a strategy for reconquering the literary field by other means. Challenged by internationally-oriented Arabophones, he first built an alliance with internationally-oriented Francophones. Later, during the civil war, he came closer to the opposite side of the field, nationally-oriented Arabophones, because of a field effect: he had been politically pushed away by internationally-minded Arabophones, and felt humiliated by Francophones. Hence, his case shows that understanding intellectual public interventions requires not only understanding the relative position acquired by actors in their principal field of activity, but also the socio-historical specificities of the fields in which they partake.