Biography

I was born in 1949 in Saïda. I grew up in a context of war in Algeria. Student of the Ecole Normale of Oran first, of Alger then, I intended to teach mathematics and I was then at the Collège d'Enseignement Technique in Saïda. After two years of national service, I landed at Marseille, on a whim, when I was 24. In France, I made many odd jobs : skilled worker, night watchman, laborer at Club Med... I discovered ordinary excluding, at the same time as having the time to do what I always wanted to do : writing.

Registered at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques of Aix-en-Provence in political sciences (more for identity card reasons than for studies love : it was either that or the jackhammer !...), I got in 1980 a graduate degree devoted to "political role of the intellectual".

Not attracted to an academic career, I provided courses in general culture, methodology, contemporary French civilization at the University, and other variants for healthcare, office, and undefined... destined for miscellaneous audiences : adults in in-service training, foreign students...

Life of funambulist between sense (writing) and non-sense (food work). Freedom has a price...

Difficult to live, even more difficult to leave, that spirit independence within an antisocial status or other, sentenced me to my delight, my greatest pain, to be what I had to be : a writer, through thick and thin. Singular, plural. What got me misunderstandings and definitive ruptures with many morons full of certainties. Indigenist or "exoticizing" publishers. "Compatriots" frustrated by a lack of militant patriotism (north and south of the Mediterranean). Perplexed in need of references and other...

Writing is a luxury and the worst pain. I get a real kick out of writing and I will assert it until my last breath.