Mouloud Mammeri (redirected from Mmmeri Mouloud)

Mammeri, Mouloud 

Born Dec. 28, 1917, in Taourirt-Mimun, Kabylia. Algerian French-language writer.

Mammeri studied in Rabat and at the Sorbonne. As an officer in the French Army, he fought against fascism during the years 1942-44. He taught French literature at a lycée in Algiers.

In his works, Mammeri depicted the folkloric traditions of the Kabyles (the novel The Forgotten Hill, 1952; Russian translation, 1966). Combining a sociopsychological analysis of reality with historicism, Mammeri achieved a high level of realism (the novel The Sleep of the Righteous, 1955; Russian translation, 1960). A fighter for Algerian independence (Letter to a Frenchman, 1957), Mammeri was forced to emigrate from Algeria to Morocco in 1957. He returned to Algeria in 1962. The national-democratic revolution in Algeria, which Mammeri recreates in his novel Opium and the Club (1965), marked the birth of the heroic epic in Algerian literature. Mammeri has also written the play The Foehn (produced 1967), and Mzab (1970), a tale about an ancient oasis.

Mammeri is chairman of the board of the Union of Algerian Writers (elected 1964) and a member of the editorial board of Lotus, the journal of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association.

WORKS

Les Isefra: Poemes de Si Mohand. Paris, 1969.

REFERENCES

Tsoppi, V. “M. Mammeri: Ego roman i ego vremia.” In M. Mammeri, Opium i dubinka. Moscow, 1967.
Khatibi, A. Le Roman maghrébin. Paris, 1968.
Dembri, M.-S. “L’ltineraire du heros dans l’oeuvre romanesque de M. Mammeri.” Cahiers algériens de littérature comparee, 1968, no. 3.
Mortimer, M. “M. Mammeri.” Afrique littéraire et artistique, 1970, no. 10.

V. P. BALASHOV