“Entre deux feux”: Jean Séénac's Struggle for Self-Determination

Abstract

During the years between 1954 and 1965, which witnessed the construction of a new Algerian national identity, Jean Sénac, the most important French-language poet associated with Algerian nationalism, was struggling to establish a sense of self, both at the collective level of the Nation and on the individual level of the Man. By the end this decade of self-determination Sénac would fashion the complex nature of his national and sexual identities into an authentic poetics of social protest. In Sénac’s works, produced after Algerian independence, he openly proclaims himself to be a gaouri—the Algerian pejorative for a foreigner or infidel—as well as a homosexual. However, Sénac’s stance on the margins came after more than a decade in which he struggled with the fear that his non-normative identity was an obstacle to be overcome if he wanted to be a poet in service to his people.