J.M.G. Le Clezio was born in 1940 in Nice, France from French parents who were first cousins and originally from Brittany. Both their families emigrated to Mauritius in the 18th century which was at the time a British colony and where Le Clezio’s father was born.

In 1947 Le Clezio had to travel to Nigeria with his mother and brother to join their husband and father who was serving as a doctor there, during the Second World War. The family returned to Nice in 1950.

Le Clezio went to school in Nice, in 1957. With his baccalaureate in literature and philosophy in hand, he continued his studies at Bristol University, London University and l’Institut d’Etudes Littéraires in Nice. He received his M.A. Degree in 1964 from the University of Aix-en-Provence and wrote his thesis on Mexico’s early history, which entitled him to a doctorate degree at the University of Perpignan in 1983.

Le Clezio grew up with two languages, French and English. He taught at universities in Bangkok, Mexico City, Boston, Austin and Albuquerque to mention but a few.

Le Clezio has obtained several prestigious literary prizes :
Prix Renaudot in 1963, Prix Larbaud in 1972, Grand Prix Paul Morand de l’Académie française in 1980, Grand prix Jean Giono in 1997,Prix Prince de Monaco in 1998, Stig Dagermanpriset in 2008, The Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008 and he was rewarded the highest Mexican award for foreigners,The Aztec Eagle in 2010. He was made chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1991 and was promoted to officier de la Légion d’honneur in 2009.

Le Clezio has been married twice, in 1960 and in 1975. He has two daughters, one from each wedlock.

Le Clezio wrote and sold many books which have been translated into several languages. He is one of France’s well known prestigious contemporary writers.

His novel, Desert, was published in France in 1980. Twenty-eight years later it was singled out among all his work by the Nobel Prize Academy as his “definitive breakthrough as a novelist”.

The story of Desert is the tale of two young Moroccan teenagers from different generations, Nour and Lalla. They both belong to a nomadic tribe of warriors, called “the blue men”. They are both struggling for survival in a different way and their lives never connect. Their two stories run in parallel throughout the novel and take place in two different time periods, Nour being born in the nineteenth century and Lalla much later in the twentieth century.

The first period which starts from 1909 and ends in 1912, is related by Nour, a young teenager, whose family left everything behind to join the march with other North African tribes who also had to leave their homes, due to the advancing French colonialists pushing them out of their native land. They march stoically, an endless exhausting journey in the inclement North African desert climate, hoping to reach the haven promised by their old and wise venerated religious leader, Ma el Aïnine. Unfortunately Nour will witness the defeat of his people’s rebellion due to hunger and exhaustion against the better equipped and trained French army.

The second period which ends in the near contemporary, is the story of Lalla, a young wild and solitary teenager. She is an orphan raised by her aunt in a poor coastal, Moroccan shanty town. Lalla can’t read or write but that doesn’t seem to matter to her, as long as she can listen to her aunt’s stories and the tales of the old fisherman, Naman and as long as she is close to nature and feels part of it. Being wild at heart, she likes the sea, the sand, the animals and the insects.

Therefore, when circumstances lead Lalla to Marseilles, she feels bewildered in the big city. Completely cut off from nature she feels like a fish out of water and isn’t happy despite becoming famous as a front cover model with great career potential. Away from her beloved wild nature back home, she couldn’t survive. Lalla is a lonely young woman and the only way for her to be happy again is to go back to nature where she once belonged and where she feels the meaning of real freedom. She also longs to see her dearest, beloved deaf and dumb best friend, Hartani, the shepherd.

In Desert, the description of the landscape is so real and vivid that the reader can almost feel the heat of the scorching sand during the day, the bitter, bleak cold at night and the vastness of the endless North African desert. Nature in the novel constitutes an important part. It has its rules, its beauty, its harshness but also its whims.

Desert is not a thriller and doesn’t rely on a plot — it should be read and savoured slowly, like all good things in life. Desert is just sheer beautiful writing with a historical background and a great deal of love and compassion. A poetic profound contemplation with an enhanced enchanting leitmotiv, a sort of an ode to Nature in general and to the North African Desert and its nomadic people in particular.

If you enjoyed reading this article or found it useful, please consider donating the cost of a cup of coffee to help maintain the site...

Yasmina Khadra is the pen-name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian ex-army officer who while still in the army used this pseudonym in order to avoid submitting his manuscripts for approval by the military censors, due to his notoriety which irritated his superiors. He was encouraged by his wife to work clandestinely by using her first two names, Yasmina Khadra.

He started writing his collection of stories “Houria” at the age of 17. Six more novels were published under his real name while in the army and before adopting his pen-name, Yasmina Khadra.

Mohammed Moulessehoul was born in Kenadsa in the Algerian Sahara in January 1955. His father joined the National Liberation Army in 1956 in the war against the French occupier. After Algeria’s independence in 1962, Mohammed Moulessehoul was sent by his father to cadet school to become an officer which also satisfied his mother’s wish.

After thirty six years in military service, Mohammed Moulessehoul decided to go into exile in France in 2001, and devoted his entire time to writing. He currently lives in Aix-En-Provence in the South of France.

Mohammed Moulessehoul received the Médaille d’Or from the Académie Française in 2001 and the Prix des Libraires in 2006. He was also awarded the trophy of Créateurs sans Frontières, presented to him on the 19th of February 2008 at the Quai d’Orsay, by the French minister of foreign affairs, Bernard Kouchner.

Some of Mohammed Moulessehoul’s books have been translated in 25 countries, but only a few books were translated from French into English : “In the Name of God” in 2000, “Wolf Dreams” in 2003, “Morituri” in 2003, “The Swallows of Kabul” in 2004 and “Double Blank in 2005.

He wrote several books about the civil war in Algeria and is today one of Algeria’s most important writers. The Swallows of Kabul has been a best seller, it will be made into a film and will be released soon in the cinemas.

The Swallows of Kabul is a parallel story of two doomed Afghani couples who have seen better days but now have to endure a hard life under the Taliban’s oppressive regime.

Mohsen Ramat and his wife Zunaira are well educated, they meet at university, he comes from a middle-class family of prosperous merchants and she is the daughter of a distinguished man. Mohsen is looking forward to a diplomatic career, and Zunaira’s ambition is to become a magistrate. She is a liberated feminist and a human rights activist when a student at university. All these dreams are shattered when the Taliban come to power. Mohsen’s family business is destroyed and Zunaira has to stay home because women under the Taliban ruling are not allowed to study, have a job or go out without wearing the burka, which Zunaira felt was stripping her of her identity and her freedom.

Atiq Shaukat an ex-mujahideen fighter from the Russian war, and now a part time jail keeper, lives with his wife Musarrat an ex-nurse who is suffering from a painful and terminal illness. He married her twenty years ago out of gratitude because she saved his life when he was severely wounded by the Russians during the war. He doesn’t love her and can’t bear the thought of coming back home to find her lying in her corner and him having to deal with the household chores.

Mohsen and Atiq have many things in common. The dissatisfaction of their gloomy life, the fear of the unknown, the boredom and the aimless and endless wandering in the streets of Kabul day after day, and the rejection of the intolerable situation the Taliban had led the country into. The two couples are deeply depressed and distraught by the frightening nightmare they are going through. They try to remain sane amongst all the insanity surrounding them caused by the Taliban’s repressive regime and the state of advanced decomposition in the city.

Mohsen releases his rage by joining a crowd stoning an adulterous woman to death. He always had a gentle nature, he felt horrified by his act, and couldn’t even believe that he was capable of such a deed. In order to unburden himself of such a heavy weight on his conscience, he had to confess to his wife what he had done: “I don’t know what came over me. It happened so fast. It was as if the crowd put a spell on me. I don’t recall gathering up the stones. I only remember that I couldn’t get rid of them, and an irresistible rage seemed to come into my arm… What frightens me and saddens me at the same time is that I didn’t even try to resist.”

Atiq doesn’t know what’s happening to him, he can no longer withstand the pitiless violence of the Taliban regime he genuinely believed in at the beginning. He feels claustrophobic in his prison cubby hole called an office. He feels disoriented and lost : “What’s happening to me? I can’t bear the dark, I can’t bear the light, I don’t like standing up or sitting down, I can’t tolerate old people or children, I hate it when anybody looks at me or touches me. In fact, I can hardly stand myself. Am I going stark raving mad?” “The prison world is getting Atiq down. During the last several weeks, he has devoted much consideration to his position as a jailer. The more he thinks about it, the less merit he finds in it, and even less nobility. This realization has put him in a state of constant rage.”

Zunaira loses her mind by becoming shockingly extreme in her attitude and behaviour towards her husband. She doesn’t want to see him any more because she holds him responsible for the shame she had to endure from a Taliban police agent in the street. She no longer respects him. In order to stop her husband arguing with her she pushes him violently, his head hit the wall, and he dies instantly.

Musarrat leads a tortured life without any hope of recovering from this long, mysterious and consuming disease. She decides in her own drastic and extreme way, to sacrifice herself in order to make her husband happy. She wants to substitute herself for the woman he fell in love with and who is sentenced to death. She tell her husband : “I’ve been inspired by the Lord : That woman is not going to die. She’ll be everything I couldn’t be for you. You have no idea how happy I am this morning. I’ll be more useful dead than alive. And at long last, you’re being offered a chance. I beg you not to ruin it. Listen to me, just this once…” She is a selfless, angelic figure amongst all the surrounding abominations.

Mohammed Moulessehoul in his powerful, realistically disturbing and traumatic, short but very dense story is able to convey the misery, injustice, suffocation and oppression of the devastated city of Kabul under the Taliban regime. He writes with great compassion about the complexity of human nature when faced with extreme hardship, absurd rulers and rules, and how extreme repression and senseless violence can bring people to the brink of helplessness and despair to the extent of losing their souls. They end up dying or raving mad.

Mohammed Moulessehoul in The Swallows of Kabul is writing about an Afghanistan that he has never visited. He says in one of his interviews that he understands the era of the Taliban very well.

“I understand that Taliban mentality very well. The landscape, the struggles, the hardness of life-all these are just like my homeland.” He points to the cover of his book: “Look at that photo (of a woman in a burka crossing a parched, desolate city scape) , that could be the Sahara village where I was born… I wanted to bring a new look from a Muslim on the tragedy of Afghanistan. And to bring to it a western perspective at the same time. When there are two perspectives there is a better chance of understanding.”

Understanding that it is extremism which is the cancer of Islam.