UNDERGROUND,
UNKNOWN,
UNSEEN
|
|
UNDERGROUND, UNKNOWN, UNSEEN
(MINES DE RIEN) RACHID BOUDJEDRA
Translated from French into English by Véronique Machelidon (Meredith College, USA) |
|
ISBN: 1-931948-82-8 2009 |
|
|
Born in 1941, Rachid Boudjedra is an acclaimed Algerian writer and intellectual. He is famous both for his literary production and for his dissident political essays. Whether in French or in Arabic, his experimental works expose the various taboos of Algerian society and probe the long and complex history of European-North African relations. In spite of several threats against his life from Islamic fundamentalists, he continues to live, work, and speak in his native country. |
Rachid Boudjedra |
|
A native French speaker, Véronique Machelidon was educated in Belgium and in the United States. Trained in Comparative Literature, she is currently teaching French and Francophone literature at Meredith College in Raleigh, North Carolina. |
|
|
|
 |
|
Dr. Véronique Machelidon during a Reading of her Translation, Underground, Unknown, Unseen. |
Dr. Véronique Machelidn with Dr. Jean-Jacques Thomas, Melodia Professor of French Literature at the University of New York at Buffallo (USA). |
|
|
|
|
Presentation of the Beautiful Book. |
During the Reading. |
|
The play Underground, Unknown, Unseen stages the thirty-year saga of demographic exchanges between Europe and North Africa, as seen through the lens of two generations of Algerian immigrants to France. From the character of Ali, who came in 1964 to work in the coalfields, to the young doctor Nadia, who fled Islamic terrorism thirty years later, Boudjedra paints a broad canvas of the effects of decolonization, immigration, and the bloody civil war that ripped his country apart in the 1990s. The mine as a metaphor for Europe’s colonial entreprise and as a microcosm for ethnic and cultural diversity, becomes Boudjedra’s haunting setting where male and female characters, French and Algerian miners, and first- and second-generation immigrants sort out the meaning of uprootedness in their own lives and discuss the possibility of integration for the generations to come.
|
|
ISBN 1-931948-82-8
2009
