Ramdane Issaad

Ramdane Issaad is a French writer born in 1951 to an Algerian father and a Norman mother. He first practiced medicine for 3 years (1979-1981) in a popular practice, in the Abbesses district of Montmartre, before deciding to devote himself fully to writing and directing documentaries for television (he won the Roberval Prize in 1998).

A former lost Maoist militant (he sold La Cause du peuple at the age of 16 on the markets), he discovered Guy Debord and situationist literature in 1968 and has since ceased to analyze the world according to this critical grid.

His universe, at the antipodes of the usual clichés concerning the "beur" literature of the ghetto, aims to be global and transcultural. Dostoïevski, Steinbeck, Malcolm Lowry, James Ellroy, Sepúlveda, Kessel, Césaire are his benchmarks and the author, who is not Arabic-speaking, defines himself above all as a universalist and close to the thought of Gilles Deleuze. From its first publication, the favorable critics note that its characters evolve in a globalized world as we live it, going so far as to evoke Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Le Vertige des abbesses, Denoël 1990; see the review of Le Canard enchaîné).

He published at Seuil in 2003, Rushes, a documented fiction on the Rwandan genocide and its treatment by the French media subjected to state propaganda.

His seventh novel, Papy Boum, published by Éditions du Net in 2011, raises the question of the relevance of the individual act of revolt in a complex world where alienation affects the poorest as much as the powerful.

He is the author of an essay on the medical-industrial complex, The Dictatorship of Hippocrates. Since 2003, Issaad has initiated, with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Glowinski, a series of portraits and interviews with members of the Collège de France (Portrait of Gilles de Gennes, Arte 2007, interview with Pierre Boulez in 2008).

Ramdane Issaad is one of those who will have tried to bring French-speaking literature called "beur" out of its cultural ghetto. Indeed, rare are the writers of his generation to have had the right to participate fully in French intellectual life. This literature presents a serious handicap. As Alec G. Hargreaves points out, "librarians don't know where to classify it, teachers are reluctant to incorporate it into their lessons, and critics are generally skeptical of its aesthetic merits." He remarks, however, that "this refusal to accept as legitimate within the confines of French letters the presence of elements from across the Mediterranean cannot be explained by aesthetic criteria alone".

Ramdane Issaad also publishes under the pseudonym of Sam Saraindead: Waiting for Eldorado, a novel; as well as many musical compositions available on the Web. His motto: "Be subversive in form and in substance but never forget that literature is above all entertainment for the soul"

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