Queer Places:
Cimetière Chrétien de Aïn Benian Guyotville
Chéraga District, Algiers, Algeria
Jean Sénac (29 November 1926 – 30 August 1973) was an Algerian author. Born of an unknown father in Béni Saf in the Oran region of Algeria, the "poet who signed with a sun" was murdered in Algiers on 30 August 1973. His murder remains unsolved. Besides his poems and writings, he was renowned for a long-running relationship and correspondences with Albert Camus. A portion of his papers are stored at the City Archives in Marseille, France.
Sénac was an Algerian francophone poet who remained strongly attached to his Algerian nationality despite the French exodus from Algeria in the aftermath of the war of liberation. His poems were largely songs of revolution, which he hoped would help create a world of beauty and brotherhood in an Algeria that was open to all cultures. His own struggles were strongly linked with his quest to better Algeria through poetry: a profound search for identity, both personal and cultural and his struggle to find acceptance in his homosexuality plagued him throughout his life; "This poor body also/ Wants its war of independence", he once wrote. Sénac was a great admirer of the work of such poets as Gérard de Nerval, Arthur Rimbaud, Antonin Artaud and Jean Genêt.
Sénac had a long-running relationship with French Algerian-born writer and Literary Nobel Prize laureate Albert Camus that lasted from 1947 to 1958. The contents of the letters remain mostly unknown, although Hamid Nacer-Khodja published a few and wrote about the history of the friendship in his essay Le Fils rebelle. Many correspondences are of a literary nature, but some also discuss the independence movement in Algeria. In April 1958 he broke relations with Albert Camus on a sour note blaming him for not supporting the plight of an Algerian student named Taleb executed for his political activities against the French. He did not communicate further with Camus from that day on until Camus' death early 1960.
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