Επιμέλεια: Εύα Πετροπούλου Λιανού
Latifa Harbaoui is an Algerian poet, writer, journalist, and media personality. She graduated in Philosophy from the University of Bouzaréah and continued her studies at the University of Mohamed Khider in Biskra. She is widely recognized as one of Algeria’s distinguished contemporary literary voices, having published extensively in leading Algerian and Arab newspapers and magazines, where she authored influential literary and cultural columns.
Her published works include the poetry collections A Sun Tailored to My Size, Fragments of Anxiety, and Close to the Front with a Kick, winner of the Dar Motoun Prize for Creativity (2023), while her forthcoming collection, Proof, is currently in press. She also published the literary epistolary collection Letters of the Blond Bat, wrote for children’s theatre, and authored the children’s book My Golden Steps in Smart Reading, published under the supervision of the Algerian Ministry of Culture and Arts in 2025. She is also working on her debut novel, Yet He Sees Me.
Harbaoui has served as Algeria’s representative of the Arab Writers League, President of the House of Poetry Biskra Branch, and a member of the Cultural Advisory Council of Biskra Province. She founded the children’s artistic troupe Shadou El Djazaïr in 1995 and produced several literary and radio programs.
Her writings have been the subject of extensive academic research at Algerian universities and translated into English, Turkish, Albanian, and other languages. She has received numerous national, Arab, and international distinctions, including the First of November Medal, two honorary doctorates, recognition among the 100 Most Influential Personalities for three consecutive years, and recent honors from the Governor of Biskra Province and Barcelona Magazine, reflecting her outstanding contribution to contemporary Arabic literature.
In the Dream
Without your tiresome chattering body
and wherever your soul may be now
the fever’s howl won’t reach you
nor the clatter of coughing
this sudden expulsion of air through the throat
recurring again and again over a flickering fire
what exactly did Ibn Sina mean by it
perhaps between them a brow that never meets
the essence and the corpse
It is happening now
that you will not cross one leg over the other to read The Prince
nor laugh inside the fat waiter’s head
as he sterilizes your table of the spray
of the invisible
Virtue is not possible
half animal half human
the argument ends
and Machiavelli remains the speaker who will not fall silent
It is happening now
that in the unseen Socrates has come to know everything
and the sophist Protagoras has stopped orating
having discovered at last
that eloquence is everyone falling silent
It is happening
that Schopenhauer still suffers
even as he finally sheds his body
Nietzsche did not despise his body but it is
weak
weak
weak
It is happening now
that you too are alone
And it is happening
that Van Gogh
is explaining The Yellow House to the dead
isn’t color the thing a human surrenders his soul to
however painful the body may be
And many things
are happening
many things
in the agonies of waking
Latifa Harbaoui Algeria
When?
Feigned Confluence
Besieging the meaning for a poet’s corpse
The text that formed the hump of the text
The bendings in the midst of a long prayer
Long along the orbit of language
The coveted earth
The abyss
The void
The treacherous days
The lament
The bewilderment
The obscure
The weak, weak human
The lone, solitary moon
And your grave, which you now inhabit
The when?
Prey to the putrid question decomposing in absence
How I wish
You would answer me about the when?
When will you return?
When shall we meet?
And when will we all forgive one another?
The beautiful ones
The beautiful ones
The beautiful ones
At the hour exhausted from the body / from the senses
At the bottom they turn over their new features, they tuck their withered names into the pocket of the earth
Thanks be to God…
Thanks be to God that they cannot see the great flowers
heaped upon their gravestones
The when the caesura is all that remains of the rubble of questions
When was the poet born
When did the poet die
©®Latifa Harbaoui
