Weeks have passed since he was announced as a favorite: Kamel Daoud received, on Monday, November 4, the Goncourt prize of houris (Gallimard, 416 p., 23 euros, digital 15 euros). This third novel, of surprising strength for its dark and serious lyricism, gives voice to Aube, a young woman silenced by the failed slaughter of her throat when she was five years old. It was during the “black decade” of clashes between Islamist groups and the Algerian army (1992-2002). Aube speaks with Houri, the girl she is carrying and whom she plans to abort, and leaves for the village where she was wounded and where her parents, her sister and a thousand other villagers were murdered.
Does it mean anything to you to be the first Algerian writer to receive the Goncourt Prize, especially in a context in which political and commemorative tensions with France are especially strong?
I am a son of Algeria, of the Algerian school, of Algerian ambitions. This award has a lot of meaning, above all on a personal level (how can I escape it?): it is a success for me, for my family. It is also a strong signal for budding Algerian writers, those writers terrified by certain political currents, destroyed in the cradle and who are afraid to write. It is important that they know that writing a book is a process that can have a happy ending.
As for context, I am a writer, not a politician. A book pushes you to imagine, to expect other things. A book does not change the world, but when read widely, it can become an instrument, a message. What I hope is that this book will make people in the West discover the price of freedoms, particularly for women, and that it will make people in Algeria understand that we need to confront our entire history, and that we do not need to fetishize part of history [la guerre d’indépendance] compared to the other [la guerre civile des années 1990].
It is often said that France is blind to the rise of Islamism and political Islam, unwilling to learn the lessons of what led to the “black decade” in Algeria. From this point of view, do you expect Goncourt to have effects?
It is the readers who make a book resonate or not. I am a writer, columnist, journalist and Algerian (which is a profession in itself), and I hope we open our eyes. I have the impression that I am in more or less the same situation as the Soviet writers who warned about the gulag at a time when the merits of communism were being sung in the West. Someone had to say, at some point, that just because we hate imperialism doesn’t mean the gulag didn’t exist.
You have 54.28% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
