Like the ballet of trucks going up and down the narrow streets of Montmartre, where he has enjoyed living for a year, Kamel Daoud does not stop. He takes out his phone to search for files and gives us photographs of women with their throats mutilated. “I was asked if my character was an allegory”comments, about Aube, the narrator of hourisSome readers found the book unbearably violent. However, he deleted much of the massacre footage. Not because of censorship, but out of fear that we would not be believed. It is from him that the obstinacy of the witnesses emanates, which is at the heart of his new novel.
The subject is Algeria’s “black decade” (1992-2002), during which several Islamist groups opposed the national army. The death toll is estimated to be between 60,000 and 200,000 and thousands missing, but in Algeria it is forbidden to talk about it. This is stipulated in an article of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, which punishes with imprisonment anyone who dares to use or exploit “the wounds of the national tragedy”. A civil war that does not pronounce its name.
Kamel Daoud experienced it first hand. In 1994, at the age of 24, he joined the Oran DiaryHe and his colleagues are responsible for ensuring “a safe cover” events. “A kind of terrible routine sets in.He relates. In every massacre, you are sent to interrogate the soldiers, the survivors. From a distance we saw the bombs. Up close, a war is a lot of silence. We go home, write our article and get drunk. »
At the end of December 1997, the young journalist was sent to Had Chekala in Ouarsenis. He met mute residents whose loved ones had been massacred and dismembered by the Islamists. The villagers buried the remains as best they could, up high. Thanks to the heavy rains, they resurfaced lower down. Then you have to start all over again. The journalist tells his editorial office the figure of 1,000 dead. We don’t believe it. The official death toll is less than 200.
The true extent of the losses was finally recognised in 2006. The writer shows us an article on the site. Algeria-WatchHere in Paris, he found the necessary distance to “cry” of this war and record it in a novel. Because this genre offers more space and time than journalism, but above all because it can leave a lasting mark on readers, as it did.
Fluctuating balances
The question of truth is an old story for Kamel Daoud. “I was alerted by the gap between the very modest story my parents and grandparents told about the colonial era and the excessive stories told at school.remember. There was something about this inflated narrative about martyrs that was wrong. » Also striking are the fluctuations in the death toll, between 500,000 and 1 million dead, the debate over fake mujahideen demanding pensions, as well as men who have fallen from grace and been erased from school textbooks. “Who is a hero and who is not? I understood very early on that history is for food. It serves to gain political weight.”
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