What is wrong with Algerian writer Kamel Daoud

 

I hate to criticise writers, I'm all for freedom of expression, but profiting from a woman's suffering, and bashing your home country to gain attention in its former coloniser's literary scene... doesn't sound like the right approach to me.

I'm from both countries myself, born in France, my whole family in Algeria apart from my parents, my sister and once cousin, and I have the utmost respect for what Algerians wen through since French troops set a foot on their soil in 1830. They are courageous people and have suffered a lot.

If I believed Daoud's book was to benefit most of the readers, I would review it. I don't.

Here is a draft I wrote today, story to come on RFI English soon.

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A controversy in Algeria overshadows writer Kamel Daoud's prize for his novel 'Houris'

The Franco-Algerian author Kamel Daoud is accused by a victim of the civil war in Algeria of having exploited his history and his traumas to write his recent novel, Houris, which won the most prestigious French prize earlier in November.

Kamel Daoud in Paris, receiving its recent prize - Photo by AP

The Algerian woman, Saâda Arbane, 30, survived a massacre during the "black decade" (1992-2002) of the civil war, and is now bringing accusations against the Algerian-turned-French author Kamel Daoud.

Arbane says she has recognised her own story in that of the character of Aube, the heroine of the novel. 

Moreover, with supporting documents, she has revealed this week that she was followed in psychiatry by Kamel Daoud's wife, in Oran, between 2015 and 2021.

She now accuses her and him of having violated the confidentiality of her medical file and "the privacy of her private life".

According to Arbane, Daoud had made several requests to adapt her story, which she always refused.

She now says he has published the novel nonetheless, without her consent or the one of her parents.

Her lawyer, Fatima Benbraham, told RFI that she had the documents proving that psychiatrist Aïcha Dahdouh, has been following her client since 2015.

"If the evidence did not exist, the claim would have been inadmissible... My client's rights will never remain violated, by anyone," she said. "We want justice."

Daoud and his wife Aicha Dehdouh are now being sued in Algeria's court of Oran for allegedly using her personal story without consent and for violating medical confidentiality.

“Right after the publication of the book, we filed two complaints against Kamel Daoud and his wife, Aicha Dehdouh, the psychiatrist who treated the victim,” lawyer Benbraham told the press on Wednesday.

Private, horrific story

In an interview with a private Algerian television channel, Saâda Arbane has claimed that there are striking similarities in the novel with her own life.

She cited the nature of her scar, the tattoo she has, the cannula, her pension, the abortion, the hair salon, the Lotfi high school, her complicated relationship with her adoptive mother and her love of horses, as an equestrian champion.

Arbane says she was shocked by what she read in Houris: "I don't like talking about my story, it's something that disturbs me in life," she says.

She was 6 years old when her village in Tiaret was attacked in 1993, many of her neighbours massacred, and her family decimated.

She was left for dead with her throat half slit, her vocal cords wrecked, and scarred for life.

Ongoing controversy

Houris is indeed inspired by some of the tragic events that occurred in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s.

Up to 200,000 people were killed in the conflict and thousands more disappeared, or subjected to torture and sexual violence.

But "its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional," its publisher, Gallimard, stated in a press release.

Gallimard thus denounced "defamatory" attacks against the Franco-Algerian author, winner of the 2024 Goncourt Prize for this novel.

Daoud claims he is the target of "violent defamatory campaigns organised by media close to" the Algerian regime.

He added that Houris is banned in Algeria.

The head of the Gallimard was even forbidden from presenting his works at the Algiers International Book Fair, which ended on 17 November.

The ban on participating in this fair was notified to Gallimard publishing house at the beginning of October, when Houris was already seen as one of the big favorites for the Goncourt.

Arbane's lawyer, Benbraham, however accuses Daoud of defaming victims of terrorism and of violating the Algerian law on national reconciliation, which prohibits publication of details about the so-called black decade.

The complaints were first lodged in August, Benbraham added, some time before Daoud won the Goncourt, but they did not want to talk about it, "so it wouldn’t be said that we wanted to disrupt the author’s nomination for the prize,” she said.

Daoud, who used to live in Algeria and work as a columnist, was  columnist for the French right-wing weekly news magazine Le Point for 10 years, and moved to France in 2023.

He has been regularly decried for his overt anti-Arab racism, since, in 2016 – following numerous cases of sexual assault on women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany – he wrote an op-ed piece published in the New York Times called "The Sexual Misery of the Arab World".

He has also been linked with French far-right intellectuals.