Kamel Daoud has neither his tongue nor his pen in his pocket. The Franco-Algerian journalist has been saying and writing what he thinks for decades, to the great dismay of Islamists, detractors of freedom of expression, supporters of patriarchy…
Yesterday, by awarding him the Goncourt Prize, the jurors rewarded his courage as much as the literary qualities of his book, Houriswhich explores the terrible “black decade” that pitted the Algerian government against the Islamists from 1992 to 2002.
It was to write far from any censorship that Kamel Daoud, divorced and father of two children, settled in France last year. “This book was born because I came to France revealed the writer upon receiving his prize. It is a country that gives me the freedom to write, that protects writers. Knowing what they experience on the other side of our democracy, it is a strong signal for all the people who are tempted by this adventure, that of writing and publishing, and of reading too. »
Horrors of the Civil War
And to speak, he might have added. Listening to him again, during interviews, on the place of God or on the fact that the Arab world “walk on one leg” because the female part of the population is stifled, we suspect that her positions must irritate more than one person. He was even the subject of a death threat from an Algerian imam in 2014.
Aged 54, Kamel Daoud is a child of Mesra, near Mostaganem, a coastal town in northwest Algeria. This son of a gendarme studied French literature before becoming a journalist.
Hired at Daily newspaper of Oran, in 1994, he witnessed the horrors of the civil war. Having become editor-in-chief of the newspaper, this hard worker was also the author of multiple columns in the Algerian press and numerous collaborations with the French press.
What he could not say through his articles, he wanted to express through his novels, starting to publish in 2003 in Algeria before releasing, in 2011, a first collection of short stories in France, The minotaur 504(Sabine Wespieser). Meursault, counter investigation (Actes Sud) in which he is inspired by the famous novel by Albert Camus, The strangerwill launch it to the French public, thanks to the Goncourt of the first novel obtained in 2014.
The supreme consecration therefore came with Hourisa poignant book, sometimes very harsh, inspired by the abuses of the 1990s which still imbue his retina. Kamel Daoud expresses himself through his heroine, a woman tortured by the Islamists.
The novel is banned in Algeria where, under the guise of pacification, it is forbidden to discuss this period. Not sure that the awarding of the most prestigious French literary award will improve Franco-Algerian relations, already far from being in good shape…
