POur 27e edition, which is held from Wednesday until November 16, this fair welcomes just over a thousand publishers representing 40 countries, including 290 Algerian publishers, who came to present more than 300,000 books.
The ban on participating in the Algiers Salon was notified to Editions Gallimard at the beginning of October, when HourisKamel Daoud’s novel about the violence of the “black decade”, the civil war which ravaged the country between 1992 and 2002, was already seen as one of Goncourt’s great favorites.
The book could not be published in Algeria, where it falls under a law prohibiting any work on this bloody period which left at least 200,000 dead, according to official figures. However, it is already widely circulating there underground.
Met by AFP at the Book Fair, writer Samia Chabane, 64, said to herself “against the banning of any book whatsoever”. “I prefer people to make up their own minds, read the book for themselves”, says the author of a recent autobiography entitled Stories from Algiers and elsewhere, the story of a free woman.
For her, prohibit Houris in Algeria, “It still looks like auto-da-fé. It takes us back centuries. It doesn’t give people the tools to be able to say: he’s right, he’s not right.”.
Chabane, who ensures “having read everything by Kamel Daoud, a great writer”, did not want to delve into Hourisbecause she “doesn’t want to relive the horrors of those bloody years”.
Makdoud Oulaid, a 63-year-old surgeon, read the novel. For him, the award of Goncourt to Daoud, often criticized in Algeria for his proximity to French President Emmanuel Macron, is more “linked to the political situation” than the qualities of the work.
Relations between Paris and Algiers, which have been seesawing since Algeria’s independence in 1962, are once again very tense after France provided increased support at the end of July for Morocco’s autonomy plan in the Sahara, where Algeria supports the Polisario separatists.
Algiers perceived this French change of heart as a betrayal, immediately withdrawing its ambassador to Paris and announcing further reprisals.
Algerian publisher Sofiane Hadjadj, 51, founder of Barzakh, who published Kamel Daoud’s first novel in Algeria in 2013 Meursault, counter-investigationdid not really want to comment on the ban on Houris. “It is an international book fair, organized by the Ministry of Culture. So we must comply with a certain number of rules. There are laws governing book publishing. It’s completely normal”, he told AFP.
Hassina Hadj Sahraoui, a 62-year-old publishing director, regrets the absence of the book in Algeria and emphasizes that “he is the first Algerian in history” to receive the Goncourt, considered the most important award in French-speaking literature.
“We have Assia Djebar (writer who died in 2015) who won many awards and was a member of the French Academy, and now we have Kamel Daoud, who will perhaps succeed her one day”, she emphasizes.
