Crowned by the Goncourt, Houris by Kamel Daoud offers a voice to the women victims of the black decade in Algeria.
C Prod
We must be wary of the gentleness of Fajr, a young Algerian woman suffering from a throat deformity which forces her to breathe through a cannula. This defect which prevents her from speaking, she wears on her neck, attached to a seventeen centimeter scar, a memory – atrocious – of a night in 1999 when, as a child, she almost had her throat slit by the Islamists who attacked his village. The book unfolds the long monologue of Fajr who, at the time of the Eid festival, confides in the child she is carrying, whom she assumes to be a girl, but whom she hesitates to keep, because her country is not kind to the women who live there on “a path of thorns”. No one knows that she is pregnant, but Fajr (Aube, in French) calls this child to witness that she has already baptized Houri (from the name of the virgins promised to paradise), listening to her suffering which sums up that of all Algerian women held back by traditions.
Transgressing taboos
Behind the apparent tranquility of the heroine’s murmur (she evokes her “inner language”) and the lyrical enveloping effect aroused by Kamel Daoud’s writing, there is the rage and ferocity of an author who , because he transgresses the taboo of the FIS years (Islamic Salvation Front – a 2005 law prohibits discussing this dark period), is no longer welcome in his country where his life is in danger. Nearly ten years ago, Daoud had already won the Goncourt for the first novel with Meursault, a counter-investigation in which he imagined the testimony of the brother of the Arab killed on the beach by Meursault in Camus’s The Stranger…
Houris ★★★✩
Kamel Daoud, Gallimard, 400 p.
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