GAllimard, the prestigious French publishing house, is banned from being present at Algiers International Book Fair (THEYfrom November 6 to 16). The information was confirmed by the organizers of this event and by Antoine Gallimard himself in a statement to the literary and editorial news magazine News.
“We have just learned that we are banned from attending the Algiers Salon,” declared the president of Editions Gallimard and the Madrigall Group. Adding: “We have just received a letter which provides no explanation as to the reasons or reasons justifying this decision. »
“The SILA organizers asked Gallimard not to have a stand at the show, but clarified that the other publishing houses of the Madrigall group were not affected by this ban,” explains another source in Algiers. “But Gallimard refused, no house in his group [Pléiade, Folio, J’ai lu, Casterman, Flammarion, POL, Minuit, Christian Bourgeois, etc.] will not participate in SILA,” we are told. “Out of solidarity, the Madrigall group will therefore not go to SILA,” he told News Antoine Gallimard, president of this holding company, the fourth largest French publishing group.
Why such a decision? The precise reasons are not mentioned in the missive sent by the SILA organizers to Gallimard. “It is permissible to imagine everything, given that their letter does not give details,” estimated Antoine Gallimard in News.
Kamel Daoud’s novel targeted
According to information collected at the Ministry of Culture, corroborated by Algerian editorial circles, “this is a roundabout way of avoiding the presence of the novel de Kamel Daoud on the Gallimard stand.
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“A censorship that does not mean its name, we ban all Gallimard to drown the fish,” reacts bitterly, a publishing player who requested anonymity for fear of reprisals. “France will recognize its responsibility in the assassination of Larbi Ben M’hidi. But Algeria banned Gallimard who published the great anti-colonial manifestos! » protests an editor.
In Kamel Daoud’s latest novel, Hourispublished by Gallimard in mid-August, the survivor of a massacre perpetrated by Islamist terrorists at the end of the 1990s retraces the rugged journey of her life after escaping death, the assassin having “missed” his throat slitting.
The novel is also a critique of the official management of the memory of this period which deeply traumatized Algerian society. The writer cites as an epigraph chapter 46 of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation of 2005, punishing with imprisonment (3 to 5 years) and fines “anyone, by his declarations, writings or any other act, uses or exploits the wounds of the national tragedy to undermine the institutions of the democratic and popular Algerian Republic, weaken the State, harm the honor of its agents who have served it worthily, or tarnish the image of Algeria on the international level.
This Charter, which provides for amnesty and compensation measures and which imposes an official account of the course of the civil war of the 1990s, has been criticized by Algerian NGOs representing both victims of terrorism and those of abuses by security forces.
Thus, at the time, SOS Disparu(e)s, Somoud (families of people kidnapped by terrorists) and the National Association of Families of the Disappeared (ANFD) considered that the Charter “consolidates impunity and denial of justice and truth for the benefit of terrorists and state agents involved in the fight against terrorism.”
Sword of Damocles
To return to article 46 of this text, “it remains inapplicable because we cannot put in prison the researchers, writers, journalists, essayists, filmmakers who, in dozens if not more, have, in Algeria, worked , investigated, written and produced around this period”, recalls an Algerian editorialist, while qualifying: “But it remains a sword of Damocles above our heads which serves to neutralize at least the creative initiative or the journalistic investigation . »
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“It is not Kamel Daoud’s novel which annoys the authorities, but the media highlighting in France and elsewhere of his critical remarks on the silence imposed by the Charter, on the absence of treatment in school textbooks, on the invisibility of victims…” comments the editorialist. Another source revealed to us that the authorities had also contacted several SILA participants last week to prohibit them from exhibiting the works of Kamel Daoud, Boualem Sansal and Mohamed Sifaoui.
According to Arezki Aït Larbi, director of Koukou editions (around twenty books of which were banned during SILA 2002 before the publishing house was completely excluded from the show in 2023 and from this 2024 edition), there is also a “blacklist” of authors at the level of the Ministry of Culture. Koukou filed a complaint against the ban on his participation in SILA last year, but the procedure is still ongoing, according to Arezki Aït Larbi.
SILA 2023 was also marked by Algiers’ refusal to allow the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Annie Ernaux to come, invited by the French Institute of Algiers. This refusal was allegedly motivated by the signing by the writer, alongside intellectuals from around the world (Noam Chomsky, Ken Loach, Achille Mbembe, Abdellatif Laâbi, etc.), of a forum calling on the Algerian authorities to release the journalist. and press boss El Kadi Ihsane.
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France out of SILA?
But beyond these cases, there would be, according to one of the actors involved in SILA, “a desire not to display or display oneself with the French”, which would have been instilled “verbally by the Ministry of Culture”. The umpteenth diplomatic crisis between Algiers and Paris, after France’s recognition this summer of the “Moroccanness” of Western Sahara, seems to have a heavy impact even on the field of publishing and books. We are a long way from SILA in 2015 where France was the guest country of honor, with former ambassador Bernard Émié signing the editorial in the official magazine of the show…
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“They can censor the works, they are circulating more than ever,” underlines our editorialist. Daoud’s novel is massively pirated in Algeria and I have already received four PDF copies on my phone. » And continues: “Beyond what is happening around SILA, it is the question of freedoms that is raised: how many literary cafés have been closed? How many intellectual conferences have been banned? How can we explain the stress of a publisher or book importer faced with an all-powerful administration that does not even justify the ban? »
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