Houris by Kamel Daoud, Madelaine before dawn by Sandrine Collette, Archipelagos by Hélène Gaudy and Jacaranda by Gaël Faye attracted the attention of the magazine’s journalists Lirebefore their nomination by the Goncourt Prize jury to claim the prestigious award…
1. “Houris” by Kamel Daoud
Kamel Daoud is not a man of silence. Journalist and columnist, he first made his words resonate in various media, before encountering literature with Meursault, counter-investigation, postcolonial rewriting of The Stranger by Camus, winner of the Goncourt prize for the first novel. But, since Zabor or the Psalms, the writer seemed to have deserted fiction. Not through lack of inspiration, he tells us during an interview for Liremore “freedom in the broadest sense”.
Kamel Daoud was born in 1970 in Mesra, Algeria. His positions on this side and the other of the Mediterranean have earned him many enmities, even death threats. At the end of 2014, he was the target of a fatwa after comments on his relationship to Islam. In 2016, following the publication of a column discussing the wave of sexual assaults committed in Germany during New Year’s celebrations, he was accused of fueling the “Islamophobic fantasies of a growing part of the European public”. Displeasing Islamists and decolonialists is a privilege little envied. Invited in residence at Sciences Po in 2019, it was by coming to live in Paris that the writer reconnected with freedom and the desire to write.
In Houris, he confronts another great taboo in his country of origin: the civil war, which engulfed Algeria between 1992 and 2002. “black decade” that Aube, its heroine, bears inscribed in her flesh in the form of a broad smile cut with a knife into her throat. “I hide the history of an entire war, written on my skin since I was a child. Those who know how to read will understand when they see the scandal of my eyes and the monstrosity of my smile. Those who deliberately forget will be afraid of me and of looking at me”she whispers to the child growing in her belly, whom she knows is a girl and named Houri.
Twenty years to write
Aube was 5 years old the night of her second birth, when, in the ambulance speeding between Relizane and Oran, she was renamed by Khadija, her adoptive mother. His father, mother and sister had died in the Had Chekala massacre. “Nearly 1,000 people were murdered in one night around our farm. The number […] shook the country. We didn’t believe him. » With her vocal cords cut by a knife, Aube is not silenced. In Oran, she opened a hairdressing salon, opposite a mosque whose imam takes a dim view of the establishment’s growing attendance. “Between my cannula and the speaker of…
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