By deciding to take legal action, Kamel Daoud, winner of the 2024 Goncourt Prize for “Houris”, Saada Arbane who accuses the writer of having been inspired by his own story to write his novel, the controversy takes on new proportions and its consecration could turn into a scandal.
Indeed, according to the private television channel One TV, this survivor of a massacre during the 1990s has officially decided to take the case to court.
With this in mind, a group of “Algerian and emigration” lawyers, led by Fatma Benbraham, was formed in this case in which Saada Arbane accuses the author of “Houris” of having “violated medical confidentiality” and having “illegally exploited personal information”.
The complaint also targets the writer's wife, a psychiatrist, who was his therapist. In her testimonies broadcast Friday, November 15 on One TV, Saada Arbane accuses Kamel Daoud of having appropriated her own tragedy that occurred during the dark decade by resuming her story that she had entrusted to the psychiatrist.
According to her, there are great similarities between Houris' main character, Aube, and her own story which she wanted to keep secret.
“Three years ago, I was invited by Ms. Daoud to have coffee at their home, cited Hasnaoui [à Oran]. Kamel Daoud then asked me if it was possible to tell my story in a novel, I refused,” she confided.
These unexpected revelations from the young woman did not fail to cause an outcry on the web, so much so that some outright demanded that the Académie Goncourt withdraw the prize from the winner.
Faced with the scale of the controversy fueled by the young woman's exit, Gallimard, publisher of the novel, reacted on Monday by denouncing “defamatory campaigns”.
“If Houris is inspired by tragic events that occurred in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s, its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional,” said Antoine Gallimard, the publisher of Kamel Daoud.
Kamel Daoud neither an opponent nor the only Algerian writer to have written about the black decade
“Since the publication of his novel, Kamel Daoud has been the subject of violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media close to a regime whose nature no one is unaware of,” said the director of Gallimard, thus presenting the Franco- Algerian to Algerian power.
But neither the Goncourt Academy nor Kamel Daoud have yet reacted to Saada Arbane's revelations and accusations.
In an interview with “New Obs” last September, Kamel Daoud admitted to having been inspired by real events when writing his novel.
“Yes, I knew a woman with a cannula, but not just one mutilated woman, since cutting the throat was the modus operandi of the Islamists. This image caused a powerful trigger in me for what I could not say.”
Guest Sunday evening on the Swiss channel RTS, the former columnist of Quotidien d'Oran, once again assures: “What I tell in this novel are true stories. I amalgamated characters who really existed.”
While awaiting the outcome of what could be described as the “Daoud affair”, this outcry in Algeria, the silence of the writer and the reaction of Gallimard have once again and without a doubt reflected the eminently political character of the 2024 Goncourt Prize.
If for his detractors, Kamel Daoud reaps the fruits of his ideological convergence with those who in France, particularly within the extreme right, as evidenced by their reactions to his consecration, have scores to settle with Algeria, notably in through his positions on women, Palestine and Islam, for his supporters, on the other hand, he is the victim of an orchestrated “cabal” which does not speak its name.
But Kamel Daoud is neither an opponent in Algeria – at least until his departure and his permanent settlement in France in 2023 -, as his publishing house tries to present him, nor the only writer to have written about the tragedy of the black decade.
In a context of tensions between Algiers and Paris, the price comes down, given the intensity of the controversy, like a stone thrown into the Algerian garden. This means that the case is not likely to be closed any time soon.
