Two complaints filed against award-winning writer Kamel Daoud and his wife in Algeria

“We didn’t want to talk about it”

Saâda Arbane, survivor of a massacre during the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, spoke on an Algerian channel accusing the author of having revealed her story in the novel without her authorization.

“The first complaint was filed in the name of the National Organization of Victims of Terrorism” and “the second in the name of the victim,” said Me Benbraham, assuring that their filing dated back to August, “a few days later the publication of the book”, and well before the award of the Prix Goncourt to the novel at the beginning of November. “We didn’t want to talk about it, so that it wouldn’t be said that we wanted to disrupt the author’s nomination for the prize,” she said.

According to this well-known lawyer in Algeria, the complaints concern “the violation of medical confidentiality, since the doctor (the wife of Kamel Daoud, editor’s note) handed over all of her patient’s file to her husband, as well as the defamation of the victims of terrorism and the violation of the law on national reconciliation”, which prohibits any publication on the period of the civil war between 1992 and 2002.

A defamatory campaign

Last Friday, Saada Arbane appeared on the One TV television channel claiming that the story of the novel “Houris” is hers. This survivor of an attempted throat slitting by armed Islamists said she recognized elements of her life: “her cannula (for breathing and speaking, editor’s note), her scars, her tattoos, her hairdressing salon.”

Kamel Daoud did not respond to these accusations, but his French publisher Gallimard denounced on Monday the “violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media close to a regime whose nature no one is ignorant of” against the writer since the publication of the novel. “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 Gallimard.

The novel, which takes place in Oran, tells the story of a young woman who lost the use of speech during a massacre on December 31, 1999, during the civil war which left 200,000 dead, according to official figures.