Like the ballet of trucks going up and down the narrow streets of Montmartre, where he has enjoyed living for a year, Kamel Daoud does not stop. He grabs his phone to search for archives, hands us photos of women mutilated in the throat. “I was asked if my character was an allegory”he comments, about Dawn, the narrator of Houris. Some readers found the book unbearably violent. However, he deleted a good part of the massacre scenes. Not out of censorship, but for fear of not being believed. He exudes the obstinacy of the witnesses, which is at the heart of his new novel.
The subject is Algeria’s “black decade” (1992-2002), during which various Islamist groups opposed the national army. The toll varies, according to estimates, between 60,000 and 200,000 dead and thousands missing, but it is forbidden to talk about it in Algeria. This is stated in an article of the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, which punishes with imprisonment anyone who dares to use or exploit “the wounds of the national tragedy”. A civil war that does not say its name.
Kamel Daoud experienced it up close. In 1994, at the age of 24, he joined the Oran Daily. He and his colleagues are responsible for ensuring “a security blanket” events. “A kind of awful routine sets inrelate-t-il. At each massacre, you are sent to question the soldiers, the survivors. From afar, we saw the bombs. Up close, a war is a lot of silence. We go back to write our article and we go get drunk.
At the end of December 1997, the young journalist was sent to Had Chekala, in Ouarsenis. He met mute inhabitants, whose relatives had been massacred and dismembered by the Islamists. The villagers had buried the remains as best they could, on the heights. Thanks to the heavy rains, they resurfaced lower down. It was then necessary to start again. The reporter reported to his editorial office the figure of 1,000 dead. He was not believed. The official toll was less than 200 dead.
In 2006, the true extent of the losses was finally acknowledged. The writer shows us an article on the site Algeria-Watch. Here in Paris he found the necessary distance to “to mourn” of this war, and record it in a novel. Because this genre offers more space and time than journalism, but above all because it can mark readers for a long time, as he did.
Fluctuating balance sheets
The question of truth is an old story for Kamel Daoud. “The gap between the very modest story of my parents and grandparents about the colonial period and the excessive story we told about it at school alerted mehe remembers. There was something wrong with this inflated narrative about the martyrs.” He is also struck by the fluctuating death tolls, between 500,000 and 1 million, the debate over false mujahideen demanding pensions, as well as the men who have fallen from grace and been erased from school textbooks. “Who is a hero and who is not? I understood very early on that history is for eating. It is for political gain.”
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