The novelist Kamel Daoud is accused of having plundered the story of a patient of his psychiatrist wife to write his latest novel “Houris”, crowned with the prestigious Goncourt prize. Two complaints were filed in Algeria against the Franco-Algerian author and his wife, for “violation of medical confidentiality” and “defamation”.
A short-lived “hurray”. Barely two weeks after receiving the coveted Goncourt Prize, writer Kamel Daoud finds himself at the heart of a scandal which taints his success. The novelist is accused of having stolen the story of a patient from his wife, who works as a psychiatrist, for his work “Houris”. The publisher claims for its part that the characters in the book are “purely fictional”.
Two complaints for “violation of medical confidentiality” and “defamation”
“Houris” carries the cannulated voice of a woman, whose throat was slit on December 31, 1999, at the age of 5, during an Islamist massacre which wiped out a thousand villagers, her father, her mother, and her sister in Algeria . Saâda Arbane is Algerian, a cannula hides the scar on her throat, like an indelible imprint of the attempted throat slitting which she survived, unlike her family, murdered in the village of Tiaret in the 1990s. Similarities which did not escape this 31-year-old woman, who with her lawyer filed two complaints for “violation of medical confidentiality” and “defamation”.
“As soon as the book was published, we filed two complaints against Kamel Daoud and his wife Aicha Dehdouh, the psychiatrist who treated the victim (Saâda Arbane, Editor’s note),” Maître Fatima Benbraham told AFP, specifying that she had seized the court of Oran, a port city in northwest Algeria and place of residence of Kamel Daoud and his wife. Complaints which relate to “the violation of medical confidentiality, since the doctor (the novelist’s wife, Editor’s note) handed over her entire patient’s file to her husband, as well as to the defamation of victims of terrorism and the violation of the law on national reconciliation”, which prohibits any publication on the period of the civil war which extended between 1992 and 2002.
“Its plot and its heroine are purely fictional”
Saâda Arbane and her lawyer assured that their deposit dates back to August, “a few days after the publication of the book”, before the award of the Goncourt Prize to the novel at the beginning of November. “We did not want to talk about it, so that it would not be said that we wanted to disrupt the author's nomination for the prize,” said Maître Fatima Benbraham.
A prize which brought joy to the Gallimard publishing house, whose name has since been affixed to the famous red banner “Prix Goncourt 2024”. The publisher also 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. Kamel Daoud, for his part, did not respond to these accusations.
This is not the first time that a writer has faced justice for similar reasons. Christine Angot, for example, revealed in her novel “Le Marché des amants” the private life of her companion's former girlfriend and had to compensate the latter to the tune of 10,000 euros.
