GREGOIRE CAMPIONE / AFP
Kamel Daoud this November 4, 2024, at the presentation of the Goncourt prize in Paris.
BOOK – Kamel Daoud (finally) crowned at Drouant. Already a finalist for the Goncourt Prize in 2014 with his bestseller Meursault, counter-investigationthe 54-year-old writer received, this Monday, November 4, the most prestigious French literary awards for his latest novel published by Gallimard, Houris.
« I am very happy. It's cliché, but I have no other words », Reacted the author, interviewed by the media at the entrance to the famous Parisian restaurant where the prize has been awarded for over a century now. He was facing another literary headliner, Gaël Faye, and two “outsiders”, the authors Hélène Gaudy and Sandrine Collette.
The ten jurors salute, “ a book where lyricism competes with tragedy, and which gives voice to the suffering linked to a dark period in Algeria “. In Houris (a term which in the Muslim faith designates young girls promised to paradise), Kamel Daoud tackles a dark subject: the civil war which struck the country where he comes from between 1992 and 2002.
A story that he delivers through the voice of Aube. Pregnant, the young woman tells the little girl that she is awaiting the massacre of her entire family, around twenty years previously, during which Islamists tried to slit her throat, leaving her disfigured and mute.
« This novel shows how literature, in its high freedom of auscultation of reality, its emotional density, traces alongside the historical story of a people, another path of memory. whispered the new president of Goncourt, Philippe Claudel, while presenting the prize to Kamel Daoud.
Kamel Daoud and Algeria
This award is not a surprise. The former journalist appeared as the big favorite of this 2024 vintage. However, it is not without taking on a political character. Houris could not be exported to Algeria, nor even translated into Arabic. And for good reason, Algerian law prohibits any mention in a book of the bloody events of the “black decade”.
In the state where he grew up, Kamel Daoud is divisive. Some Algerians admire his writing, like one of the bosses of Barzakh editions, Sofiane Hadjadji, who published in 2013 Meursault, counter-investigation. “He invented his own way of writing », Estimated the latter before the book was picked up by Actes Sud.
For another part of public opinion, on the other hand, he is a traitor to his country. In Algeria, “I am attacked because I am neither communist, nor decolonial, nor anti-French”declared Kamel Daoud in a major interview with Point in the month of August. He was naturalized French in 2020 and says, like Apollinaire, “ more French than the French “. A love for France that he repeated this Monday in front of the press: “ I know that we like to do “French bashing”, but for me, this country is a welcoming country for writers, for writing and all that which comes from elsewhere ».
A tense diplomatic context
While Gallimard editions are banned from the Algiers International Book Fair, which is to be held from this Thursday, November 6, Kamel Daoud's words arrive in a tense diplomatic context between Algeria and France. At the end of July, Paris announced its “ reinforced support » to an autonomy plan under “Moroccan sovereignty” for the disputed territory of Western Sahara, where Algiers supports the separatists of the Polisario Front.
Since then, the crisis has deepened between the two countries. On November 1, Algeria celebrated, during a two and a half hour military parade, the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the war of independence against France. A show of force to commemorate the night of November 1, 1954, during which around thirty FLN attacks targeting symbols of the colonial presence left ten people dead.
The same day, Emmanuel Macron recognized “the assassination” of the leader of the National Liberation Front Mohamed Larbi Ben M'Hidi, national hero for Algeria, “by French soldiers”. A symbolic gesture which did not arouse the hoped-for enthusiasm. Some saw it as a maneuver to exploit memory, others as a way of avoiding “ the question of political responsibility for this crime of extrajudicial execution”, as observed in this article from International Mail, who quotes the historian Fabrice Riceputi.
Not a “ vindictive political gesture »
The handing over of Goncourt to Kamel Daoud is in any case not “ a vindictive political gesture against a friendly country », insisted Philippe Claudel, according to whom this can however “ allow you to reinstall, sew up links that some people are too inclined to want to tear, or perhaps have an interest in seeing torn ».
Several of the prizes awarded in the past by the Academy have also been seen through a political prism, like Three powerful women by Marie NDiaye, very critical of France under Nicolas Sarkozy. But the jurors seem more fond of romantic works, like the vast majority of award-winning texts in recent years, such as Watch over her by Jean-Baptiste Andrea, Their children after them by Nicolas Mathieu or The anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier.
This has been the case since 1919 with Marcel Proust, rewarded at the time for In the shade of young girls in flowers. A contested attribution which, according to the writer Robert Kopp in the journal History in 2009, would have started “ a change of taste in literature » and the transition to a literature « disengaged “. A trend to which Houris however, seems to deviate.
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