An Algerian court accepted a first complaint against the Franco-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud and his psychiatrist wife for revealing and using the story of a patient to write his novel Hourisawarded the 2024 Goncourt Prize, assured this Thursday the plaintiff's lawyer.
Survivor of a massacre
“We paid the legal costs, which means that the prosecution [d’Oran] accepted the complaint,” Fatima Benbraham told the press in Algiers, anticipating an upcoming summons. According to the lawyer, Kamel Daoud and his wife, who reside in France, will also be summoned to Oran and tried in absentia if they do not appear.
Two appeals were filed against Kamel Daoud and his wife who treated Saâda Arbane, a survivor of a massacre during the dark decade of civil war in Algeria (1992-2002, 200,000 dead). A complaint comes from Saâda Arbane who accuses them of having used her story without her consent, and another from the National Organization of Victims of Terrorism.
“He used drama”
“Kamel Daoud used the victim's tragedy to gain glory,” criticized the lawyer, asserting that she had asked the Prosecutor's Office to investigate the “disappearance of the medical file” from the hospital and accusing Daoud's wife of having “given it to her husband to make a novel”. “The penal code condemns the disclosure of professional secrecy” for doctors, underlined the lawyer, an offense punishable by six months of imprisonment.
The lawyer showed photos of Saâda Arbane when she arrived at the hospital as a child in 1999, just after an attempted throat slitting perpetrated by jihadists. “Kamel Daoud asked the victim to publish his story in a novel in exchange for money, but she refused,” she continued, adding that “he nevertheless published his book with the help of his wife, who told her about the tattoo she had on her back, like in the novel Houris.
Gallimard denounces “violent defamatory campaigns”
The complaint also refers to article 46 of the so-called national reconciliation law, which provides for up to five years in prison for “any person who, through his statements, his writings or any other action, exploits the wounds of the tragedy national”. On November 15, Saada Arbane appeared on the One TV channel affirming that the story of the novel “Houris” was his because he cites personal elements such as “his cannula [pour respirer et parler, NDLR]his scars, his tattoos, his hair salon”, his relationship with his mother and his desire to have an abortion.
Kamel Daoud did not respond to these accusations, but its French publisher Gallimard denounced on Monday the “violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated [à son encontre] by certain media close to a regime whose nature no one is ignorant of.”
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