This is a new twist in “The Affair Houris “: the story of the Algerian who filed a complaint against the writer Kamel Daoud, whom she accuses of having used elements of her private life, was “public”, affirmed the novelist recipient of the 2024 Goncourt Prize, Wednesday December 10 on France Inter.
“She told her story everywhere”
“Everyone knows his story in Algeria, and especially in Oran. It’s a public story,” explained Franco-Algerian Kamel Daoud on French public radio, before adding: “The adoptive mother of this young woman is the former Algerian Minister of Health. She told her story everywhere.”
The complainant, Saâda Arbane, had in fact appeared on the Algerian channel One TV mid-November 2024 to affirm that the heroine of Houris was “modeled after her”, a survivor in 1999 of a slitting attempt perpetrated by jihadists.
According to her, Kamel Daoud knew her personal life because her psychiatrist wife had had her as a patient: “I went to her for consultations”, and “everyone knows that I do not want to talk about this story. It’s something that disturbs me in my life,” she explained in an interview.
A complainant “manipulated by the regime”?
“The fact that she recognizes herself in a novel which does not quote her, which does not tell her life, which does not tell the details of her life, I am sorry, I can't do anything about it,” noted the writer. “My novel has nothing to do with that woman. […] There are no medical secrets in this book.”
Asked if the complainant was “manipulated by the regime”, he replied: “ah but totally! I knew it was coming, that I couldn’t escape it.” Because after the publication of the novel in August 2024, “from the first week, there were editorials in (Algerian) government newspapers, which spoke of conspiracy, of a Trojan horse”.
Kamel Daoud is the target of another complaint from associations of victims of terrorism. “It’s the same method,” commented the novelist.
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Houris cannot be published in Algeria, because it falls under a law prohibiting any work on the “black decade” (which ran from 1992 to 2002 and caused at least 200,000 deaths, according to official figures).
