Kamel Daoud, a very political Goncourt

Published on November 4, 2024 at 1:51 p.m.updated on November 4, 2024 at 2:26 p.m.

By crowning “Houris”, a book banned in Algeria, the Goncourt jurors made a very political gesture. Especially in the context of degraded relations between Paris and Algiers.

Finally. We can say that Kamel Daoud will have waited for this prize for ten years. Finalist given favorite in 2014 for “Meursault, contre-investigation” (Actes Sud), the writer had to “console” himself with the Goncourt of the first novel, in 2015. This year, he was once again the ideal winner with “ Houris” (Gallimard), a novel as lyrical as it is political about the Algerian “black decade”. In the last square, Gaël Faye and his “Jacaranda” (Grasset) seemed the only one who could compete with him. Which gave the unfortunate impression that the two women also in the running, Sandrine Collette and Hélène Gaudy, both with very good novels – “Madelaine avant l'aube” (JC Lattès) for the first and “Archipels” (L'Olivier ) for the second − were only making up appearances, just to display a semblance of parity.

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But we had no illusions. The match was inevitably going to be played between Daoud and Faye. And that's what happened. On the first floor, Goncourt; to the second, the Renaudot. Let us first note that in doing so, the two major literary prizes crown novels which are already selling very well. At the top of sales since its release at the end of August, “Jacaranda” has sold 161,000 copies compared to 77,000 for “Houris”, according to “Libres Hebdo”. Enough to lend credence to the idea that literary prizes only confirm commercial successes, in fact participating in the phenomenon of “best-selling” in the book market, narrowed around a handful of titles.

And the literary dimension in all this? Does it still have any importance in the choice of jurors? Ample and ambitious, “Houris” is distinguished by Daoud’s incantatory writing. The story is told by Aube, a young woman deprived of her voice following an attempted throat slitting during the Algerian civil war in the 1990s. Aube speaks to the child she is carrying. She doesn't know if she's going to keep her – she's convinced that she's a little girl. She tells him about the misfortune of being born a woman in Algeria:

“For here is no place for you, it is a corridor of thorns for a woman to live in this country. I will kill you for love and make you disappear towards paradise and its gigantic trees. »

With this narrator, a mute Scheherazade who recounts the thousand and one nights of massacres and horrors in embedded stories, Kamel Daoud seems to adopt the phrase of Marguerite Duras (winner of the Goncourt just 40 years ago for “The Lover “): “Writing is screaming without noise. » In this respect, the Goncourt awarded to him today is undoubtedly a literary prize. But it is also, and perhaps above all, an eminently political price.

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As Kamel Daoud reminds us in the exergue of the novel, discussing the “black decade” is considered illegal in Algeria. Say “the wounds of the national tragedy” is punishable by three to five years in prison and a fine. And in fact “Houris” is banned in the country that Kamel Daoud ended up leaving to settle in France. Tragically irony, one of the characters in “Houris” is a bookseller who almost paid with his blood for selling books. At the beginning of October, we also learned that Gallimard, which published Daoud's novel, was excluded from the Algiers Book Fair, which is to be held from November 6 to 16.

This prize also arrives a week after Emmanuel Macron's trip to Morocco, in the company of a large delegation including the writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, one of the ten jurors of the Goncourt Prize. If the trip sealed a reconciliation between Paris and Rabat, this rapprochement was to the detriment of already degraded relations between France and Algeria, particularly on the very sensitive subject of Western Sahara. Our journalist Sara Daniel then wrote that between Algeria and Morocco, France had chosen. The Goncourt awarded to the Algerian Kamel Daoud – who is likely to displease his native country – paradoxically seems to endorse this choice of Morocco.