The Franco-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud, winner of the Goncourt Prize on Monday, at the age of 54, is a critical chronicler of Algeria whose freedom of tone ended up forcing him to leave his city of Oran for Paris, against heart.
“Houris” (editions Gallimard), the Goncourt-winning novel, could not be exported to Algeria, let alone translated into Arabic.
As the author writes in his novel, Algerian law prohibits any mention in a book of the bloody events of the “black decade”, the civil war between the government and the Islamists between 1992 and 2002.
In Algeria, “I am attacked because I am neither communist, nor decolonial, nor anti-French”, said this “exiled by force of circumstances” to Point, the French magazine where he is a columnist, in August.
– Traitor label –
He took French nationality. Even saying, in reference to the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, born Polish and naturalized in the middle of the First World War: “I have Apollinaire syndrome, I am more French than the French”.
Among a large part of Algerian opinion and intelligentsia, he cannot shake off the label of traitor to his country.
Many Algerians, on the contrary, admire his writing, his knowledge of the country's history and his stubbornness in asking the angry questions. Starting with the publisher Sofiane Hadjadj, from Barzakh editions, who published “Meursault, contre-investigation” in 2013.
“He invented his own way of writing,” he commented at the time of the dazzling success of this novel, spotted by Actes Sud.
Released in France in 3,000 copies in May 2014, this rereading of the plot of “The Stranger” by Albert Camus will be one of the literary sensations of the year, with more than 100,000 copies sold. A finalist for the Goncourt prize, the work won the Goncourt for high school students, among others.
Comments made on French television then earned Kamel Daoud a diatribe from a Salafist imam, which would have been a fatwa if its author had had the legitimacy. A court will condemn this imam in 2016 for “death threats”, before an appeal court buried the case.
– Integrity –
Son of a gendarme, Kamel Daoud was born in Mostaganem (north-west) in June 1970, the eldest of six children. He was raised by his grandparents in a village where he became the imam as a teenager, rubbing shoulders with Islamists, before moving away from religion.
The only one of his siblings to study literature, he turned to journalism, first at Détective, the Algerian version of the news magazine, then in a major French-speaking newspaper, Le Quotidien d'Oran.
As he explained during the promotion of “Houris”, journalist positions had become available after assassinations. The job was dangerous and very delicate: it was necessary to give reports of massacres that everyone wanted to conceal, minimize or exaggerate.
His reputation for integrity comes from this period, then from articles and columns where he bluntly denounced everything that is eating away at Algerian society: corruption, religious hypocrisy, neglect of power, violence, archaisms, inequalities.
Father of two children, he stopped journalism in 2016, in favor of literature.
It was after a lively controversy, in France and beyond, over his denunciation in Le Monde of “sexual misery in the Arab-Muslim world, the sick relationship with women, with the body and with desire”. Some had accused him of maintaining a racist cliché.
“I have the right to think and defend my ideas,” he replied, in an interview with AFP in 2017. “Every Algerian does not need to be on the same wavelength.”
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