JEAN :
The new Goncourt has therefore arrived, it is therefore a question ofHouris by Kamel Daoud, writer, editorialist, who was a journalist in Algeria for a long time, and whose third work of fiction, undoubtedly the most formally ambitious, was widely acclaimed by the Goncourt jury. It is a dense, apparently complicated book, which aims to fill a gap through romance: that of the Algerian black decade, the 1990s during which it is estimated that 200,000 people were executed, notably by Islamist militias after the cancellation of 'an election which gave their party, the FIS, the winner. Daoud, who experienced it, and treated it as a journalist at the time, here creates a work of memory with intensity, an intensity which oscillates it seems to me between a documentary desire to do justice, an anger against the authorities of his country of origin where the book was also censored, but also perhaps less honestly, the strategic defense of a thought which resonates well beyond the context that the novel circumscribes – and it is there that the hurts a little for me at the reading.
This prologue is a bit long because it is not easy to be fair about this book, and not easy either to separate the editorialist Daoud from the author, and from his characters. The protagonist is a woman, who speaks in the first person. Her name is Aube, she is twenty-six years old, and she was born twice; the first in a village where she lived with her sister and her parents, the second on January 1, 2000 where she almost came back to life after having her throat slit in her bed by a militiaman. An injury which left him mute, and whose smile-shaped scar is a provocation: it forces those around him to remember this time that no one wants to hear about. Aube lives in Oran with an adopted mother who is a lawyer, she runs a beauty salon which faces the local mosque, a proximity which leads to conflicts and violence; she drives, smokes, does not wear the veil. She is a woman who is both free and half dead, and who at the start of the book is pregnant and has resolved to get rid of her child. Yet it is this child that she is addressing, this very little girl whom she nicknames Houri, from the name of these women promised to believers in the Muslim paradise. Aube is at a crossroads in her life, and in a second part sets out on the roads, in search of the place where her tragedy took place, a route as much geographical as memorial where everything is a symbol, where everything is a sign, and everything is memory.
Pathos, but in the service of what
This is undoubtedly what impresses in this fable who emphasizes everything with often exhausting lyrical means, and who loops and loops scenes of sometimes incredible violence but whose repetition is not really effective. It is also this excess which makes us doubt the posture of Daoud novelist: here is a male author, Algerian certainly, and who cannot be suspected of ignorance of the context, who speaks for a mute Algerian woman, who stuffs in some takes his own words out of the throat of a slit woman – he uses this metaphor himself constantly, but that does not absolve the author of a certain form of brutality.
It seems to me that by wanting to shout out loud an anger that perhaps goes beyond Algerian history alone, Daoud crushes his characters, and thus does almost the opposite of what he probably thinks he is doing: giving them a voice so that we hear their language. This is all the more striking in the case of the character of Aube, whose true humanity, despite all the pathos poured into the writing, is difficult to feel, and who seems there to be a strategic literary tool, ready to point out what Daoud often points out elsewhere in his interventions with various media: the fear of the Islamization of our societies, including Western ones, and what, supported by the pathos of fiction, this fear can carry with it simplistic and discriminatory. Dawn and its story, as resounding as it is, would perhaps have deserved to be given more sensitive flesh, and to trust the reader to understand its tragedy, without weighing it down with considerations which, we feel, , have another agenda.
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