Kamel Daoud, a Goncourt against identity assignment

Qhether the Goncourt Prize jury wished it or not, the awarding, Monday, November 4, for the first time, of the most prestigious French literary award, to an Algerian writer, Kamel Daoud, constitutes a political event. That this distinction honors a book devoted to illegality in Algeria itself through its subject – the “black decade” (1992-2002) of civil war between the government and the Islamists, which left between 60,000 and 200,000 dead, but including a charter for peace and reconciliation prohibits speaking in the country – in fact an event with a bilateral dimension, at a time when Paris and Algiers maintain frosty relations.

Apart from its literary qualities, analyzed in « The World of Books”, the crowned novel, Houriswhose central character is a young Algerian woman rendered mute by a failed throat slitting, raises the question of the writer’s commitment to the recent history of his country. It also questions the capacity of literature to break the incredible silence imposed on Algerians by a power which has never ceased to celebrate and exploit another memory, that of the war of independence against France (1954- 1962).

The disastrous consequences – racism, denial of the realities of colonization – of the silence which has long prevailed on this subject in France, where the “Algerian War” was only officially recognized in 1999, bear witness to this: the negation and official forgetting of historical dramas leads to nothing good. In Algeria as elsewhere, what is left unsaid is gangrene. A society cannot be rebuilt on imposed amnesia. “Silence drives you crazy”we read several times in Houris.

Deadlocks in the French debate

Kamel Daoud, who was a journalist at Oran Daily during the civil war, who has been the subject of a fatwa since 2014 for his denunciation of Islamism, and had to leave Oran to settle in France in 2023, knows what he is talking about. His writings and remarks, marked by the obsession with religious influence and which tend to minimize the reality of discrimination in French society, can be debated and criticized. But the writer does not lack courage in his defense of the universality of human rights and in his denunciation of the fate reserved for women by the Islamists.

However, certain reactions to his interventions say a lot about the impasses of the French debate. For the right, Kamel Daoud is a courageous dissident, an ideal Algerian Muslim since he is both critical of the Algiers regime and slayer of the obscurantism to which some would like to reduce Islam. For part of the left, the writer, naturalized French in 2020, personifies the traitor to his community. On the one hand, he is showered with praise laden with political ulterior motives; on the other hand, we tend to accuse him of being an unhealthy Muslim, an Islamophobic renegade, under the pretext that he denounces the control of religious people and takes advantage of the freedoms offered by the former colonial power.

This double essentialization is worrying. Beyond the writer Kamel Daoud, a creator perfectly free to shed his religious heritage, the whole question of assignment to an identity is raised. And the fundamental right of everyone, Prix Goncourt or simple citizen, to choose their ideas and their struggles, to express their preferences, regardless of their origins, their name, the color of their skin.