In an article published in “Point”, the novelist denies the accusations of Saâda Arbane, survivor of the Algerian civil war, who maintains that her novel “Houris”, winner of the 2024 Goncourt Prize, is inspired by her personal story.
When a writer takes up the pen to defend himself. Kamel Daoud defended himself on Tuesday December 3 in a column in the weekly The Point for revealing and using the story of a victim of the bloody “black decade” in Algeria for his novel Houriscrowned with the Goncourt prize. “This unhappy young woman claims it’s her story. If I can understand his tragedy, my answer is clear: it is completely false.writes the Franco-Algerian writer, also a columnist for Point.
“Apart from the apparent injury, there is no common point between the unbearable tragedy of this woman and the character Aube [personnage principal du roman]. The injury is not unique. Unfortunately, it is shared by many other victims. It is visible. It is that of hundreds of people”he continues, accusing the complainant of being “manipulated to achieve a goal: to kill a writer (and) defame his family”. Kamel Daoud and his psychiatrist wife are accused of having used without his consent the story of Saâda Arbane, survivor of a massacre during the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, for the writing of Houris.
Two complaints were filed in Algeria against them, one of which was accepted by a court. According to the plaintiff's lawyer, the writer and his wife must be summoned to Oran and tried in absentia if they do not appear. The writer had so far not responded to these accusations, but his publisher Gallimard had denounced him “violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated (against the writer) by certain media close to a regime whose nature no one is ignorant of”.
Defamation and lies
“Houris is a fiction, not a biography. It is the tragic story of a people. […] Houris does not reveal any medical secrets. The cannula [tube permettant de respirer et parler]the scar and the tattoos are not medical secrets, and this woman's life is not a secret, as her own testimonies prove. You just have to READ this novel to see that there is no connection, other than the tragedy of a country”he insists, while defending his wife, whose “name has been sullied by defamation and lies”.
Houris won the Goncourt Prize on November 4, the most prestigious in French literature. The book could not be published in Algeria, where it falls under a law prohibiting any work on the black decade between 1992 and 2002, which left at least 200,000 dead, according to official figures.
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