The story of the Algerian woman who filed a complaint against the writer Kamel Daoud for using elements of her private life was “public”, said the Goncourt Prize novelist Wednesday December 11, 2024 on France Inter.
After receiving this award at the beginning of November for Houris the Franco-Algerian was denounced by a woman who claims that he used her story in this novel.
“Everyone knows his story in Algeria, and especially in Oran. This is a public story,” explained Kamel Daoud on public radio. “The adoptive mother of this young woman is the former Algerian Minister of Health. She told her story everywhere,” he added.
This complainant, Saâda Arbane, appeared on the Algerian channel One TV mid-November to affirm that the heroine of Houris was modeled on her, a survivor in 1999 of an attempted throat slitting perpetrated by jihadists, and that Kamel Daoud knew her personal life because his psychiatrist wife had had her as a patient.
“I went to her for a consultation”et “Everyone knows I don’t want to talk about this story. It's something that bothers me in my life.” she explained in an interview.
Read also : Two complaints filed against Kamel Daoud: we summarize the affair which is shaking the literary world
“Manipulated by the regime”
“The fact that she recognizes herself in a novel that doesn't quote her, that doesn't tell her life, that doesn't tell the details of her life, I'm sorry, I can't do anything about it “, continued the writer. “My novel has nothing to do with that woman. […] There are no medical secrets in this book.”
Asked whether the complainant was “manipulated by the regime”he replied: “Ah but totally.”
“I knew it was coming. I knew I couldn't escape this.” he said on this subject, because after the publication of the novel in August, “from the first week, there were editorials in government newspapers, which spoke of a conspiracy, of a Trojan horse.”
Kamel Daoud is the target of another complaint from associations of victims of terrorism. “It’s the same method”commented the novelist.
Houris cannot be published in Algeria, because it falls under the scope of 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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