Novelists Lynda Chouiten and Kaouther Adimi hosted a debate in Saïda during the 7th National Festival of Cinema and Women’s Literature which took place from May 23 to 26. They talked about their experience with writing.
Kaouther Adimi, who has five novels to her credit, returned to her latest, Au vent mal, published in 2022 by Barzakh in Algiers and at Le Seuil in Paris. It is the story of Leïla, Tarek and Saïd who live in a village in eastern Algeria, at the beginning of the 1920s. “Said becomes a writer, publishes the first Algerian novel in Arabic, after independence of the country where he addresses the story of Leila and her village.
Leila experiences this as violence. The violence of a literate man against a woman who was unable to study. There, I say that literature can hurt, can, at certain times, become black magic. Writers have a real impact on readers. It is sometimes dramatic to be around writers. In my last two books, Nos riches and Au vent mal, I questioned what a writer can be and what can generate emotion,” she said. Said, according to her, abused the people he met to write a novel. She confided that she had crossed the last Algerian century in this novel, evoking in particular the film The Battle of Algiers by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo. “The filming of this film is a true epic with the coup d’état of Boumediène against Ben Bella on June 19, 1965.
Filming in Algiers brought the war back to life for Algerians. It is a feature film made with a single professional actor, all the others were retained by the director in the street or in cafes,” underlined the novelist. Released in 1966, The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri), which looks back on a painful episode of the War of National Liberation, won the Golden Lion at the Venice festival the same year.
“Writers or artists are expected to be messengers, this excludes the aesthetic and emotional dimension of a work. The first role of an artist is to create beauty. This does not take away from my commitment to my texts. I don’t think you have to create a work of fiction to convey a raw and immediate message. If you don’t enjoy reading a work, there’s no point in continuing to read,” underlined the author of Stones in My Pocket.
The waltz, a metaphor for life
Lynda Chouiten returned to her latest novel, Une valse, published by Casbah in Algiers, and which won the Assia Djebar prize in 2019. “It’s the story of Chahira, a young seamstress, in her forties, who lives in a village, El Moudja. She has to give up her studies even though she was brilliant, abandons her dreams, is not happy, does not get along with those around her who do not understand her. She then sinks into a sort of madness. A madness that makes him confuse reality with imagination. She invents characters, imagines a waltz. It brings sweetness to his hard daily life. Despite this, she qualified for the final of an international fashion design competition in Vienna. She goes there, forgets her illness and the conflict she had with everyone,” she explained. According to her, the waltz is a metaphor for life with its movements, lively or slow, hard and soft… Lynda Chouiten, who teaches English literature at M’hamed Bougara University in Boumerdes, stressed that her second novel, after Le Roman des Pôv’Cheveux, published in 2017, inevitably addresses the theme of “the female condition”. A Waltz evokes the story of a woman prevented from shining, from continuing her studies. We try to force her to fit into the mold when she refuses.
This is a reality that many Algerian women have experienced. The theme of the feminine condition goes hand in hand with that of madness. Chahira, who suffers from psychosis, is an artist, wrote poems in her youth, is a seamstress, creates models, creates beauty… “It’s thanks to this that she can still hold on. Art is saving for her. I try to push the reader to think with me about all the questions that bother me,” she said. Lynda Chouiten called the novel A Waltz violent but written “in a poetic style.” “I tried to add a lot of aesthetics so that the violence of the novel was bearable. In the novel, you will find Algerian Arabic and Kabyle. I tend to say that my mother tongue is a mixture of Kabyle and French. My parents spoke to me in these two languages when I was a child. There is also Egyptian dialect. Chahira loves the singer Ismahane and listens to her song Layli el ouns fi Vienna,” the writer said.
“The title gives rise to a scene, then to a character…”
Written by Ahmed Rami, Layli el ouns fi Vienna (nights of gaiety in Vienna) is a song composed by Farid El Atrach, who was Ismahane’s brother, in 1944, for the film Gharam oua intikam (love and revenge) by Youssef Wahby.
Asked about the development of characters in her novels, Lynda Chouiten confided that she lets things happen. “Sometimes I start with a title. And I’m not starting from anything. I take note and let the text take shape. The title gives birth to a scene, then to a character… I take the time I need. I don’t write in a methodical way but I make sure to maintain a certain coherence. I am an intuitive and cerebral author at the same time. I let the vagueness fade little by little,” she said. Kaouther Adimi admitted to working as a mechanic while writing her novels. “I put my hands in, prepare cards for each character. Afterwards, I draw up an outline of the novel, develop the content of the chapters and plan the number of pages. Then I start writing.
Often, I redo the plan as the writing progresses. The female characters are more difficult because I give them more ambitions. In Au vent mal, the character of Leila speaks for an entire chapter in the first person because everyone else was speaking in her place. She took the right to tell her story, to say I,” she noted. And adds: “What remains of a film or a novel are the images and emotions, sentences and moments.
A successful film is one whose images and scenes will come back. We continue to think about it after seeing it. A bad film is quickly forgotten. Movies and books can have more impact on us than certain people. This is the great power of cinema and literature. There are books that have transformed me more than the encounters I have had. When we go to see a film in a theater, we are all together. Reading a book is, on the other hand, an individual act. In the cinema, the relationship with the intimate is different from the book. When we read a book, we make it our own. I feel like some readers own my books. They have a relationship with my books that is more carnal and powerful than me.”
“When you write a screenplay, you are never alone”
Kaouther Adimi then discussed his experience with Rachid Bouchareb in writing the screenplay for the film Nos frangins, co-written with director Rachid Bouchareb. Released in 2022, this film returns to the death in 1986 of Malik Oussekine, a French student of Algerian origin, killed by police officers in Paris.
“I worked with Rachid Bouchareb without knowing the script. I documented myself before writing, read scripts. With Rachid, I worked on character design. I write, he corrects, offers me other ideas. When you write a screenplay, you are never alone. There is always someone more obsessed than you! I didn’t know this non-loneliness in writing the screenplay. The stylistic research is not the same in the screenplay as in the novel,” she explained. The theme of the film Our Brothers, freshly received upon its release in France in 2022, is, according to her, still relevant: “I am appalled by the current police violence. There are children and adolescents who are beaten or killed by police officers far from the cameras. Today, it is very dangerous to be Arab in France. What we are experiencing in this country is scandalous.
We are completely in the colonial reality.” She described the current situation in France as very difficult with “strong Islamophobia and a powerful extreme right which is not only represented by the National Rally (RN)”. “The far right is present in the speeches of certain current ministers. We even measured the length of young women’s dresses and skirts when they entered high schools. Young women considered to be Muslims of foreign origin. The measure was applied without much debate, without much commitment from the political classes. We found it normal to come and control the bodies of Muslim women,” said Kaouther Adimi.
“You love France but you are leaving it”!
In France, the abaya (long dress) is banned in schools because it is considered “religious clothing”. “I am very worried today about what is happening in France, the place given to the far right and the lack of nuance in the debates. With a colonial vision, we want to control Muslims. Everything is difficult for French people of foreign origin: access to employment and healthcare. Studies have shown it. There is latent racism. It’s quite frightening,” said the Algerian novelist, currently based in France. She recalled that the newspaper Le Monde recently published a report on “Muslims who are leaving France” because of Islamophobia. Olivier Esteves, Alice Picard and Julien Talpin, three French researchers and academics, recently published a survey on the departure of Muslims from France, “France, you love it but you are leaving it”. “Discriminated on the job market and stigmatized for their religion, their names or their origins, these French people of Muslim culture or faith find the social advancement abroad that was denied to them in France,” they noted. .
“In France, colonization remains a difficult subject to bear. Nuclear testing in the Algerian Sahara (in the 1960s) is still classified as a secret subject. The archives remain inaccessible. But, I think that the French are ready to discuss these questions. It’s an important subject for them. For a long time, a silence was imposed on colonization. France’s war in Algeria concerned many French people like the former Conscripts. I met some during the signing sessions who told me that they never talked about their length of service in Algeria,” said Kaouther Adimi.
Saida
From our special correspondent Faisal Metaoui
