Christiane Chaulet Achour returns in an excellent column for the magazine “histoirecoloniale.net” on the very political reasons for the award of the Goncourt Prize to the Algerian writer Kamel Daoud.
In a recent review of the novel Houris by Kamel Daoud, prior to his obtaining the 2024 Goncourt Prize, Christiane Chaulet Achour, professor of comparative literature and French literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise, predicted that this book “will certainly have prizes but probably not for reasons literary”. For histoirecoloniale.net, she returns here to the reasons for this “announced” price, which according to her testifies “once again to the French difficulty in facing the imperial heritage and the greed to seize a partial representation of Algeria, exonerating France from any responsibility in the transmission of violence.” In another article, she shows that contrary to what one can read in France, this novel is in no way “the first” on the black decade written and published in Algeria. We will also read with interest about Orient 21 “Kamel Daoud’s fascination with the extreme right”, by Fares Lounis, which provides some keys to understanding the enthusiasm of certain media and political actors, particularly in the French extreme right, for this writer and editorialist.
Chronicle of an announced Goncourt Prize
France occupied Algeria for 130 years, an indisputable historical fact… It took a certain time for linguistic domination, diffused sparingly it must be said – we are not going to redo the history of the diffusion of French in the settlement colony – so that it produces lasting effects through the entry into the French literary field of “colonized”, talented writers. No need to linger as they are so well known!
The Goncourt Prize was created at the turn of the 19the and 20e s. and the first prize, awarded in 1903. Since then, more than one hundred and twenty novels have been crowned: this is the first time that an Algerian writer has won an award, under colonization or under nation. We will not return to the seven award-winning southern writers between 1921 and 2021 except to underline the observation: no Algerian. So the question legitimately arises: why this price in 2024, at a time when, as journalist Makhlouf Mehenni writes, in International Mail of 09/30/24, “the dark clouds continue to gather in the already not too serene sky of relations between France and Algeria. On both sides, negative signals are multiplying, which does not bode well for the future of relations between the two countries, which are now dotted lines.”
The president of the prize clarified the reasons for the choice of Houris by Kamel Daoud by the jurors (6 out of 10, after 5th voting round): “The Goncourt Academy crowns a book where lyricism competes with tragedy, and which gives voice to the suffering linked to a dark period in Algeria, that of women in particular. This novel shows how literature, in its high freedom of auscultation of reality, its emotional density traces, alongside the historical story of a people, another path of memory..
The last expression is particularly interesting. What is this “other memory path” that traces Houris for the jurors of the most prestigious French prize? Does it designate the dissidence that is highly appreciable today in France by an Algerian writer? We will not be challenged with the literary masterpiece that stands out in a race where there is so much talent. We know, since the decisive studies carried out, that a renowned literary prize combines the literary, the economic and the political and that the last two weigh with all their weight in the choice. A telling example of the weight of politics is the Nobel Prize awarded to Albert Camus in October 1957, at the time when the Battle of Algiers ended. We will also appreciate that once again it is one of the three publishers of the “Bermuda triangle” (Le Seuil/Grasset/Gallimard) who is honored in the person of one of its novelists. But at Gallimard, the same year, another novel was published on this dark decade, Soon the living by Amina Damerdji. Didn’t he propose “another way” for having been left by the side of the road, never even mentioning it in all the articles that appeared on Houris since September?
In 2014, Kamel Daoud missed the boat, in favor of Lydie Salvayre, for Meursault counter-investigationa novel which remains, from my point of view, his best performance to date. It is worth recalling the words of its Algerian publisher (Barzakh editions), Sofiane Hadjadj, who was the first to publish this novel, in Huffington Post Algeriae: “This is the first time that an Algerian author has been nominated in the same year for the most prestigious prizes in French-speaking literature (…) with a book first published in his country of origin. (…) Kamel Daoud is an Algerian writer living in Algeria and who has been published in Algeria. This French and international recognition is therefore a source of great pride.”
After not winning the prize, the novelist tweeted: “I would have liked to offer joy to my family, to people and to readers, to return home with a beautiful self-image.”
Ten years have passed and… a lot of water under the bridge has flowed both in Franco-Algerian relations and in the novelist’s career. This time, the work towards the coronation has been well done in the Franco-Western media and literary field that Kamel Daoud occupies with talent, provocation, opportunity and opportunism. According to what seems to have become firmly held convictions, all the little white stones have been laid: deliberately provocative positioning on the Israel/Palestine conflict, dialogues with certain personalities, tireless contempt of Islamists, etc…
An atmosphere of dissidence is created around him which distinguishes him among Algerians who are never “critical” enough of their country. We cannot multiply the quotes but the two words that the French media most readily attach to his name are those of lucidity and courage. Under the title: “The intellectual who shakes the world”, The Point devotes a file to him, on February 9, 2017: “The positions taken by the Algerian writer on Islamism and Arab dictatorships have a global impact”… Just that! In Teleramain February 2020, from the pen of Marie Cailletet, about a documentary on Algeria in which Kamel Daoud participated: “his positions on Islamism, the place of women, the archaisms of Algerian society, the turpitudes of the Bouteflika era earned Kamel Daoud, columnist and writer, fatwa, attacks and virulent denigration campaigns (…) A lucid, uncompromising and rebellious word.” It is a comparable echo that we find this time in the “Grand interview” by Rachel Binhas in Marianne in September 2024: “The writer Kamel Daoud lucidly analyzes the Hirak”. These examples show that from 2017 to 2024, “the other memory path” has been well traced.
SO Houris, crowned for dissent? What dissent is this? Of the one which allows us to read a novel entirely devoted to Islamists, their misdeeds and their criminality – which more than one Algerian novel has denounced and which is not contestable -, outside of any previous, national and international, and above all outside of any reminder of the colonial period, thus clearing France of 130 years of Algerian “management” or alluding to it as a lesser episode than the war of the Black Decade? Finally, an Algerian writer, lucid, who attacks his own “Islamists”, encountering an active fight in France, rather than the “historical” enemy!… This prize awarded is, above all, on the political level. It once again testifies to the French difficulty in facing the imperial heritage and the greed to seize a partial representation of Algeria, exonerating France from any responsibility in the transmission of violence.
Christiane Chaulet Achour
November 7, 2024
*For a detailed analysis of the making of the text, see my article in CollateralSeptember 13, 2024, “Kamel Daoud writes his catabase”; and in 24 HDZ of November 6, 2024: “Houris, “first” Algerian novel about the dark decade? »
