The smiles and applause of the Drouant restaurant seem far away. On November 4, Kamel Daoud became the first Algerian writer to win the Goncourt Prize, after a rare victory in the first round of voting. But the reward for his novel Houris has now caused him to be the target of two complaints, notably for “violation of medical confidentiality”.
The author is accused by a 31-year-old young woman, Saâda Arbane, who appeared on Algerian television on Friday, November 15. On the One TV channel, she appears with her neck surrounded by a medical device and, her voice barely audible, the young woman accuses her. The story of Aube, the central character of the novel, is her own, a story that she expressly asked the writer not to tell. Saâda Arbane knows the author and especially his wife, who was his psychiatrist for years. Victim of violent strangulation when she was a child, in the middle of the Algerian civil war, the young woman lost the use of her voice, like the character in the novel, which she assures includes elements of her life that only her psychiatrist could know.
This affair fuels a new controversy around a very divisive personality. Kamel Daoud, 54, was first known to Algerians as a journalist for The Daily of Oran. In the 2000s, he embarked on a literary career, marked by his novel Meursault, counter-investigationa sort of extension of The Stranger by Camus, published 10 years ago. Hailed by critics in France, the author then became the target of a “fatwa” in his country, for his virulent criticism of Islamism and the influence of religious people. Today he is based in France, the history of his country does not leave him and Houris takes as its setting the “black decade”, this period of civil war in Algeria, the evocation of which is prohibited in Algeria under a charter on national reconciliation.
Kamel Daoud and his wife are also targeted, in these two complaints, for “violation of medical confidentiality”, but also for “violation of the law on national reconciliation”. The second point is based on an article of this charter, which prohibits the evocation of “wounds of the national tragedy”expression used to designate this period of civil war between 1992 and 2002. Kamel Daoud has always pointed out this omerta, which is why his book was banned in Algeria. His presence was also not authorized at the Algiers International Book Fair last weekend. In a press release, its publisher, Antoine Gallimard, denounces “violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media close to a regime, the nature of which is well known“, all this against a backdrop of frosty relations between Paris and Algiers.
