The Franco-Algerian author Kamel Daoud, Goncourt 2024 for his novel “Houris” (Gallimard), is accused by Saâda Arbane, a victim of the civil war in Algeria, of having exploited his history and his traumas for the needs of his work. Survivor of a massacre during the Black Decade, the one who was medically followed by Kamel Daoud’s wife in 2015 says she recognized herself in the main character of the book, Aube.
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According to the complainant, she was invited to the Daoud couple’s house to have coffee. At that point, the writer reportedly asked him for permission to tell his story. A proposal that she would have declined. “Later, his wife told me that he was writing a book and I told her that I didn’t want it to be about my story. She told me ”Not at all… I’m here to protect you.” The work “is a violation of my privacy,” she told One TV, an Algerian channel.
This Monday, publisher Antoine Gallimard denounced the “defamatory” attacks against the author. “If “Houris” is inspired by tragic events that occurred in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s, its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional,” he said in a press release.
A novel about the violence of the “black decade”
“Since the publication of his novel, Kamel Daoud has been the subject of violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media close to a regime whose nature no one is ignorant of,” continues the director of the publishing house who was prohibit him from presenting his works at the Algiers International Book Fair, which ended on Saturday. The ban on participating in this show was notified to Editions Gallimard at the beginning of October, when “Houris”, the novel about the violence of the “black decade” (between 1992 and 2002), was already seen as one of the great favorites du Goncourt.
He won the most important prize in French literature on November 4. The book could not be published in Algeria, where it falls under a law prohibiting any work on this bloody period which left at least 200,000 dead, according to official figures. After the ban on the book and our publishing house at the Algiers book fair, it was the turn of his wife (professional psychiatrist, Editor’s note), who in no way provided the basis for the writing of “Houris” , to be affected in his professional integrity,” continues Gallimard.
“Houris”, which in the Muslim faith designates young girls promised to paradise, is a dark novel, taking place partly in Oran, on the fate of Aube, a young woman who has been mute since an Islamist cut her throat on December 31, 1999.
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