[Critique] In the bad wind”: Algeria in a gust of wind

Camped from 1922 to 1992, In the bad windthe fifth novel by Kaouther Adimi, intersects the destinies of three characters caught up in the turmoil of History and the moral subtleties of literature.

The Second World War, the war for the independence of Algeria, the years of civil war: from El Zahra, a village in eastern Algeria, the novelist sketches a quick and effective fresco – sometimes a little torn — by injecting it, after Our riches (Seuil, 2017), a bit of his family history inspired by the story of his grandparents.

Foster brothers and childhood friends, Saïd and Tarek were inseparable. The first, son of an imam, will study in Tunis, while the second was born to be a shepherd. But both are sensitive to the beauty of Leïla who, married against her will at fifteen to a friend of her father, will leave her husband after the birth of her son. When he returned from the war in 1944, Tarek would marry her and have other children. In 1957, we find him docker at the port of Algiers, joining the FLN and the fight for independence.

The wheel of time turns and, a few years later, Tarek participates in the filming of The Battle of Algiers, the famous film by Gillo Pontecorvo. Then, he finds himself working in a factory in France, the time, he thinks, to finance work on the house, believing that a “temporary separation of the couple is preferable to misery for the whole family”.

For his part, Saïd, lost sight of by Tarek and Leïla, who became a writer and radio host, published in 1972 the “first Algerian novel in Arabic”. And it is with amazement that Leïla will discover that she is the main character of the novel. Tarek also finds himself there, under his name, as a “rough but endearing shepherd”. Just like the name of their little village. For them, it’s a tragedy, a betrayal, the equivalent of a rape.

For Leïla, illiterate, the shock is brutal: “So that’s being a writer? Cut, edit, imagine memories? Take the photo albums and rummage through them? Create a story from little bits? Change dates, mix events? Create from scratch? »

Crushed by shame, Tarek and Leïla will decide to leave the village to go and bury themselves in the multitude of the capital, Algiers. They will live there for twenty years, far from anyone who might confuse fiction with reality.

Until political events force them to return to their village. At the end of 1991, the Islamists having won the first round of the first pluralist elections in Algeria, the government halted the electoral process, inaugurating a “dark decade” of civil war: attacks, deaths, disappearances, exiles.

By mixing these emblematic and exceptional lives, Kaouther Adimi, who was born and raised in Algiers in 1986, delivers a burning portrait of Algeria in the 20e century. Misery, colonial emancipation, wars, emigration to the cities and the rise of Islamism pass through it in a breeze. In addition to a questioning of literature, capable of saving, but which “can also be an evil wind”.

In the bad wind

★★★ 1/2

Kaouther Adimi, Seuil, Paris, 2022, 272 pages

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