In the epigraph to his new novel, HourisKamel Daoud recalls that it has been forbidden in Algeria since 2005, under penalty of imprisonment, to use “the wounds of the national tragedy” to “tarnish the image of Algeria on the international level”. As for freedom of expression, we’ll have to wait…
Kamel Daoud does not lack courage. I had met the author of the excellent Meursault, counter-investigationa mirrored tribute to The stranger by Albert Camus, which earned him the Prix Goncourt for his first novel in 2015, while he was the target of a fatwa. He knows what he is exposing himself to by breaking the silence around the Algerian civil war of the 1990s, a national tragedy that left some 200,000 dead.
Hourisa finalist for the Prix Goncourt, which will be awarded on November 4, is one of the most celebrated novels of the new school year in France, where Kamel Daoud now lives (he teaches at Sciences Po and writes a column for the magazine The Point). The journalist is never far behind the writer in this novel, which is partly based on the coverage of the war reporter Daoud was at the Oran Daily while the Armed Islamic Group was raging.
The narrator ofHourisAube, is 26 years old. Since she was 5 years old, she has borne the scars of a terrorist attack in her native village. Her throat was cut on December 31, 1999 in Had Chekala. A bloody night when 1000 people were massacred, starting with her family.
Aube, who lives in Oran, will make a pilgrimage to this place she calls “the dead place”, seeking her way and her voice. Her vocal cords have been lacerated, she is almost mute. She only has a thread of voice left to make heard, then that of the interior monologue, intended for this Houri that she has recently carried in her womb.
“I feel like I’m cut into two bodies, into two languages. What cuts me is my smile,” Aube tells him. That smile is the 17-centimeter sacrificial scar under her chin, the morbid motif of this story and a reminder of a war that people around her prefer to forget.
The young woman breathes through a cannula in her throat, which she most often hides under a headscarf. However, she does not wear the Islamic veil in her seaside town where the muezzin’s chanting is becoming more and more insistent. Instead, she wears tight pants, she smokes and she drinks. Her hair salon, the Shéhérazade, is a place of gentle feminine revolt, perceived as a rebellion by the ultraconservative imam of the mosque opposite.
In a language that is both poetic and allegorical, but also harsh, brutal and almost unbearable, Kamel Daoud criticizes radical Islam, which is increasingly influential in his country and in the Arab-Muslim world.
In particular, he condemns the complacency towards the misogyny of the Islamists, which is wreaking havoc in Algerian society.
She herself sacrificed to childhood like a sheep to Eid, Aube questions the appropriateness of giving birth to Houri, whom she presumes to be a girl, in a country where not everyone recognizes women’s full rights. Houriswhich refers to the virgins promised to the faithful in paradise, is Daoud’s scathing response to those who rule his beloved country.
When another survivor, Aïssa, a guardian of the memory of the barbarity of the “black decade,” picks up Aube on the road in his van, the flood of images that emerges from her descriptions of rape, mutilation, and massacres is almost unbearable. It is a difficult and tedious read, but necessary to do justice to the victims. I also recommended it this week to a few readers who criticized “Muslims” for not denouncing gender inequality.
Kamel Daoud returns to this civil war which has been obliterated, banished from history books, unlike the war of independence against France, erected as a myth.
He recalls that amnesty was granted to Islamist terrorists in the 1990s, who were encouraged to declare themselves “cooks” of the maquis rather than admit their war crimes, in order to avoid prison. He underlines the absurdity of a prison sentence provided for those who talk about war, but not for those who provoked it.
Daoud refuses to let this bloody episode fade into Algeria’s repressed memories. He bore witness to the atrocities at the time, and his account of them today is as gripping as it is disturbing. The details are extremely precise, the locations meticulously circumscribed, so much so that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the journalist from the novelist. He writes, aware of the risks he runs in recalling the past, because to forget is to ensure that history repeats itself.
Houris
Gallimard
416 pages