A few novels and a handful of films evoke it. But the bloody and unthinkable years of the “black decade” in Algeria are still covered today by a real leaden pall.
This civil war, which pitted Islamists against the forces of law and order after the cancellation, in January 1992, of the first free legislative elections – on the verge of being won by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) – nevertheless struck consciences. Ten years of massacres, rapes, attacks and sometimes blind repression. Historians speak of 200,000 deaths.
Adopted in 1999, the Law on Civil Harmony granted amnesty to Islamists who laid down their arms. And in 2005, the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation locked down memory by prohibiting anyone from using or exploiting “the wounds of the national tragedy.”
In Hourishis third novel, after Meursault, counter investigation And Zabor, or the psalms (Actes Sud, 2014 and 2017), Algerian journalist and writer Kamel Daoud, 54, wanted to break the silence, defying the legal ban in his own way. So that we do not forget the massacres, the Islamist madness and the tragic fate often reserved for women, eternal victims, during this “war of all against all”.
What remains in Algeria today of these years of embers? A great silence? “There is a political and cultural victory of the Islamists,” explains the writer, contacted in Paris. “Today, the Islamists control justice, schools, culture, they control almost all the media in Algeria. There remains a silence among the generation that lived through them and a monstrous amnesia among the youngest. Children of 15 do not know that there was this war. They know nothing about this war, because there is no trace of it.”
A year ago, Kamel Daoud moved to France — a country of which he has held nationality since 2020 — in order to live in safety and have free rein to explore, far from Oran and this Mediterranean that he misses “cruelly,” the memory of his country. And also all the subjects that he would like to address, faithful to his way of conceiving literature.
Pilgrimage
At the age of 5, in the late 1990s, Aube (Fajrin Arabic), the narrator of Houriswas slaughtered and left for dead by Islamists. That night, 1,000 people were massacred in her village of Had Chekala, in northwestern Algeria. The young woman, mute, breathing through a cannula, is disfigured by a scar in the shape of a rictus. A mutilation that is displayed to the world and is reminiscent of Gwynplaine by The man who laughsby Victor Hugo.
Twenty years after the events, pregnant by accident and wanting to have an abortion, Aube addresses the child she is carrying, whom she assumes is a girl and names “Houri”, to tell her in her own way the horrors of the Algerian black decade. And in “this country that does not want us, women”, having an abortion seems to her to be the most beautiful gift to give to her daughter, according to her deprived of a future before even being born.
During the week of Eid, Aube will make a sort of chaotic and hallucinatory pilgrimage to her home village, the scene of the massacre.
Forbidden Memory
Houristhe title, refers to these 72 virgins in the paradise of Islam who will be the reward of the faithful among the faithful. “They are the obsession of the suicide bombers who kill and of the jihadists, explains Kamel Daoud. It is not a fantasized imaginary, but something real in the minds of many radicals. At the same time, it is for me the most tragic equation: hoping for women in paradise while making women live hell on earth.”
The writer thus wanted to show how Islamists fantasize about women who do not exist while hating those who do. A concept, he believes, that reduces Islamist radicalism to what it is: an obsession.
“I believe in the heaven and hell that we create. I believe that we only have the god of our actions, it is an intimate conviction. Everyone can give as much faith as they want to the afterlife, rightly or wrongly, but never by walking on the bodies of women. For me, heaven and hell are here.”
The writer believes that it was the war of decolonization — which pitted Algerian nationalists against France from 1954 to 1962 — that legitimized the practice of violence in Algeria. Until the civil war, which resumed “the same barbarities, the same monstrosities, because, I think, we gave a positive value to violence.” Like a poison that had infiltrated society.
Mute and mutilated, Kamel Daoud’s heroine is also the terrible metaphor for millions of women condemned to silence and to being a figurehead. She is also the symbol of a society assigned to collective amnesia. Unlike countries like South Africa or Rwanda, the writer notes, which have chosen to face the facts in the hope of breaking the cycle of violence.
The unbearable reality
At Oran Dailywhere he was from 1994 in turn journalist, editor-in-chief and columnist, Kamel Daoud has long been a critic of the government, accustomed to playing cat and mouse with censorship. Today a columnist for the weekly The Pointhe recalls those formative years, in the midst of the civil war, during which many journalists were also targeted.
“It was war at 20,” he recalls, almost speechless. An experience of reality that was at once tragic, addictive and a little toxic.
Because reality is unbearable, recalls Kamel Daoud, who admits to having censored many scenes, even though they were real, that could have ended up in his novel. “I told myself that people wouldn’t believe it, that they would say that I was making it up. However, nothing is symbolic in Houriseverything is true. But the absurd always has imagination. You can’t write a novel of absolute realism about war.”
In this sense, Kamel Daoud is convinced that literature allows us to go further than journalism. “We give fiction the status of something secondary, whereas it is what allows us to best illuminate reality. Politics is fiction with weapons. And literature is also fiction, but without weapons. Everything is fiction. And the one who has the most means imposes his fiction, the propagandists know it. Fiction is essential, it allows us to create empathy, to penetrate the soul of the other, to understand and even to live his reasons.”
To illuminate reality, to “define” it, one needs both shadow and light. In the same way that his novel is a bearer of hope, despite all the horror it inventories.
But what is neither expressed nor assumed, believes Kamel Daoud, risks one day returning. “There remains a legitimization of violence, but also denial, with all the violence that it carries. There are still many traces, starting with the devastating feeling of impunity. All of this also has an impact on reality. Or on the meaning of reality. In a country that can sentence someone who steals a mobile phone to thirty years in prison, while a killer who has slit a throat can walk down the street without anyone saying anything to him, there is an attack on reality and ethics.”