The Unspoken Voices of the Algerian Civil War

In his third novel, the Algerian author weaves the monologue of a young woman who lost the power of speech after a man tried to slit her throat during the black decade.

Almost ten years ago, Kamel Daoud received the Goncourt for his first novel and was among the finalists for the Prix Goncourt for Meursault, counter-investigation (Actes Sud, 2014), a rewriting of The Stranger by Albert Camus. While the first distinction is clearly no longer relevant, some already place his third novel Houris in good running for the second. This work, which is published this Friday, August 15, is bound to make people talk about it.

The story : Aube lost her parents, her sister, and her voice during the massacre of her village on the eve of the 2000s. The man who tried to slit her throat in the name of God severed her vocal cords. Twenty years later, she lives in Oran, runs a hair salon, has a huge scar on her neck, and remembers everything. She is angry at the silence surrounding the Algerian Civil War. Unable to speak, she tells her story to the child she is expecting. She addresses him by calling him “Houri”. The “Houris”, a word that became the title of the book, are the virgins promised to the faithful Muslims who enter paradise.

We often hear of literature that it “gives a voice to those who have none.” With Houris, Kamel Daoud takes expression head on. The Algerian author tells the story of Aube, Fajr in Arabic, a young mute woman whose story of losing her voice would be unheard of if she could speak. The author says it again and again: Algeria is not keen on stories from survivors of the Civil War that took place from 1992 to 2002. As a response, this third novel by Kamel Daoud is made up of the young woman’s inner monologues: rich, poetic words, a story held back for a long time to come out in one go.

With the character of Dawn who describes herself as “the real trace, the most solid evidence attesting to everything we have experienced in ten years in Algeria” and from a few cleverly interwoven stories, Kamel Daoud intends to lift the taboo, to tell the story of this war that the country rarely talks about. Houris is teeming with descriptions of events, dates and names: so many details which make this great story a true tribute to the victims.

The narrator addresses all her words to the child she is carrying and does not wish to keep. This address, which personifies the embryo, can sometimes provoke a feeling of embarrassment, especially since the term “kill” is often preferred to that of“to abort”. But beyond this observation, it is a clever and touching process. Dawn seems to be able to transmit her story only within her wounded flesh, only to an ear that does not yet know the language of the outside.

Dedicating the story to the embryo also allows us to return to the basics of the war, to lay the foundations because the recipient knows nothing. Houris thus stands as a formidable work of popularization of history. Alongside the words of Civil War, the narrator also describes her life in Oran. Kamel Daoud, who it is important to remember was accused in a column of the World signed by various sociologists, journalists and historians to convey “the most hackneyed orientalist clichés” and to feed “the Islamophobic fantasies of a growing part of the European public”, thus takes a look at contemporary Algerian society. In particular, it addresses, through the figure of Aube, the living conditions of women.

Extract : “I show a big uninterrupted smile and I am mute, or almost. To understand me, people lean towards me very closely as if to share a secret or a night of complicity. You have to get used to my breath which always seems to be the last, to my presence which is embarrassing at first. Cling to my eyes with the rare color, gold and green, like paradise. You will almost believe, in your ignorance, that an invisible man is suffocating me with a scarf, but you must not panic. In the light, I appear as a slender woman, exhausted, barely alive, and my immense frozen smile adds to the discomfort of those who pass me. This smile, unlimited, wide, almost seventeen centimeters, has not moved for more than twenty years.” (Houris, page 15)

“Houris” by Kamel Daoud (Gallimard, 416 pages, 23 euros).