About halfway through our meeting on a grey day in Oxford, Kamel Daoud apologises. He looks smart, but a burst of flights, signings, press engagements, and back-and-forth with translators, since Houris won the Goncourt Prize, has left the Franco-Algerian novelist rather tired. Receiving France’s top literary award last year—his best-selling debut novel, Meursault, contre-enquête (The Meursault Investigation), came close in 2015—has, Daoud insists, brought “beautiful things”. Yet joining a pantheon that includes Marcel Proust and Simone de Beauvoir has also meant dealing with “a very heavy agenda… and when you are Franco-Algerian, it’s even more complicated. You’re not just a writer, you’re a political object.”
Houris, which was published last August and is due to appear in Spanish, Italian and German this year, is nothing if not political. The novel recounts Algeria’s “Black Decade” of civil war between 1992 and 2002, which killed up to 200,000 people. Aube, the protagonist, is narrating the story to her unborn child—silently, as an Islamist fighter has cut her vocal cords. This act of violence—like the countless atrocities committed during the war—underlines both how extremist groups make a point of targeting women, and the enduring capacity of human beings to find the words to tell their stories, however painful.
The Goncourt judges praised “a book of lyricism and tragedy that gives voice to the suffering associated with a dark period for Algeria’s history”, but their decision “enraged” the “dictatorship” that governs Daoud’s birth country, he says. In Algeria, where Daoud was issued with a fatwa in 2014, Houris is proscribed and its French publisher, Gallimard, banned. Daoud is also facing legal action from a woman who says he used her life story as the basis for his latest novel, claims he has denied.
“The civil war has been totally erased,” Daoud says, contrasting it with the “cult of glory” that surrounds Algeria’s war of independence in the 1970s. “In Algeria, there is a law that forbids you from speaking about it. I knew I was taking an enormous risk with the book. I did so because I believe it’s my right.”
“The regime interpreted the Goncourt as a political message,” he observes. “For them, the prize going to a Franco-Algerian author writing about the civil war is France saying: ‘It’s not all about the war of decolonisation, there’s another war you are hiding.’” Despite the official measures, Daoud notes, clandestine copies of the novel have circulated widely, and many Algerians have thanked him for pulling back the veil on a brutal period of history they lived through. “The ban has only encouraged readers,” he adds.
After studying French literature at university, Daoud took up journalism, and on the day we meet he is racing to file a column for Le Point magazine. His latest piece calls attention to his “dear friend”, the novelist Boualem Sansal, who in March was jailed for five years by Algerian authorities for “undermining national unity” after being detained there since November last year. French president Emmanuel Macron has since reiterated calls for Sansal to be freed, adding to demands from other writers, including Nobel laureate Annie Ernaux and Salman Rushdie.
For Daoud, who believes he would be “disappeared” if he set foot in Algeria again, journalism and fiction are “complementary” but have different origins and endpoints. “In an article or an essay you might have an objective, but for the novelist there is an emotion,” he observes. “Fiction, contrary to what a lot of people say, does not tell of that which does not exist. It tells of what has really happened within us, or in the world. Journalism transmits information. Literature transmits meaning.”
