Kamel Daoud’s Goncourt-Winning ‘Houris’ Breaks the Silence on Algeria’s Black Decade

 

For countries sharing as complicated a relationship as France and Algeria, some might expect the recent awarding of France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, to an Algerian writer to be cause for celebration. Algerian-born writer Kamel Daoud emerged the winner of this year’s Goncourt with his third novel “Houris” (“Virgin” in English), securing six out of 10 votes from Académie members during the deliberation process. However, the momentous occasion has garnered little reaction in Algeria, which has neither acknowledged nor welcomed the writer in its 27th edition of the Algiers International Book Fair.

 

One of the Arab world’s largest literary events, the Algiers International Book Fair welcomed 1,007 publishers from 40 countries, including 290 Algerian publishers and over 300,000 books on display. Running from November 6 to 16, its theme this year, “Read to Triumph,” focuses on history. Ironically, Daoud’s “Houris,” a novel delving into Algeria’s “Black Decade,” the civil war between 1992 and 2002, fell short of the invitation list. According to the novel’s French publisher Gallimard, exhibition organizers contacted the publisher a month before the event to announce its exclusion from the fair. Algerian media have also turned a blind eye to the novel’s awarding, staying silent on any news of Daoud’s Goncourt success, reports Hugh Schofield in the BBC. Instead of celebrations, Daoud could face criminal charges for violating Algeria’s Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation law, enacted in 2005, which makes it a crime punishable by jail to “instrumentalize the wounds of the national tragedy.”

 

According to Daoud, however, this law has effectively made the civil war, “which traumatized the entire country,…a non-subject,” writes Schofield.

 

Algeria’s civil war has remained a painful memory for many, with an estimated 200,000 lives lost in massacres blamed on Islamists or the military-backed government. The memories of these victims lie at the heart of Daoud’s novel “Houris,” a fictional account written from the perspective of a survivor. The story follows Aube (alternatively Fajr), the survivor of a massacre perpetrated by Islamists in December 1999, who lost her ability to speak at the age of five after having her throat slit. Years later, she is determined to tell her story to the fetus in her womb as she makes the difficult journey back to the site of the massacre, where she will ultimately terminate her pregnancy.

 

Aube is accompanied by a man who insists on driving her to her destination when she attempts to travel on foot. Equally haunted by memories of war, he has an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the Civil War. Meanwhile, Aube speaks to her unborn child through her thoughts, “I spare you childbirth to spare you death at any moment. In this country, they love us as mutes and naked for the pleasure of men at the moment of lust." In the words of Antoine Jouki in Al Majalla, “She also speaks to her child, without a doubt, to delay the hour in which she will put her decision into effect.”

 

“Aube finds herself trapped inside a body that does not obey her, and a part of herself that does not belong to her, as if the wound is reshaping her existence, or perhaps reminding her that she is not the only one bearing the effects of a war that Algeria is still groaning under,” writes Samir Kasimi in Al Majalla, adding, “This novel was not written to be a narration of an individual experience, but rather to form something like a mirror that reflects the turmoil of Algerian identity and its deep dive into the sea of ​​collective silence, that silence that the ‘black decade’ left in the souls of Algerians.”

 

Philippe Claudel, president of the Académie Goncourt, described the novel as “a book in which lyrical poems compete with tragedy and express the suffering associated with a dark period in Algeria’s history, especially what women suffered.” He continues, “This novel shows the extent to which literature, with its great freedom to examine reality and its emotional intensity, can draw, alongside the historical story of a people, another path to memory.”

 

 

 

 

 

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