Kamel Daoud. “The minimum for a writer, if he cannot change the world, is to bear witness”

“I often tell my students that in life we ​​go from birth to death, and in literature – from death to birth. That said, the hero or heroine always begins with the observation of a dead life, a dead relationship, a dead country, while the whole novel continues its path to resurrection, to the end, which is reborn for us.” This is what Kamel Daoud says in his new novel. Houristackles many taboos through the story of Obi, who had his throat cut in half as a child during the Algerian civil war. Doubly silenced, she has lost her vocal cords and since 2005 the law prohibits any mention of the dark decade, she uses an inner monologue to address the little girl she is pregnant with. Because how can we give her life when she herself is a survivor and has to grow up in this country that denies women so many rights? An interview with a writer who makes dizzying parallels to Abraham, this prophet who is going to slaughter his son but who does not speak to God, and Obi who is also going to kill his daughter and speaks not to God, but. the child

Madame Figaro: Why this title? Houris ?
Kamel Daoud: The hours traditionally denote the virgins who reward the blessed in heaven; a fantasy that has fueled literature, preaching, and theology in the so-called Arab world. Today we find many little books that evoke the joys of heaven, and therefore the hours, and I think this says a lot about the concept of life that insists that the joys must happen after death, not before. A reversal that distorts the meaning of existence and the meaning of relationship, the desire for the other, and therefore for the woman as well as for sexuality. The present body then becomes a phantom body. What the word “huri” crystallizes as violence, horror, morbidity, as promise, and as weight in the world is what made me interested in it. And at the same time wanting to pay tribute to the real Huris, the real woman that is Obi.

Dawn desperately tries to talk about the war no one is talking about. Can you tell us a few words about it?

All those who have survived this dictated silence, this legislative silence, so to speak, face the same problem. They have to talk about it while finding themselves unable to talk about it for lack of words, opportunities, and excuses. I wanted to embody this difficulty by talking about it through my characters, including Obi, my mute narrator. In Houris many men and women cannot speak, hold it, or make people believe what they have experienced. The novel needs a pretext in order to take place: here both war and the impossibility of telling. It is also a counterweight to the constant glorification of the liberation war, which constitutes the founding history of the country and is entitled to mentions, calendar dates, episodes on stilts, school textbooks, monuments, etc. I didn’t invent this disparity, I noticed it – deleted war vs. a war we sanctify.

But why do we prioritize pain and death? Why develop hyperamnesia about the war of decolonization and amnesia about the civil war? That should also be said and assumed. I myself am a child of this civil war, and it is paradoxical. we are educated to remember the other war, but not the one we experienced, which can be painful. During meetings in bookstores, I see many Algerians who cry and talk about this silence. It is an imposed silence, but also a mourning silence that was not done. Where can I find the words to tell the story of this war? This is what everyone is looking for in themselves. I was lucky enough to write and tell about my war, even if I didn’t tell everyone the war.

Why is it important for you to use a novel rather than journalism?
Because it allows the transmission of intimacy. Through literature, there is an experience of immediacy, which means that the reader is immersed in this immediacy, which does not pass, in times of violence, in times of war. It’s like a 3D experience versus a 2D experience for historical stories or journalistic stories. And then the novel can mix poetry, prose, epic, comedy, tragedy, it has this hybridity that makes it the best tool to understand complex reality. Journalism is important, but it will never be enough to tell the story of war. I often say that trauma is measured by journalism and it is told by literature.

Do you think telling the unsaid is a necessity as a writer?
I think that the minimum for a writer, if he cannot change the world, is to testify. And giving testimony means passing on the debt to the next generation. Eastern European writers were required to bear witness to what was happening behind the Iron Curtain for the next generation to take up the cause. In all literature, in all novels, there is the mechanism of the little match girl, a profound metaphor for writing and happiness. We strike the matches, it lights up, it lights up, and maybe there will come a time when it will take over, when it will change, when a more lasting light will come. I don’t like the word “commitment” because I think that in the second half of the last century we have invested too much in it to the point that it has become an attitude. I prefer to define it in reverse. Can we disconnect? Never. Because we are alive. Only the dead are disabled.

Houris is also a novel about language…
She is important to me as a writer, to Obi as a woman who cannot speak, to the life in her womb as a trace of beauty and a transmission of beauty. I wanted the language itself to be a character.

Language can also become a character when it is forbidden.

Kamel Daoud

And how do we make language a character?
Take a poem you like, read it, re-read it. You will see that the rhymes are beautiful, but the poem is also a character that accompanies you, talks to you, listens to you and you listen. He is the same as someone you invite into your home. Language can also become a character when it is forbidden. If you write a novel about Afghan women who can no longer speak out (since August 2024, the Taliban regime has passed a law that forbids them from making their voices heard in public, Editor’s note), language is already a tragic figure.