4 keys to understanding this seminal novel about the dark decade in Algeria
1. The taboo of civil war
When in 1992, in Algeria, the army interrupted the legislative elections which gave the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) the victory, it went into hiding. It was the start of a decade of attacks, assassinations of intellectuals, journalists… and bloody military repression. This civil war left 200,000 dead and hundreds of thousands injured. The amnesty and reconciliation laws of 2005 prohibit mentioning it. The novel Houris is banned there and, coincidence?, its publisher Gallimard is persona non grata at the Algiers Book Fair this year.
The war affected all families, some with members in the army and the FIS, explains Amina Damerdji, Franco-Algerian author of Soon the livingon the same subject: “The generations who lived through it needed to move forward. Today, I believe that society is ripe to hear these stories, and the State cannot prevent speech from being freed. »
2. Put words to the unbearable
The ten years of the civil war were marked by unprecedented violence: villages razed, throats slit, sexual slavery… Young journalist, Kamel Daoud was on the scene of the great massacre of Had Chekala (300 km west of Algiers) , which left 1,000 dead in 1998 and dozens of victims. He saw with his own eyes women rendered mute by throat slitting, like his heroine. In his novel, Aube’s monologue is extremely dark and leaves the reader no respite.
To justify the charge of anger in his writing, Kamel Daoud explains that his fiction is well below reality and that he writes so that we remember what happened.
3. The cause of women
The title Houris refers to the name of the virgin women who await the martyred men in the Muslim paradise. Not only do women pay the high price during wars (rape), but peace is forbidden to the victims, embodying the dishonor of families. “It is for me the most tragic equation: hoping for women in paradise while making them experience hell on earth,” confides Kamel Daoud (Duty, September 14).
The politician Leïla Aslaoui adds by presenting twelve portraits of women in Guilty : “Bédira, Chérifa, Safia… have only one fault, being born girls in Algeria. Sub-citizens, minors for life, guilty by nature, such is their condition. » Nevertheless, the woman of letters Maïssa Bey sees an evolution: after the Hirak demonstrations (2019-2021), women burst into the Algerian public space, and in an irreversible manner.
4. The novel as a work of memory
For Kamel Daoud, “if literature has a necessity, it is to tell History in its reality, its complexity, the very impossibility of transcribing things” (The Point August 8).
Of War and peace, by Leo Tolstoy, Those of 14, by Maurice Genevoix; of If it’s a man, from Primo Levi, to the works of Gaël Faye or Jean Hatzfeld on Rwanda: writers have always written about conflicts, participating in the work of memory.
The Algerian civil war is itself at the heart of several fictions: Under the jasmine at night, by Maïssa Bey, The Algerian Quartet, by Yasmina Khadra, 1994, by Adlène Meddi, or even Soon the living by Amina Damerdji, Defector Prize for best French novel 2024 which tells the life of a free young woman, some of whose relatives are on the side of the Islamists.