The publisher Gallimard denounced attacks on Monday, November 18: defamatory » against the Franco-Algerian author Kamel Daoud, 2024 Goncourt Prize for his novel Houris. The Franco-Algerian author is accused, by a victim of the civil war in Algeria, of having exploited his history and his traumas to write his novel.
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If Houris is inspired by tragic events that occurred in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s, “ its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional », Affirms Gallimard in a press release. He also returns to the fact that “ Houris » is banned in Algeria.
It is a woman, Saâda Arbane, who survived a massacre during the “ dark decade » (1992-2002) of the civil war, which brings the accusations against the author. Saâda Arbane recognizes her own story in that of the character of Aube, heroine of the novel by Kamel Daoud.
During an interview with a private Algerian television channel, the young woman affirmed that there are, in the novel, striking similarities with her own life: the nature of her scar, the tattoo she wears, the cannula , her pension, the abortion, the hairdressing salon, the Lotfi high school, her complicated relationship with her adoptive mother or even her love of horses.
This riding champion says she was shocked by what she read in Houris : “ I don’t like talking about my story, it’s something that bothers me in life “, she declares.
Saâda Arbane maintains, with supporting documents, that she was followed in psychiatry by Kamel Daoud’s wife, in Oran, between 2015 and 2021. She accuses him of having violated the confidentiality of her medical file and ” the privacy of his private life “. According to Saäda Arbane, Kamel Daoud had made several requests, but published the novel without her consent or that of her parents.
For his part, Gallimard, without returning to the substance of these accusations, denounces “ violent defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media of a regime whose nature is well known », in a press release alluding to the Algerian power. The director of the publishing house was banned from presenting his works at the Algiers international book fair, which ended on Saturday, November 17. The ban on participating in this show was notified to Editions Gallimard at the beginning of October, when Houriswas already seen as one of the big favorites at Goncourt.
Also readAlgeria: the Algiers Book Fair deprives itself of all Kamel Daoud’s books