Kamel Daoud arrives in Berlin for his interview in a black limousine, accompanied by two men dressed in black who never leave his side. The Algerian writer, who now lives in France, is under police protection: his latest book not only won him France’s most prestigious literary prize, the Prix Goncourt, but also put him in great danger.<\/p>\n
\u201cHouris\u201d, now published in German, is a novel that tells of the massacres and torture during the Algerian Civil War. Not only is it taboo to discuss the war in Algeria, but a law was passed in 2005 banning it – ostensibly to promote "national reconciliation." <\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you write a novel like this, you make enemies of the Islamists, the regime and even the intellectuals of the far-left decolonial movement,\u201d Daoud said. "You don’t please anyone. A 17-year-old idiot with something to prove can be as big a threat as the regime.\u201d \u201cHouris\u201d was banned in Algeria \u2013 in fact, all of Daoud\u2019s books were pulled from stores. Algerian authorities have issued two international arrest warrants against him, but the world police organization Interpol has not accepted them.<\/p>\n
Additionally, a woman has filed a civil lawsuit against the author, accusing him of basing the main character on her own story without permission. Daoud considers this a slander and claims that the legal action was orchestrated by the regime.<\/p>\n
While the war of liberation against French colonial rule (1954-62) continues to shape Algerian identity today, the government in Algiers is doing everything it can to make the civil war of the 1990s forgotten. At that time, the national army and Islamist terrorist groups fought bloody battles. Since then, much has remained obscure, including the death toll, which is usually estimated at around 200,000. The suffering of individual victims is hardly mentioned.<\/p>\n
Daoud wrote about the war as a reporter. "But there are things you can’t write about that stay in your head. When you write a report about a massacre with 400 victims, 400 is just a number. But how do you convey the feeling of stepping over corpses?" he said. The novel \u201cHouris\u201d presents a different perspective. The narrator is a young woman who survived a massacre as a little girl. Her throat was cut but she was saved.<\/p>\n
Daoud insisted that the main character of his novel should be a woman because they were the ones who paid the highest price in war. \u201cMen are forgiven \u2013 or not,\u201d he told. \u201cBut what about women who were kidnapped by Islamists aged 13 or 14 who were raped and became pregnant? After the war, the men came back, but the women came back with their children. And no one forgives them for that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The main character Aube only becomes pregnant after the war. But people still can’t forgive her. Algerian society wants to erase all memories of the so-called \u201cBlack Decade\u201d and sees the visible scar on Aube’s neck as a provocation. The title of the novel, \u201cHouris,\u201d alludes to the virgins who are supposed to wait in paradise for righteous male Muslims. Aube calls her unborn child \u201cMy Houri,\u201d but wonders whether the child will be allowed to live at all: the past is too painful, the present too hostile \u2013 especially for women.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs everyone knows, I am a feminist,\u201d said Daoud, explaining why his novel paints a picture of an oppressive Islamist patriarchy. The fragile but defiant young woman can only breathe through a tube in her throat. In an inner monologue, Aube speaks to her unborn child about the atrocity itself and the events that followed. She now runs a beauty salon directly opposite a mosque. It’s a little piece of freedom where her clients can enjoy beauty treatments while the neighboring imam delivers misogynistic sermons to their husbands.<\/p>\n
Shortly after the release of \u201cHouris\u201d in France in 2024, Daoud was accused of being Islamophobic and playing into the hands of right-wing extremists. He vehemently rejects these accusations: \u201cIslamophobia is a Western disease, not mine,\u201d he said. "I lived through a civil war in which I saw Islamists killing. I have the right to speak out and you have no right to silence me."<\/p>\n
Daoud’s attitude is comparable to that of his compatriot, author and friend Boualem Sansal, who also wrote about the period of the Algerian civil war, was exposed to censorship and received important literary prizes. Sansal’s work has also criticized Islamist violence and the Algerian regime for many years. Like Daoud, he recently became a French citizen. But he was arrested upon entering Algeria at the end of 2024 and has since been sentenced to five years in prison.<\/p>\n
This is worrying for Daoud – not only because Sansal is a friend, but also because of the threat to his own safety. \u201cIf the regime managed to issue two international arrest warrants against me, then they really want me to sit by Boualem Sansal\u2019s side,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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