Goncourt Prize-winning writer Kamel Daoud speaks throughout a press convention held to mark the discharge of the Korean version of his novel, “Houris,” on the French Embassy in Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of Minumsa Publishing Group
“We predict that just because we’ve witnessed one thing, we are able to categorical it. However no. Nice ache, nice struggling — they impose limits. If you stroll via a website of bloodbath and human flesh sticks to your sneakers, what use are grand, weighty phrases?”
Kamel Daoud was 22 when he grew to become a journalist to cowl the civil battle in his homeland of Algeria. The battle, which raged between the federal government and Islamist rebels from 1991 to 2002, claimed as many as 200,000 lives, most of them civilians. But the best way the state selected to “doc” the atrocity was via absolute erasure.
In 2006, it handed a regulation successfully forbidding any try to talk about or examine the occasions of what has since come to be generally known as the “Black Decade.”
Daoud’s “Houris,” which received French literature prize Prix Goncourt in 2024, summons the very reminiscences of the civil battle that his nation sought to wash from its historical past. By the voice of Aube, without end scarred as the only survivor of a bloodbath that worn out her whole household, the author makes an attempt what the state by no means did: to recollect.
A translation of the e-book has reached Korean readers this month.
“A civil battle just isn’t like a battle in opposition to an invader. It’s a shameful one — a battle in opposition to ourselves. We’re all, ultimately, killers and victims. At a sure level, you do must discover a technique to cease the cycle,” the 55-year-old mentioned at a press convention in Seoul, Wednesday. “However in Algeria, I believe we confused amnesty with forgetting, and these are two very various things.”
In the long run, forgetting can’t seal the previous away. The nation could outlaw acts of remembrance, however the previous will at all times discover its approach again, he added — in literature, in testimony, within the effort to maintain the struggling of earlier generations from being misplaced.
The quilt of Kamel Daoud’s “Houris,” translated into Korean by Yoo Jae-hwa / Courtesy of Minumsa Publishing Group
The worth of talking the reality has been steep.
“Houris” is at the moment banned in Algeria and Daoud himself — who has lived in exile in Paris since 2023 — grew to become the goal of two worldwide arrest warrants issued by Algerian authorities in Might.
He had been warned by fellow author Boualem Sansal, who was freed after spending a yr in jail. The key police had ordered Sansal to ship a message: Even in Paris, they might discover Daoud; he ought to by no means assume he was secure.
The novelist’s go to to Korea marked the primary time he has set foot outdoors Europe and he admitted {that a} small a part of him thought, “Perhaps this time, they’ll get me.”
However he pressured that he’s “not in battle with my homeland,” however quite “in battle with a regime that has stolen my homeland from me.”
“And when a dictatorship falls, nobody remembers the political commissars or the key cops. Everybody remembers the names of the writers.”
For Daoud, writing a novel, quite than a journalistic article or an instructional thesis, begins with a query for which there isn’t any good reply.
“How do you protect which means in your life when the photographs in your thoughts are of kids lower into items? That’s the place literature steps in,” he mentioned. “After I face a contradiction that has no good answer, I write a novel to see how my characters try to beat it.”
In “Houris,” Aube is pregnant with a daughter in a rustic that mistreats ladies. She asks herself whether or not she ought to carry the kid into the world that hates them, or simply finish all of it. She tells her unborn repeatedly: I’ll kill you as a result of I like you; if I hated you, I’d allow you to stay.
The title “Houris” refers back to the celestial maidens mentioned to await pious Muslims in paradise, however within the novel, it names not these imagined within the subsequent world, however the ladies residing right here, now.
“I choose societies by how they deal with their ladies. After I’m in a spot the place ladies aren’t free, the place every part is blamed on them, I see a nation that’s unwell,” he mentioned.
“In lots of Arab international locations, we lock away half of our energy. Girls are first educated — after which veiled, hidden, married off, confined. How can we ever hope to be affluent when half of our human potential is annulled? And the way can we love life whereas despising the very beings who give us life?”
Korea resembles Algeria in sure methods, together with of their shared histories of colonization, civil battle and bloodbath. To readers right here, Daoud emphasizes that his story just isn’t certainly one of despair, however of passage: how we transfer from being merely a survivor to changing into totally alive once more.
“To me, this can be a common story,” he mentioned. “My hope is that readers take from it one thing quite simple: that life continues after ache, after dying.”
There’s one fact Aube comes to understand within the e-book: The lifeless don’t ask us to resemble them.
“The lifeless ask nothing of the kind. They ask us to stay — twice, 3 times, 4 occasions if vital. To stay our personal lives, and likewise the life they themselves couldn’t.”
