Algerian literature remained divided between the Arabic and French languages, by virtue of historical circumstance, as the French occupation of Algeria continued from the year 1830 to 1962, despite the time gap of nearly half a century, between the first novel in French, “Al-Khayyal” by Ahmed Ben Sherif (1921), and the first novel in Arabic. “The South Wind” by Abdelhamid Ben Hadduka (1970).
Algerians who wrote in French continued to look forward to the French scene, in the hope that they might win an award that would increase their financial and literary fortunes. While those who write in Arabic look forward to the Arab scene in the Levant, in light of the scarcity of literary awards, especially in Algeria.
Albert Camus coat
custom Kamal Daoud In Algeria, through his sharp articles in “Oran Daily”, which were later collected in a book entitled “We Have Seen Your Opinion” by “Dar Al-Gharb”. But his actual beginning was through the novel “Meursault: Counter-Investigation” (Dar Al-Barzakh 2013) and (French Publishing House Act Sud) 2014, in which the writer identified himself with the novel “The Stranger” by the Frenchman Albert Camus, born in Algeria in 1913, and who received a B.A. Nobel Prize in 1957.
Western praise and Algerian ban
Only a few months passed until the novel was placed by its author, who wrote it in his forties, in the spotlight and controversy, as it was described by prominent international outlets, such as the Financial Times magazine, the New York Times Book Review, and the New Yorker newspaper. “New, amazing, and innovative,” and “the best Middle Eastern novel of the modern era.”
On the other hand, the authorities banned its distribution in Algerian libraries, and its participation in the International Book Fair, which began in Algeria on Wednesday, “because it did not differentiate between the ruling authority and armed groups in the 1990s, but rather extended it to a wide sector of the educated elite.”
The leader of the “Islamic Awakening” in Algeria, Abdel Fattah Hamadouche, issued a fatwa in which he called on the government to execute the writer, describing him as “an apostate, a deviant, and a denier of the religion of God and His Prophet,” through paragraphs he cut from the novel, which are essentially phrases that came from the tongues of some of its characters. It prompted the writer, Kamal Dawoud, to file a complaint with the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Endowments, which was accompanied by signatures of support from a wide sector of intellectuals and activists in Algeria.
Sober rhythm
The widespread fame did not make Kamal Dawoud rush and take advantage of his stardom in publishing novels that were close in time. He waited three years to publish his second novel, “Psalms,” in which he continued to work on the theme of alienation, within a society that he saw as contradictory and biased toward the past, and to suspend its problems and imbalances. On denouncing Western colonialism.
The two novels represented the desire of a young Arab Muslim man, who is, in a way, Kamal Daoud himself, as he was an Islamist, before he became intellectually and emotionally involved in the French language and culture, for emancipation in its broad sense, and the beginning would not be from his point of view, except by jumping on the inherited language, considering the language is a home. Being in the language of the German philosopher Heidegger, and replacing it with a language in which modernist, humanistic, and civilizational discourses accumulated, and that language was none other than French.
The crowning novel
Kamal Daoud embodied the desire to break free from what he calls the “deadly imagination” in his third novel, “Nymphs,” published by Gallimard. And the crowned one Goncourt Prize 2024, through the girl “Fajr,” who emerged from a massacre committed by terrorists in Algeria in 1999, with a disability that caused her to lose her voice, in reference to the suppression of a woman’s voice, thinking, being, and desires. So she began narrating to her child in her womb, “Horiya,” the justifications for her abortion, so that she would not join a society that would never He sees her outside of his physical desires.
Single trial
The text focused on an internal monologue between the heroine and her fetus, which made it a unilateral trial of Algerian society, in which the rest of the voices were not allowed to appear and present their vision, despite the fact that the average Arab reader, and before him the Western reader subject to ready-made provisions regarding the Islamic space and imagination, did not feel the necessity of this. Under the weight of the magic of storytelling that produces spontaneous sympathy for the victim.
Although Daoud employed the tools of a journalist in it, through his first novel, given that it was based on investigating a crime, and he employed his autobiography in his second novel, in the novel “Huriyat” he used his political positions for which he was known, through his articles, publications, and dialogues, in which he launched more From an attack on Arabs, Arabism, Islam and Muslims, with a generalizing tone that necessarily expected its author to be arbitrariness.
Algerian interaction
The writer and academic Saeed Boutagine says: “Before obtaining some Arab and European awards, you must abandon many of your intellectual, religious, ideological, humanitarian and artistic convictions, submitting to the lobbyists, and you must also turn away from your history and your nation in the following way: to mock the language and symbols of your people, to distort Scholars, heritage, and religion, and to consider those who have the right to be terrorists.”
In a counter context, the novelist Samir Kasimi, who had some of his novels translated into French and published in France, says, “The Algerian’s dissatisfaction with the success of other Algerians is a behavior inherent in the Algerian intellectual, and the matter appears on occasions when one of them shines, but it appears in its ugliest form when a writer whom the establishment detests succeeds.” “The official culture, and it worked hard to ignore it, to overcome and achieve what the facade writers who we find occupying all platforms were unable to achieve.”
A century and a quarter of radiation
It is known that the Goncourt Prize is at the forefront of French prizes that attract the attention of French writers, including Algerian writers.
“Goncourt” was founded in 1903, in honor of two brothers-writers who participated in realistic writings during the nineteenth century, namely Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. It is awarded annually, according to the former’s will, to the best and most imaginative book of the year.
The academy supervising the award, which includes ten members, waited 84 years for it to open up to French writers coming from the Arab and Islamic space, and awarded it for the first time to the Moroccan Taher Benjelloun, then the Lebanese Amin Maalouf in 1993, then the Afghan Atiq Rahimi (2008), and then the Moroccan. Laila Slimani (2016), then Senegalese Mohamed Mbogar Sarr (2021), then Algerian Kamal Daoud in 2024.