“This shows how literature can trace another path of memory next to historical accounts.”
The irony is that few people in Algeria will read this book. This book does not have an Algerian publisher. French publisher Gallimard was excluded from the Algiers Book Fair, and news of Daoud’s success at Goncourt has not yet been reported in the Algerian press, a day later.
Worse, Daoud, who now lives in Paris, could face criminal charges for mentioning the civil war.
The 2005 ‘Reconciliation’ law made ‘instrumentalizing the wounds of a national tragedy’ a crime punishable by prison.
According to Daoud, the effect is to render a civil war that has shocked the entire country a non-starter.
“My 14-year-old daughter didn’t believe me when I told her what happened,” Daoud told Le Monde newspaper. “Because war is not taught in schools,” he said.
“I cut some of the worst scenes I ever wrote. “It’s not because it’s not true, it’s because people don’t believe me.”
Daoud, 54, experienced the massacre firsthand as he was a journalist working for the Quotidien d’Oran newspaper at the time. In interviews, he described the gruesome routine of counting bodies, increasing or decreasing his numbers depending on the message the authorities were trying to convey.
“You develop a routine,” he said. “Come back, write, and get drunk.”
