The winner of France’s top literary prize has been accused of basing his novel on the life of a patient who was treated by his psychiatrist wife.
Kamel Daoud was awarded the Prix Goncourt last month for Houris. Its central character is a 26-year-old woman whose throat was cut by an Islamist militant during Algeria’s 1992-2002 civil war. The woman survives but loses her voice and communicates using a speech aid.
The book is banned in Algeria under a law restricting the publication of accounts of the conflict. Its French publisher, Gallimard, was barred from the Algiers book fair last month.
Saada Arbane, a survivor of the war, is suing Daoud and his wife in Algeria. She has accused Daoud of fictionalizing her experiences without her consent.
Arbane said that she told her story during therapy sessions with Aicha Dahdouh, a psychiatrist who later married the author. She claims that many details in the life of the novel’s heroine, Fajr, such as her speech aid, scars and tattoos, her pregnancy and wish for an abortion, came directly from what she told Dahdouh.
She said she met Daoud, who moved to Paris in 2020 and took French nationality, at his invitation three years ago but turned down his request to use her story for his book, after which he told her to leave.
“It’s my life. It’s my past. He had no right to throw me out like that,” she told Algerian TV.
Fatima Benbraham, Arbane’s lawyer, said she has filed two lawsuits against the couple. One is for an alleged breach of medical confidentiality. The other claims that Daoud contravened Algeria’s national reconciliation law banning publications about the civil war. Under the legislation, it is a crime to use “the wounds of the national tragedy … to tarnish the image of Algeria”.
“It’s my life. It’s my past. He had no right to throw me out like that.”
Antoine Gallimard of the Gallimard publishing house defended Daoud, 54, who worked as a journalist and columnist in Algeria and now writes for the French weekly news magazine Le Point.
“While Houris was inspired by the tragic events that occurred in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s, its plot, characters and its heroine are purely fictitious,” he said.
“Since the publication of his novel, Kamel Daoud has been the target of violent and defamatory campaigns orchestrated by certain media close to the [Algerian] regime … Now it is the turn of his wife, who played no role whatsoever in the sourcing of Houris, to see her professional integrity attacked.”
The novel, whose title refers to the beautiful women who are believed to await devout Muslims in paradise, is an attempt to break the silence about the massacres and atrocities suffered by Algerian civilians during the war.
Daoud told Le Monde in September that young Algerians knew so little about the conflict that his own teenage daughter had not at first believed that the book was based on real events.
Daoud has not responded to a request for comment.
David Chazan writes about French politics, culture, and lifestyle for The Times of London
