The French-Algerian writer Kamel Daoud is accused of having used the story of a patient of his wife, a psychiatrist, to write the novel “houris“, winner of the 2024 Goncourt Prize, the France Presse agency reported this Wednesday.
“As soon as the book was published, two complaints were filed in Oran, Algeria, against Kamel Daoud and his wife, Aicha Dehdouh, the psychiatrist who treated the victim,” Saâda Arbane, lawyer Fatima Benbraham told AFP.
Saâda Arbane, survivor of a massacre during the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, accuses the writer and his wife of having revealed her story without your consent.
“The first complaint was filed on behalf of the National Organization of Victims of Terrorism” and “the second on behalf of the victim,” Fatima Benbraham told AFP.
The lawyer assured the French agency that the The filing of complaints dates back to August.“a few days after the publication of the book”, and months before the Goncourt Prize was awarded to the novel, which took place this month, on the 4th.
“We didn’t want to talk [sobre o caso] so that it would not be said that we wanted to disrupt the author’s nomination for the award,” the lawyer told AFP.
According to Fatima Benbraham, the The complaints refer to “violation of medical confidentiality.”since the psychiatrist [casada com Daoud] handed over to her husband her entire patient file, as well as the defamation of the victims of terrorism and the violation of the law of national reconciliation”, which prohibits any publication about the “dark decade” of the civil war in Algeria, between 1992 and 2002, which caused 200,000 deaths, according to official figures.
Last Friday, Saâda Arbane declared to the French channel One TV that the romance story”houris” and yours.
Arbane, a survivor of an attempted beheading by armed Islamists, said he recognized elements of his life in the book in question: “The Cannula [que lhe permite respirar e falar]the scars, the tattoos”, even his “hairdresser”.
In this interview, Arbane listed other personal elements present in the book, such as her relationship with her mother and her desire to have an abortion, ensuring that she confided them to the psychiatrist Aicha Dehdouh, in 2015, during therapy. Meanwhile, Dehdouh married Kamel Daoud.
According to Arbane, the writer invited her to his house for coffee three years ago and, on that occasion, asked her if it was possible to tell her story in a novel, to which she said she refused.
Kamel Daoud did not respond to these accusations, but his French publisher, Gallimard, on Monday questioned the “violent smear campaigns orchestrated [contra o escritor] by certain media outlets close to a regime [argelino] whose nature no one ignores.”
“Yeah houris “It was inspired by the tragic events that occurred in Algeria during the civil war of the 1990s, its plot, its characters and its heroine are purely fictional,” said Gallimard.
In Algeria, the writer and Le Point columnist is seen as someone who betrayed the Palestinian cause to make a career in France, and the Goncourt prize is understood as a political and not a literary reward, writes AFP.
In “houris“, the 54-year-old French-Algerian writer and journalist puts himself in the shoes of Aube, a young pregnant woman who tells her unborn daughter about the massacre of her family by Islamists who tried to cut her throat, leaving her disfigured and silenced.
A critic of radical Islam, which earned him a fatwa in his country of origin (Algeria), Kamel Daoud had already won the Goncourt prize for best first novel in 2015, with “Meursault, counter-investigation” (published in Portugal by Teodolito), a work he wrote in response to “the foreigner“, by Albert Camus.
Source: Observadora
