When remembering becomes criminal: Goncourt winner Kamel Daoud confronts Algeria's silenced past

Goncourt Prize-winning author Kamel Daoud speaks during a press conference held to mark the release of the Korean edition of his novel, "Houris," at the French Embassy in Seoul, Wednesday. Courtesy of Minumsa Publishing Group

“We think that simply because we’ve witnessed something, we can express it. But no. Great pain, great suffering — they impose limits. When you walk through a site of massacre and human flesh sticks to your shoes, what use are grand, weighty words?”

Kamel Daoud was 22 when he became a journalist to cover the civil war in his homeland of Algeria. The conflict, which raged between the government and Islamist rebels from 1991 to 2002, claimed as many as 200,000 lives, most of them civilians. Yet the way the state chose to “document” the atrocity was through absolute erasure.

In 2006, it passed a law effectively forbidding any attempt to speak about or investigate the events of what has since come to be known as the “Black Decade.”

Daoud’s “Houris,” which won French literature prize Prix Goncourt in 2024, summons the very memories of the civil war that his country sought to scrub from its history. Through the voice of Aube, forever scarred as the sole survivor of a massacre that wiped out her entire family, the writer attempts what the state never did: to remember.

A translation of the book has reached Korean readers this month.

“A civil war is not like a war against an invader. It is a shameful one — a war against ourselves. We are all, in some way, killers and victims. At a certain point, you do need to find a way to stop the cycle,” the 55-year-old said at a press conference in Seoul, Wednesday. “But in Algeria, I think we confused amnesty with forgetting, and these are two very different things.”

In the end, forgetting cannot seal the past away. The country may outlaw acts of remembrance, but the past will always find its way back, he added — in literature, in testimony, in the effort to keep the suffering of previous generations from being lost.

The cover of Kamel Daoud's "Houris," translated into Korean by Yoo Jae-hwa / Courtesy of Minumsa Publishing Group

The price of speaking the truth has been steep.

“Houris” is currently banned in Algeria and Daoud himself — who has lived in exile in Paris since 2023 — became the target of two international arrest warrants issued by Algerian authorities in May.

He had been warned by fellow writer Boualem Sansal, who was freed after spending a year in prison. The secret police had ordered Sansal to deliver a message: Even in Paris, they could find Daoud; he should never assume he was safe.

The novelist’s visit to Korea marked the first time he has set foot outside Europe and he admitted that a small part of him thought, “Maybe this time, they’ll get me.”

But he stressed that he is “not in conflict with my homeland,” but rather “in conflict with a regime that has stolen my homeland from me.”

“And when a dictatorship falls, no one remembers the political commissars or the secret police officers. Everyone remembers the names of the writers.”

For Daoud, writing a novel, rather than a journalistic article or an academic thesis, begins with a question for which there is no good answer.

“How do you preserve meaning in your life when the images in your mind are of children cut into pieces? That is where literature steps in,” he said. “When I face a contradiction that has no good solution, I write a novel to see how my characters attempt to overcome it.”

In “Houris,” Aube is pregnant with a daughter in a country that mistreats women. She asks herself whether she should bring the child into the world that hates them, or just end it all. She tells her unborn again and again: I will kill you because I love you; if I hated you, I would let you live.

The title “Houris” refers to the celestial maidens said to await pious Muslims in paradise, but in the novel, it names not those imagined in the next world, but the women living here, now.

“I judge societies by how they treat their women. When I’m in a place where women are not free, where everything is blamed on them, I see a nation that is unwell,” he said.

“In many Arab countries, we lock away half of our strength. Women are first educated — and then veiled, hidden, married off, confined. How can we ever hope to be prosperous when half of our human potential is annulled? And how can we love life while despising the very beings who give us life?”

Korea resembles Algeria in certain ways, including in their shared histories of colonization, civil war and massacre. To readers here, Daoud emphasizes that his story is not one of despair, but of passage: how we move from being merely a survivor to becoming fully alive again.

“To me, this is a universal story,” he said. “My hope is that readers take from it something very simple: that life continues after pain, after death.”

There is one truth Aube comes to grasp in the book: The dead do not ask us to resemble them.

“The dead ask nothing of the sort. They ask us to live — twice, three times, four times if necessary. To live our own lives, and also the life they themselves could not.”