BURKINA FASO: The Goncourt 2024: A political prize?

 

Of the four finalists, we knew that the prize was between Houris by Kamel Daoud and Jaracanda by Gaël Faye, two authors who are very well known to the public and whose novels are already bestsellers, with Jaracanda topping the bestseller list, according to Livres Hebdo.

The Goncourt jury preferred Houris, a novel about Algeria's black decade, the civil war of the 1990s that pitted the regular army against Islamists who took up arms after being robbed of their election victory. Thousands died. However, an armistice between the belligerents granted amnesty for all crimes committed during this period, and a law prohibits any reference to this bloody period. Houris therefore falls within the scope of this law in Algeria, where it was banned as soon as it was published. Gallimard, the publisher of the novel, paid the price by not being invited to this year's Algiers Book Fair.

Kamel Daoud is a journalist and writer whose first novel, Meursault contre-enquête, which gives a name and a life to the Arab killed by Meursault in l'Etranger by Camus, won the 2009 Goncourt prize for first novel. The man is a fine writer and a polemicist whose editorials in Le Point have made him a highly divisive public figure, who is criticised by many for taking a stance close to the French far right on issues of racism, immigration, Islam and colonial debt.

Houris undoubtedly deserves to win the Goncourt for its literary quality, but the first outbursts from the president of the jury and the winner in the press unfortunately focused on the political aspect of the novel, which will not help the reception of the book in Algeria and its diaspora in France. Indeed, the author paid tribute to France as a country of freedom of expression, ‘I know we like French bashing, but for me, that country is a welcoming place for writers’, offering a welcome boost to those contemptuous of him as a token intellectual, an Arab alibi, a Harki who serves the master without bothering him by spitting on his culture, on the Arab world, while refusing to criticise French policy in the world, Israel in the war in Gaza and beyond, a bellicose geopolitics that is responsible for the tragedies in the Arab world.

The good news about this year's major literary prizes is that the Goncourt went to a Franco-Algerian writer and the Renaudot went to Jaracanda, a novel by a Franco-Rwandan author. This means that there is a process of decentring French literature from the Hexagone to the French-speaking territories of Africa. Kateb Yacine's war booty, the French language, is thus regaining strength in these lands and making its mark on French literature in France. A fine revenge!

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