Chroniques: Selected Columns, 2010–2016

285 Pages·2018·3.61 MB·English

by  Kamel Daoud

ALSO BY KAMEL DAOUD
The Meursault Investigation

© Actes Sud, Arles, 2017
© Éditions Barzakh, Algiers, 2017
Originally published in French as
Mes indépendances: Chroniques 2010–2016
by Actes Sud, Arles, and Éditions Barzakh, Algiers, in 2017
Translation copyright © Other Press, 2018
Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas Text designer: Julie Fry
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Names: Daoud, Kamel, author. |
Zerofsky, Elisabeth, translator author of introduction.
Title: Chroniques : selected columns, 2010–2016 / Kamel Daoud ; translated from the French and with an
introduction by Elisabeth Zerofsky.
Description: New York : Other Press, 2018. | Originally published in French : Algiers: Éditions Barzakh,
2017, and Arles : Actes Sud, 2017, under title: Mes indépendances.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018005172 (print) | LCCN 2018016504 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519578 (Ebook) | ISBN
9781590519561 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Algeria — Politics and government — 21st century. | Middle
East — Politics and government — 21st century. | Daoud, Kamel — Political and social views. | BISAC:
POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism. | LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays.
Classification: LCC DT295.6 (ebook) | LCC DT295.6 .D3613 2018 (print) | DDC 965.05/4 — dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018005172
Ebook ISBN 9781590519578
v5.3.2
To my wife, upright in my storms
To Brahim H., because to dream is also to build
CONTENTS
Cover
Also by Kamel Daoud
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
Glossary of Names and Terms
Credits
About the Authors
INTRODUCTION
“What do you say about your little invisible country?” Kamel Daoud wrote
during his first trip to Manhattan, in the fall of 2015. “How do you make your
country be seen by those who don’t know that it exists?” Of course when Daoud
arrived in New York that November, he was, in reality, the most conspicuous of
foreign writers. His first novel, The Meursault Investigation, had been published
in America five months earlier, preceded by a luminous profile in the New York
Times Magazine (and by my own brief but adulating clip for the New Yorker).
By the end of the summer, nearly every U.S. publication of record was lauding
this North African writer who had seemed to emerge from nowhere, for the
singular music of his prose and his ability to upend accepted historical and
literary narratives. Still, the novel’s success in the United States was due at least
in part to the fact that it operated within forms and structures that are easily
recognizable to American readers — it played on the work of Albert Camus, and
delivered Algeria to the reader in the guise of the country’s 130-year relationship
with France. That the second half of Daoud’s novel shifts registers into a
testimony to the writer’s disenchantment with the Algerian nation for the
unfulfilled possibilities of liberation is a clever maneuver, made to go down
easy.
It was while Daoud was in New York that fall that the Islamic State struck
Paris, on November 13, 2015, leaving 130 people dead. Daoud had, by that time,
already become a kind of guru for the French-language press — he was a
Muslim and an Algerian, a member of a postcolonial society but somewhat
distanced from it by the privilege of his position and his intellect. In other words,
a commentator who could both speak for and critique the “so-called Arab
world,” as Daoud likes to say, from the inside and from the outside. After the
November attacks, the demands for Daoud’s insights seemed to come from
everywhere, a spotlight trained on him wherever he went. So it was that less than
two months later, he published a column in Le Monde entitled “Cologne, Scene
of Fantasies.” The article took up the events of New Year’s Eve in Cologne,
Germany, in which some six hundred women were allegedly assaulted near the
city’s train station by several hundred men, the majority of whom appeared to be
of North African or Middle Eastern origin. In his column, Daoud exhorted his
Western audience to put aside their bien-pensance and accept that if they were
going to take in large numbers of refugees from this Arab world, as, he argued,
they should, their new guests would essentially need to be reeducated — lifted
from the backward sexual mores of their home countries and initiated into the
enlightened ways of the West. The backlash against Daoud from the leftist
establishment was quick and merciless; nineteen academics signed a petition
against his “orientalist clichés” and “colonialist paternalism,” igniting a
transnational dustup that eventually drew in the prime minister of France.
When, a few weeks later, Daoud announced that he was taking a break from
journalism (one that didn’t last long in the end), he explained that the decision
was not only so that he could regain some serenity, but also because he felt that
the argument wasn’t really about the words that he had written. What was going
on, he felt, was that he was being used, instrumentalized within a broader
political debate, one that was symptomatic of the kinds of virulent cultural
confrontations that would explode elections across Europe and America over the
next two years. The Affaire Daoud, as it was dubbed, seemed to cement in the
European imagination a certain idea of who Daoud was, to reduce him to a
caricature in a debate that many casual observers don’t necessarily grasp the
nuances of in a meaningful way. When I moved to Paris at the beginning of
2017, I would mention to French writers and journalists that I was translating
Daoud. The reaction would invariably be a display of reverence followed by a
charged silence. “Ah. So what do you think of him?” would come the question.
This collection, a selection of Daoud’s columns mostly from Le Quotidien
d’Oran between 2010 and 2016, will open up his thinking about upending world
events, and about everything, beyond the handful of his pieces that circulated
widely in the American press. I think that Daoud is a humanist. He is an
anticonformist. He is instinctively suspicious of the dominant consensus in the
press or in public discourse, and he takes pleasure in confronting his public with
it — not for the sake of being reactionary, but to deconstruct the conclusion and
the rationale, to better understand where it came from, and to urge readers to be
more rigorous. Daoud is idiosyncratic. He is fearless. He is also, in many ways, a
populist (though not in the sense that the word is now being used to describe
right-wing reactionary and illiberal movements across the world). That is, he is a
tireless defender of “the people,” without being blind to the whims, failures, and
shortcomings of popular will.
That populism is perhaps most discernible in his urgent writing in support of
the Arab Spring revolutions that unfurled around him, beginning in late 2010
and early 2011. Daoud watched from Algeria, a nation paralyzed by its
memories of violence from the “Black Decade” of the 1990s, and suppressed
through monetary incentives from the government, while in neighboring
countries, years’ worth of resentment exploded in the streets. To follow Daoud’s
writing over this period is to follow the emotional trajectory of the Arab
revolutions. At the beginning there is surprise, excitement, a simultaneous
incredulity at what appears to be happening alongside a deep recognition of the
impulses from which the movements arise. The path of the revolutions becomes
bloody and complicated, and Daoud defends them against the cynics and the
critics, both internal and external — those who say that these countries would
have been better off leaving their dictators in place, that the revolutions may
overthrow them but will never succeed in creating anything better. That’s not to
mention Daoud’s impatience with those who blame “the West” for all ills. He is
a tireless advocate for personal responsibility in all matters both private and
collective, but also for the justice owed every inhabitant of this planet. As he
watches the Syrian revolution surge, wither, mutate, he turns to those who hide
behind their laptop screens. “The Syrians are alone,” he wrote in May 2011,
surely not knowing how the magnitude of the sentiment would multiply
exponentially over the next years. “They can be killed en masse, executed in
front of the whitest walls, people can watch them die between two detergent ads,
hear them screaming before turning out the bedside lamp to go to sleep. Almost
no one is concerned.” Six months later, he denounces the conspiracy theorists,
writing that “for the Syrian, the equation is simple — he’s the one getting killed,
dragged out, tortured. There’s no NATO, no IDF, no conspiracy — just the
dictator,” and concluding, “the least they deserve is our respectful silence.” In
December, watching Syrians die on YouTube, he writes with his singular
acumen: “Horror is something unknowable, something that each person carries
alone in his own personal nighttime. On a screen you can listen and you can
watch, but you can’t know.” He admonishes the obscenity of this Facebook
world, where we can watch these people who are “just numbers” for a few
seconds on an iPhone — if this new connectedness is supposed to make us feel
closer to people on the other side of the world, well, what good has it done
them? “How can you convey to each viewer the precise sensation of the screech
of an arrested child,” Daoud writes with some desperation. “A child who’s had