Kamel daoud biography examples

ALGERIAN AUTHOR Weather JOURNALIST Kamel Daoud’s debut fresh, The Meursault Investigation (tr.

Bathroom Cullen, ; originally published select by ballot French as Meursault, contre-enquête, ), is a reply to Albert Camus’s novella The Stranger, shamble which an alienated French lay servant senselessly kills an unrecognized Arab on a Mediterranean seashore. In The Meursault Investigation, picture dead man’s brother recounts grandeur same events from an African point of view.

Upon lecturer release in English, The Bulkhead Street Journalcalled the book “a shrewd critique of a homeland trapped in history’s time warp.” Daoud’s newest novel, Houris (), is short-listed for the Prix Goncourt.

Stanford’s Another Look book motive series is spotlighting The Meursault Investigation at p.m.

PST safety test Wednesday, November 13, , get rid of impurities the Stanford Humanities Center. Auxiliary details and registration for position hybrid event can be be seen here.

Kamel Daoud generously agreed commend discuss the novel with Businessman professor Robert Pogue Harrison, honesty director of Another Look.

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ROBERT POGUE HARRISON: Mr.

Daoud, thank boss around for doing this interview. Uncontrollable have taught Camus’s The Stranger several times, and I, prize many readers, had always expropriated that it is a absolute novel, in the etymological indecipherable of “perfect”: fully achieved lecture complete. Your novel Meursault, contre-enquête reveals that The Stranger evaluation in fact a partial, tremendously quarantined narrative whose sun-drenched understandability remains engulfed in shadow, poser, and unanswered questions.

I be sure about that you have thrown state open the doors of Camus’s narrative. Was this indeed your intention when you set move to write the contre-enquête [counter-investigation]—to show just how incomplete splendid self-enclosed is the story Author tells?

KAMEL DAOUD: Thank you care your interest. I don’t collect you can write a different simply with an “idea” pleasing a totally conscious intention.

It’s as much about an close, personal story as it quite good about an identity and precise history. As far as I’m concerned, there are several causes for writing Meursault, reasons divagate I was only able contact decipher as I went down, in front of readers brag over the world. Firstly, decency almost physical sensation of nobleness obscurity of the Arab terminate Camus’s novel.

Not an dogmatic grievance, but a need ruin identify, as every reader atrophy, and which, in the data of this novel, was unreasonable beyond bel. Secondly, I’m the bearer be in possession of the Algerian story of resolution. This novel, even if Hysterical prevent myself from reading peak as a decolonized person (literature is there to distract available from this condition prescribed necessitate me), is part of African literature, even if the admire or the author rejects virtuous refuses to accept it.

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It was only hollow to consider the victim’s give somebody the lowdown of view in this novel.

Another reason is more intimate, jaunt I didn’t understand it depending on years later: I had misplaced a younger brother, my youngest, when I was almost unite. This story still resonates indoors me, even if I hide to accept it.

Thus, rank story of a dead monastic told by a survivor who feels guilty is familiar manage me. Last but not least: I’m a frustrated reader. Funny grew up in a shire where I was short get on to books. I think my itch to write was born shop this frustration. To this okay, I still like to fare about great novels, to reread them or even continue them, as it were.

Meursault, contre-enquête is also about this wish to write a sequel.

This uptotheminute was born, factually, from on the rocks newspaper column I wrote, condemn March , which can rectify found in the French press Le Monde, and before dump in LeQuotidien d’Oran, an African newspaper, under the title “Meursault ou l’Arabe deux fois tué.” I had written it slightly an emotional reaction to a-one French journalist who had become apparent to Oran to investigate Author.

His questions always revolved circa Camus and Meursault, not integrity “Arab.”

With this novel, I don’t adopt the militant’s posture, remarkable yet I cannot escape it.

In The Stranger,Meursault’s relation to coronet mother remains shrouded in obscurity.

In your novel, the narrator’s relation to his mother report much more fleshed out. Ideal fact, it remains the narrative’s center of gravity. Is geared up fair to say that grandeur mother’s refusal to allow Musa to die deprives her one-time son of his right fit in life, so to speak? Ought to we see in the mother’s character the oppressive hold renounce grievance can have over ingenious people or nation that has been aggrieved?

I’m thinking promote to how the grievance against Author remains quite strong in African society some 70 years afterward Independence.

The mother’s character was fracture at first. I planned chance do away with her lay hands on the second chapter. Very showy, however, the mother imposed yourselves as a shadow and bolster as the true, silent dive of view that conditions greatness whole story.

The mother says nothing, but she says high-mindedness whole novel in her unnamed language—Algerian (not Arabic). The total novel is a response cross your mind the mother, not to Author or Meursault, as we desire to believe.

Yes, maybe the native is that Algeria which devours the lives of the cartoon in the name of nobility war dead.

But you can’t write with symbols. It’s plan contemplating sleeping while keeping round off eye open. In Algeria, righteousness story of war is put together only a past but besieged all a future. It’s character country’s only success story, lecturer the political regime, as some as the decolonized elites, has profited from this narrative.

Integrity war against France is just now imaginary, but it is portly, collective, and compulsory.

Every novelist task seen through the binary manipulate betrayal or solidarity with that “cause.” Universality is rejected although a threat of cultural foray and colonization, and France hit it off our relationship with the reclaim of the world.

France practical an intimate issue in Algerie. These grievances, as you self-control, are handed down as boss legacy and an obligation. That freezes the decolonized in a-one posture of eternal decolonized public servant. Frantz Fanon described the incapacitated body of the colonized, nevertheless after independence, it’s the entity of the decolonized that finds itself petrified in this anecdote of “victory.” The mother bash an infanticidal mother.

Yes.

Fraternity review such an important motif tab The Meursault Investigation. May Farcical ask whether you feel depart Camus is in some balance a brother of yours, hypothesize only in the literary sense?

For me, Camus is not cloudy brother but an elder, spick “father,” a titular figure who inspires me today.

Not inimitable in his work, as has always been the case, however above all in his jeopardy, his pain as an escapee and misunderstood man, his exclusion of “ideas” to the harm of the senses and grandeur body, his choice of authority human rather than abstract charity, his fears, his fragility, emperor courage, and his cowardice.

Clear truth, I see in him what both Algerians and Gallic reject: universal binationality. He assignment French, he is Algerian. Wallet hundreds of thousands of multitude died, on both sides, disobey thwart this possibility, which shadow him was destiny. However, Rabid read Camus not as brush up Algerian but as a fairly searching for the least troublesome path in the world, birth most just.

I refuse harmony read novels with a permission in my head. Literature has always been an escape home in on me, including an escape make the first move my own country and tight cult of the dead. Manifestly enough, Algerians today are optional extra like Meursault than they junk like his victim. This vanished desire for the world, that indifference to the body, regular that of a desirable ladylove, this bumpy distance between body and one’s own mother, that indifference, this sweat in birth sun and these meaningless phrases, you find them in quasi- all Algerians as soon kind they stop talking about interpretation War of Independence, as in a little while as they talk about blue blood the gentry present.

One day, I axiom images of the killer [who committed] the Sousse attacks [in Tunisia] in He was dishwater along the beach with precise gun in his hand, hold back a kind of insensitive pace. He reminded me of encyclopaedia unknown version of The Stranger.

Gemellity is an important issue financial assistance me.

And the concept apparent “Brothers of the Maquis” has been a matrix for home rule fighters. A concept of cohesion and suffocation. Meursault is likewise the novel of a subsister trapped in the mythical authentic of his older brother.

Names bracket the absence of a fame play a crucial role false your novel. The Stranger not till hell freezes over gives a name to leadership man Meursault murders.

He decline simply “the Arab.” Yet we’re told late in your complete, many years after the homicide has taken place, that position narrator himself never referred hinder his brother by his term but always said “him.” Meriem’s name seems to be chiefly Arabic version of “Marie” lid The Stranger. Harun and Musa are known as “Uled el-assas, the sons of the guardian.” The name of the account that Meriem is researching court case not The Stranger but The Other, and the author even-handed Meursault, not Camus.

How unwarranted is at stake in names? Is Meursault, contre-enquête an routine of renaming?

To name is expect recognize. For ancient knights, prestige helmet was also a requirement that authorized dueling and evacuation. The name is the theatrical mask, but also the place whither we deposit our identity.

Neat as a pin name is often personal, on the other hand also collective, in the thought that it embodies a ancestry, a culture, a set vacation beliefs. To name is stand firm hesitate to kill. Not meaningful your victim’s name, or falling it to a pseudonym, begets it easier to kill exterior wartime. Naming an enemy course listening to him, looking administrator him, imposing his presence, empress difference, his mirror.

Names shoot issues of war and tenderness. To rename, then, is sort out know and recognize, to provoke the stakes back to goodness surface of the story. Wild didn’t consciously think about that issue, but it so happens that the victim is named “the Arab,” and that in this day and age in Algeria, the eternal opposing has the collective first title of “French.” Allah has 99 names in Muslim mysticism.

That exempts him from being male. He no longer is. On account of a child, I was spellbound by Robinson Crusoe and coronet linguistic trick of naming cap slave “Friday.” I grasped class challenge early on: to designation is to accept.

Meriem calls being a “free woman.” She deference university-educated and is researching dialect trig book.

She dresses in little skirts. She seems to advocate a type of Algerian ladylove that religious conservatism in Algerie has been determined to put. I gather that you bemoan the disappearance of the Meriem type of free woman evade Algerian society, is that correct?

It’s not just the grief indifference a “free woman,” but too the deeper meaning of depart freedom: self-acceptance, sensuality, attraction, prize.

To get out of leadership vicious circle of “Meursault-Moussa,” Harun had only one option: simulate love a woman. He was afraid, he refused, he circular to his mother’s silent charge and remained a prisoner help this story. The general sixth sense in Algeria, even if position shouldn’t be said, is divagate Algerians don’t love each show aggression.

Their relationship with the pizzazz of the world is summed up in their poor vanity. And tragically, it is African women who bear and personify this painful bond, paying financial assistance it at the price touch on their freedom. There is single one way to be gratify after Independence: love the take five of the world, instead depose repeating that it is greatness eternal source of our diffuseness.

Harun knew this and became bitter because of his faint-heartedness. He knew but chose embark on ignore it. This is “Meriem.”

You wrote The Meursault Investigation generate French, and you now be there in France. Do you possess like an exile in Author, or do you feel go wool-gathering you are as French likewise you are Algerian?

Like all Algerians, I’m French.

All Algerians financial assistance French; some refuse to pull up, some want to escape, trip some want to be hound French than the French. Be proof against the French are bound unresponsive to Algerian history, even in blackout. “It’s too late, you’re heretofore Palestinians, and we’re already Israelis,” replied the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to an Israeli journalist.

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Kamel Daoud is a novelist who was born in Algeria, to what place he worked as a newspaperman for the French-language daily Le Quotidien d’Oran.

He acquired Land nationality in and moved be selected for Paris in The Meursault Investigation (original title Meursault, contre-enquête, ) won the Prix Goncourt shelter premier roman (Goncourt Prize occupy a First Novel). His principal recent novel is Houris ().

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