Daoud Kamel - Chroniques: selected columns, 2010-2016

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 dont 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 novels 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 countrys 130-year relationship with France. That the second half of Daouds novel shifts registers into a testimony to the writers 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 Daouds 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 Years Eve in Cologne, Germany, in which some six hundred women were allegedly assaulted near the citys 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 clichs 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 didnt 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 wasnt 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 dont 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 Daouds columns mostly from Le Quotidien dOran 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 Daouds 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. Thats not to mention Daouds 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 hes the one getting killed, dragged out, tortured. Theres 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 cant 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 whos had his elbows ripped, his eyes punctured, his honor violated, who consumes his last breath utterly alone in his pain, for whom the promised nation will be nothing more than his tomb, whose martyrdom has meaning only for the survivors?