Contemporary literature

After several disappointing years, the Goncourt Prize finally honors a novel that truly deserves the recognition. The jury has given us a real gift by shining a light on a major author of our generation, still too little known to the general public. With Houris, Kamel Daoud delivers an engaged novel, teeming with symbols and hidden meanings, a work that can be read on multiple levels.

Admittedly, the first pages are written in a style that is a bit too baroque for my taste, but very quickly, we are drawn into the story of Aube, a mute hairdresser from Oran, a few weeks pregnant, who hesitates to abort a child she already considers a girl and calls Houri—a term in Islam that signifies celestial beauty. Her dense and haunting inner monologue recounts the tragedy that shaped her fate: the night of December 31, 1999, during the massacre of hundreds of villagers by rebel forces in Algeria’s civil war. Unlike her sister Taïmoucha, Aube survived the throat-slitting. Rendered mute by the severing of her vocal cords, she permanently carries the mark of that night, hidden beneath a carefully wrapped scarf around her neck. Her mother, Khadidja, refuses to accept this mutilation, vainly searching for a specialist who could restore her daughter's voice. Before deciding the fate of her unborn child, Aube embarks on a journey to the site of the massacre, repeatedly putting herself in danger, as if confronting her past were the only way to regain control of her future.

The novel is infused with powerful symbols, starting with Aube’s name, which evokes both a new beginning and an unhealed wound. Her muteness, imposed by the violence of her past, mirrors the collective amnesia surrounding Algeria’s civil war: in a society that prefers to forget, where traces of tragedy must be erased, she carries a truth she cannot express. In contrast, Oran’s imam imposes his hateful, misogynistic, and authoritarian voice on the entire neighborhood through loudspeakers, making his discourse impossible to ignore, even for those who refuse to listen.

Aube’s decision not to give birth to her daughter goes beyond the mere question of abortion. It is not an act of selfishness but a refusal to condemn a child to grow up in a world where women hold an inferior status, where memory is a burden to be silenced, where truth is a forbidden luxury. The choice of language is also significant: Daoud writes in French, as if Arabic—too laden with prohibitions and the silences imposed by Algerian society—could not accommodate Aube’s confessions.

Her profession as a hairdresser is another form of resistance: in a country where female beauty is seen as a threat, a seed of male sin, she runs a beauty salon, a space where women come to reclaim a freedom that society denies them. And it is no coincidence that her salon is located opposite a mosque led by a fundamentalist imam, a silent but striking provocation.

Finally, the character of Aïssa, the son of a bookseller forced to abandon his profession because books have become suspect, embodies another form of resistance against oblivion. He too suffered during the civil war and refuses to bury the past. In his story, as in Aube’s, there is an obsession with numbers—those of the massacres, the victims, the years that pass without truly being counted.

With Houris, Kamel Daoud delivers a necessary novel, both intimate and political, where every detail carries a strong symbolic charge. A text of rare power, reminding us that silence is sometimes more deafening than all the cries in the world.