Yasmina Khadra | On Albert Camus
04. February 2013 09:38
I was 14 when I read The Stranger. That’s the novel that gave me the drive to write in French. The Stranger is a masterpiece. Every time I read it again, I have the feeling of discovering an entirely new work, better each time. It’s the greatest novel of the 20th Century. I’ve always stated so. It’s not what Camus says that is interesting to me; it’s how he says it. I adore this revolutionary way he speaks about subjects. I adore how he uses common and simple language to familiarize the absurdity of beings and things. Camus was writing of Algeria from the perspective of a sad young child who had a favorite subject he wanted to share with us. This was Algeria. He lauded it as a precious good, and I think that’s the reason why he didn’t speak further about it. Camus was someone who had never been able to speak about Algeria in its full diversity. He stayed in a very personal and singular phantasm.
I tackled those dimensions he didn’t want to investigate, all of these virgin fields he gave up on: the other Algeria, the Kabyle, the Arab. I tried to give meaning and life to those territories that avoided him. Camus left me everything he didn’t want to see. He was like a marauder who went into an orchard: he took all of the fruits that seemed tastier, and he left me the rest.
All the rest is this Muslim community he didn’t see, this community he totally ignored. For him, it was just an excrescence of a local fauna. Figures, ghosts, he preferred to keep at a distance, like geographical references. I do think that nowadays Algerians and those of those times reproach him for reducing the Algerians with one single word: Arab. And there was in this word something very pejorative, unbearable, which the Algerians felt as a negation. Arab was too generic. It was the bag in which he placed everyone who was not European. In his fantasy, he cleaned up, he pruned, in order to keep only what mattered for him. And the Arab didn’t matter. Camus was in his Algerian dream.
This didn’t stop him, as a journalist, from describing the daily life of Algerians with accuracy. But he didn’t do so in his novels. I’ve always wanted to reply to him. “What day owns to the night” is my Algerian, brotherly, answer. I’ve simply tried to tell him that Algeria is not some guy you shoot on a beach because the weather is hot. I’ve tried to show that Algeria is a history, a saga, a bravery, a valor, an intelligence, a generosity. All those beautiful things that Camus failed to see. I’ve always wished to tell him that, despite the greatness of your talent, you’ve been unfair to the Algerian.
On the other hand, it was unfair to reproach him for the famous sentence in which he declared choosing his mother over Justice. Camus was a loyal man, but he chose heart before reason, to my great regret. For Algerian intellectuals, this was a stab in the heart. The Algerians never succeeded in knowing Camus’s exact position. When he was writing in the press, he was hesitant. He engaged himself, then withdrew, then came back again… He was someone who never really chose. He was gripping this Algeria as if he had only one shore: this country has to stay as he always knew it. He was ready to sacrifice all. He was ready to sacrifice even his soul for his own Algeria. I’ve always said that we should never judge a writer by his text. When he’s writing, Camus is a god. What he writes can hurt, as it hurts me for example, but I can’t contest his genius and enormous talent. We continue to love him. He’s a great writer of Algeria. He’s our only Nobel Prize winner.