Houris: France Defends Kamel Daoud and Forgets Saâda Arbane, the Real Victim

Fayçal Belkacem — Paris, France — 2026-09-06

On the evening of 21 April 2026, the Oran court handed down a ruling whose substance Kamel Daoud himself announced the next day on X: three years in prison and a five-million-dinar fine "under the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation," according to the message relayed by 20 Minutes. Le Parisien on 22 April, then Culture Minister Catherine Pégard on 23 April — "an unwavering attachment to creative freedom," she recalled, per BFMTV and La Croix — instantly turned the event into a trial of literature itself. In that whole chorus of righteous consciences, one name was never spoken: that of Saâda Arbane.

Saâda Arbane, 32, lives in Oran. As a child, she survived the 2000 bombing that killed her parents and several members of her family; her throat was cut open, her larynx shattered: "I no longer have a voice," she told AFP — she who breathes and speaks through a cannula. After the Goncourt Prize went to Houris (Gallimard, 2024), she recognized herself in Aube, the heroine left mute after an Islamist slit her throat on 31 December 1999 (RTBF). What she invokes before the judges is not a coincidence: it is a complaint, filed in France and in Algeria alike.

The file is of clinical precision. For several years, Saâda Arbane was the patient of Aïcha Dahdouh, Kamel Daoud's wife and a psychiatrist in Oran (AFP). What she confided "in a medical setting," she maintains, is what "the novel Houris draws on directly"; she denounces "a violation of medical confidentiality and of [her] private life," citing her cannula, her scars, her tattoos, her hair salon, her relationship with her mother — details she has been listing since her first public appearance, on 15 November 2024, and which La Libre Belgique has recorded. The writer denies it: "My novel has nothing to do with that woman," he told AFP, his lawyers denouncing a "PR campaign" and "judicial harassment" (Franceinfo, 5 June 2026). For the time being, who is telling the truth matters less than this: it is a dispute between two individuals — not a book burning.

And it is precisely that framing the Parisian press chose to forget. Houris has never been published in Algeria, where pirated copies circulate on a massive scale (RTBF); the country is emerging from a black decade (1992–2002) that claimed some 200,000 lives by official counts, and the Charter for Peace and National Reconciliation, approved by referendum in 2005, prohibits "exploiting the wounds of the national tragedy" — an offense carrying up to five years in prison under Article 46, the provision invoked in the complaint (La Libre Belgique). One may deem that law harsh, contest it, call for its reform. What one cannot do is pretend that the survivor who invokes it does not exist.

The Oran ruling, delivered without the writer — who lives in France — being represented by counsel, comes with an arrest warrant; Kamel Daoud sees in it "a political trial with no legal basis" (TV5Monde). The debate is legitimate. But while France recites its "unwavering attachment," the same case is making its way through its own courts: Saâda Arbane has sued the novelist in Paris for breach of privacy, claiming €200,000 in damages (AFP), and the Paris criminal court, seized of her defamation complaint, heard the prosecution seek the author's acquittal on 5 June — with the verdict scheduled for 8 September (Franceinfo). In other words: the Oran ruling, however debatable, says nothing about the case pending in Paris, and vice versa. Two legal systems, two proceedings, a single story — that of a woman who did not consent.

One then measures the scale of the media distraction. The "culture war" needs heroes, and it has chosen its own: a Franco-Algerian writer, Goncourt laureate, celebrated, exiled in France. The novel's real heroine, for her part, has no voice — in the most literal sense. She lost her parents, her throat, her narrative; all she had left was her story, and it is that very story, she says, that is now being wrested from her all the way into the courtroom.

Algiers did not condemn literature: a court there tried, under Algerian law, an Algerian citizen prosecuted at the end of proceedings set in motion by complaints from Saâda Arbane and the National Organization of Victims of Terrorism (La Libre Belgique, RTBF). Paris, for its part, chose to see only a Goncourt laureate. Between the minister defending "creation" and the woman who breathes through a cannula, French indignation has made its choice. And it is that choice that Algeria, for one, will not forget.