T_he piece in this week’s issue, “Musa,” is drawn from your novel “The Meursault Investigation,” which came out in Algeria in 2013, in France last year, and will be published in the United States in June. The book is, in some ways, a response to Albert Camus’s “The Stranger”—it’s narrated by the brother of the nameless Arab who is murdered by Camus’s antihero, Meursault. In other ways, it tells its own story. Did you intend it to be an answer to “The Stranger”? A correction?_
No. My basic idea was to start with Albert Camus’s “The Stranger,” to question the work, but to move on from there—to question my own presence in the world, my present and today’s reality. It was also a matter of analyzing Camus’s work, of “rereading” it, of having it reread by an Algerian and by contemporary readers. Camus still provokes polemics in Algeria. I wanted to pay tribute to his work and his thinking, but also to provide another version of the story. “The Stranger” is Camus’s character, but also a symbol of the philosophical and human condition. It was valid in 1942, the year the novel was published, and it’s still valid today. I wanted to take another look at that strangeness. I’m not responding to Camus—I’m finding my own path through Camus.
When did you first read “The Stranger”? What was your feeling about it?
I think I was in my twenties. But I have to admit that I didn’t like the novel: it is dry, hard. It inspires discomfort, not pleasure. It is fascinating but morbid. At that age, I was more interested in “The Rebel” and “The Myth of Sisyphus.” I had to reread and reread “The Stranger” in order to habituate myself to its universe. The philosophical stakes are much clearer in Camus’s other works. Like everyone else, I read the story of the murder and I didn’t even think about the murdered Arab. I ignored him. Meursault’s genius is to make you forget the crime. Even if you were a victim of it!
Although “The Meursault Investigation” is specifically inspired by the Camus novel, it also functions independently, as a portrait of grief, of a mother and a son coping with the loss of their loved one, their protector, and their economic support. The mother resents her living son for having survived; the son resents his mother for being obsessed with his dead brother. Do you think these are common responses to this kind of loss? Do your narrator and his mother have an unusual relationship?
At the center of this novel is the strong bond between a son and his mother. It’s a bond that is complex in Arab culture and in the Mediterranean region. Here, it is strengthened by the characters’ shared grief and by the desire for revenge in one and the desire for freedom in the other. The bond between a mother and her son is not always rosy: it’s where your bond with the rest of the world is formed. If you stumble here, you will fall wherever you go.
In Algeria, this bond also reflects the relationship that many Algerians have with their motherland. I discovered this after writing the book! A man’s life is sometimes a long journey toward understanding his own parents, freeing himself from them, and then accepting them. Inversely, the journey of parenthood requires that one accept the independence of others, including one’s children. Myself, I think that the bond with the mother is the center of our culture but also the source of our unhappiness and pain.
You write a newspaper column and have also written short stories, but “The Meursault Investigation” is your first novel. What was it that inspired you to write in this form?
I always wanted to be a writer. I am a journalist by accident—and because it’s the profession that brings me closest to writing as well as to a vivid experience of reality. I wrote a novel because, for once, I was able to put a little distance between myself and journalism. It’s a profession that consumes my writing energy, especially with all that is happening in the region where I live. The novel is also a longer, more attentive, more serene, and better-thought-out interrogation of the world.
In response to the novel—or perhaps to your journalism—an imam with a group called the Islamist Awakening Front issued a fatwa against you. Is it a threat you take seriously? Do you believe that the novel is or could be offensive to Muslims?
Offensive to Muslims? No. Offensive to Islamists? Yes. They are offended by our life, by difference, by women, by desire, by laughter. They are lovers of death, not of life. The threat is serious, but it is serious for everyone: you, me, the tourist, the cartoonist, the dancer, the woman, the Nigerian schoolgirl. The threat was addressed at me, but more importantly at all of us. I take many precautions; I am vigilant, but I am alive and I like to live and to defend my freedom. I don’t want to spend my life thinking about fear, because that would kill the desire to write and to live. It would be impoverishing. I am careful, but I live as before: my eyes open and watchful.
What comes through to me, very clearly, both in “Musa” and in the novel as a whole, is your interest in the lyrical use of language and in storytelling. Will you be writing more novels?
I love to write. To find the right phrases, to dig beyond appearances. Lyricism is a hymn to language and to life. Metaphor is a gift from the gods. I am going to write, I write, and I have always written: it is my vocation and my passion. I will defend it. It is also the proof and the practice of my form of luck: my freedom. I have a right to freedom because I am alive and because I am going to die. This is why I write.
(Kamel Daoud’s answers were translated, from the French, by Deborah Treisman.)
