I Refuse to Read Novels with a Passport in My Head

Robert Pogue Harrison interviews Kamel Daoud about his 2015 novel, “The Meursault Investigation,” translated by John Cullen.

By Robert Pogue HarrisonNovember 1, 2024

• Philosophy & Religion

• Fiction

ALGERIAN AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST Kamel Daoud’s debut novel, The Meursault Investigation (tr. John Cullen, 2015; originally published in French as Meursault, contre-enquête, 2013), is a reply to Albert Camus’s 1942 novella The Stranger, in which an alienated French civil servant senselessly kills an anonymous Arab on a Mediterranean beach. In The Meursault Investigation, the dead man’s brother recounts the same events from an Algerian point of view. Upon its release in English, The Wall Street Journal called the book “a shrewd critique of a country trapped in history’s time warp.” Daoud’s newest novel, Houris (2024), is short-listed for the Prix Goncourt.

Stanford’s Another Look book event series is spotlighting The Meursault Investigation at 7:00 p.m. PST on Wednesday, November 13, 2024, at the Stanford Humanities Center. More details and registration for the hybrid event can be found here.

Kamel Daoud generously agreed to discuss the novel with Stanford professor Robert Pogue Harrison, the director of Another Look.

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ROBERT POGUE HARRISON: Mr. Daoud, thank you for doing this interview. I have taught Camus’s The Stranger several times, and I, like many readers, had always assumed that it is a perfect novel, in the etymological sense of “perfect”: fully achieved and complete. Your novel Meursault, contre-enquête reveals that The Stranger is in fact a partial, highly quarantined narrative whose sun-drenched lucidity remains engulfed in shadow, enigma, and unanswered questions. I believe that you have thrown wide open the doors of Camus’s narrative. Was this indeed your intention when you set out to write the contre-enquête [counter-investigation]—to show just how incomplete and self-enclosed is the story Camus tells?

KAMEL DAOUD: Thank you for your interest. I don’t think you can write a novel simply with an “idea” or a totally conscious intention. It’s as much about an intimate, personal story as it is about an identity and a history. As far as I’m concerned, there are several reasons for writing Meursault, reasons that I was only able to decipher as I went along, in front of readers all over the world. Firstly, the almost physical sensation of the obscurity of the Arab in Camus’s novel. Not an ideological grievance, but a need to identify, as every reader must, and which, in the case of this novel, was impossible. Secondly, I’m the bearer of the Algerian story of colonization. This novel, even if I prevent myself from reading it as a decolonized person (literature is there to distract me from this condition prescribed to me), is part of Algerian literature, even if the latter or the author rejects or refuses to accept it. It was only natural to consider the victim’s point of view in this novel.

Another reason is more intimate, and I didn’t understand it until years later: I had lost a younger brother, my youngest, when I was almost four. This story still resonates within me, even if I refuse to accept it. Thus, the story of a dead brother told by a survivor who feels guilty is familiar to me. Last but not least: I’m a frustrated reader. I grew up in a village where I was short of books. I think my desire to write was born of this frustration. To this day, I still like to write about great novels, to reread them or even continue them, as it were. Meursault, contre-enquête is also about this desire to write a sequel.

This novel was born, factually, from a newspaper column I wrote, in March 2013, which can be found in the French newspaper Le Monde, and before that in Le Quotidien d’Oran, an Algerian newspaper, under the title “Meursault ou l’Arabe deux fois tué.” I had written it as an emotional reaction to a French journalist who had come to Oran to investigate Camus. His questions always revolved around Camus and Meursault, not the “Arab.”

With this novel, I don’t adopt the militant’s posture, and yet I cannot escape it.

In The Stranger, Meursault’s relation to his mother remains shrouded in mystery. In your novel, the narrator’s relation to his mother is much more fleshed out. In fact, it remains the narrative’s center of gravity. Is it fair to say that the mother’s refusal to allow Musa to die deprives her younger son of his right to life, so to speak? Should we see in the mother’s character the oppressive hold that grievance can have over a people or nation that has been aggrieved? I’m thinking of how the grievance against France remains quite strong in Algerian society some 70 years after Independence.

The mother’s character was incidental at first. I planned to do away with her in the second chapter. Very quickly, however, the mother imposed herself as a shadow and then as the true, silent point of view that conditions the whole story. The mother says nothing, but she says the whole novel in her unknown language—Algerian (not Arabic). The whole novel is a response to the mother, not to Camus or Meursault, as we want to believe.

Yes, maybe the mother is that Algeria which devours the lives of the living in the name of the war dead. But you can’t write with symbols. It’s like contemplating sleeping while keeping one eye open. In Algeria, the story of war is not only a past but above all a future. It’s the country’s only success story, and the political regime, as much as the decolonized elites, has profited from this narrative. The war against France is now imaginary, but it is heavy, collective, and compulsory.

Every novelist is seen through the binary of betrayal or solidarity with this “cause.” Universality is rejected as a threat of cultural invasion and colonization, and France conditions our relationship with the rest of the world. France is an intimate issue in Algeria. These grievances, as you say, are handed down as a legacy and an obligation. This freezes the decolonized in a posture of eternal decolonized man. Frantz Fanon described the immobilized body of the colonized, but after independence, it’s the body of the decolonized that finds itself petrified in this narrative of “victory.” The mother is an infanticidal mother. Yes.

Fraternity is such an important motif in The Meursault Investigation. May I ask whether you feel that Camus is in some sense a brother of yours, if only in the literary sense?

For me, Camus is not my brother but an elder, a “father,” a titular figure who inspires me today. Not only in his work, as has always been the case, but above all in his precariousness, his pain as an exile and misunderstood man, his rejection of “ideas” to the detriment of the senses and the body, his choice of the human rather than abstract humanism, his fears, his fragility, his courage, and his cowardice. In truth, I see in him what both Algerians and French reject: universal binationality. He is French, he is Algerian. And hundreds of thousands of people died, on both sides, to thwart this possibility, which for him was destiny. However, I read Camus not as an Algerian but as a conscience searching for the least unfortunate path in the world, the most just. I refuse to read novels with a passport in my head. Literature has always been an escape for me, including an escape from my own country and its cult of the dead. Strangely enough, Algerians today are more like Meursault than they are like his victim. This lost desire for the world, this indifference to the body, even that of a desirable woman, this bumpy distance between oneself and one’s own mother, this indifference, this sweat in the sun and these meaningless phrases, you find them in almost all Algerians as soon as they stop talking about the War of Independence, as soon as they talk about the present. One day, I saw images of the killer [who committed] the Sousse attacks [in Tunisia] in 2015. He was walking along the beach with a gun in his hand, in a kind of insensitive slowness. He reminded me of an unknown version of The Stranger.

Gemellity is an important issue for me. And the concept of “Brothers of the Maquis” has been a matrix for independence fighters. A concept of solidarity and suffocation. Meursault is also the novel of a survivor trapped in the mythical life of his older brother.

Names and the absence of a name play a crucial role in your novel. The Stranger never gives a name to the man Meursault murders. He is simply “the Arab.” Yet we’re told late in your book, many years after the murder has taken place, that the narrator himself never referred to his brother by his name but always said “him.” Meriem’s name seems to be an Arabic version of “Marie” in The Stranger. Harun and Musa are known as “Uled el-assas, the sons of the guardian.” The name of the novel that Meriem is researching is not The Stranger but The Other, and the author is Meursault, not Camus. How much is at stake in names? Is Meursault, contre-enquête an act of renaming?

To name is to recognize. For ancient knights, the helmet was also a distance that authorized dueling and elimination. The name is the mask, but also the place where we deposit our identity. A name is often personal, but also collective, in the sense that it embodies a genealogy, a culture, a set of beliefs. To name is to hesitate to kill. Not knowing your victim’s name, or reducing it to a pseudonym, makes it easier to kill in wartime. Naming an enemy means listening to him, looking at him, imposing his presence, his difference, his mirror. Names are issues of war and love. To rename, then, is to know and recognize, to bring the stakes back to the surface of the story. I didn’t consciously think about this issue, but it so happens that the victim is called “the Arab,” and that today in Algeria, the eternal enemy has the collective first name of “French.” Allah has 99 names in Muslim mysticism. This exempts him from being man. He no longer is. As a child, I was fascinated by Robinson Crusoe and his linguistic trick of naming his slave “Friday.” I grasped the challenge early on: to name is to accept.

Meriem calls herself a “free woman.” She is university-educated and is researching a book. She dresses in short skirts. She seems to represent a type of Algerian woman that religious conservatism in Algeria has been determined to extinguish. I gather that you lament the disappearance of the Meriem type of free woman from Algerian society, is that correct?

It’s not just the grief of a “free woman,” but also the deeper meaning of that freedom: self-acceptance, sensuality, attraction, love. To get out of the vicious circle of “Meursault-Moussa,” Harun had only one option: to love a woman. He was afraid, he refused, he bowed to his mother’s silent injunction and remained a prisoner of this story. The general feeling in Algeria, even if it shouldn’t be said, is that Algerians don’t love each other. Their relationship with the rest of the world is summed up in their poor self-esteem. And tragically, it is Algerian women who bear and embody this painful bond, paying for it at the price of their freedom. There is only one way to be happy after Independence: love the rest of the world, instead of repeating that it is the eternal source of our unhappiness. Harun knew this and became bitter because of his cowardice. He knew but chose to ignore it. This is “Meriem.”

You wrote The Meursault Investigation in French, and you now live in France. Do you feel like an exile in France, or do you feel that you are as French as you are Algerian?

Like all Algerians, I’m French. All Algerians are French; some refuse to be, some want to escape, and some want to be more French than the French. And the French are bound by Algerian history, even in amnesia. “It’s too late, you’re already Palestinians, and we’re already Israelis,” replied the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish to an Israeli journalist.

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Kamel Daoud is a novelist who was born in Algeria, where he worked as a journalist for the French-language daily Le Quotidien d’Oran. He acquired French nationality in 2020 and moved to Paris in 2023. The Meursault Investigation (original title Meursault, contre-enquête, 2013) won the Prix Goncourt du premier roman (Goncourt Prize for a First Novel). His most recent novel is Houris (2024).