Yasmina Khadra (Mohamed Moulessehoul)

[Al-khiyal]

The Sirens of Baghdad by Yasmina Khadra

Publication date May 8th, 2007

Les Sirènes de Baghdad, le dernier roman de Yasmina Khadra, publié en septembre dernier chez Julliard, a été classé troisième meilleur livre de l’année en France, selon une enquête réalisée par la revue spécialisée Lire. L’enquête, publiée dans la livraison de décembre et janvier de ce magazine, a englobé vingt titres littéraires, sortis tous en France.

Parmi les livres en lice, on notera des auteurs américains, sud-africains, roumains et bien évidemment français. On relèvera aussi que des essais littéraires ont été retenus dans ce classement. Un autre écrivain arabe a, lui aussi, occupé une place parmi les dix premières de ce classement.

Il s’agit de l’Egyptien Alaa El-Aswany, pour son roman l’Immeuble Yacoubian, traduit de l’arabe et sorti aux éditions Actes du Sud. Cette consécration de Yasmina Khadra, en cette fin d’année 2006, compense en quelque sorte le recul de son audience aux Etats-Unis.

En effet, une de ses œuvres, après avoir figuré au moins deux années de suite au box-office américain en tant qu’une des meilleures ventes littéraires traduites cette année, l’auteur a été carrément déclassé. Par contre, son avant-dernier roman les Hirondelles de Kaboul a rencontré un immense succès aux Etats-Unis.

Probablement que les Américains n’ont pas eu encore le temps de découvrir les Sirènes de Baghdad, sorti en septembre dernier.

Yasmina Khadra consacré par la revue Lire

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Wolf Dreams by Yasmina Khadra

Review by Richard Marcus:

How do you go from being a young man who dreams of being an actor to being a cold blooded fundamentalist terrorist who thinks nothing of killing women and children without a second's thought? To our minds it must seem unconscionable, but in the world created by Yasmina Khadra, and in the head of Nafa Walid, his protagonist in Wolf Dreams, it's simply the path of least resistance.

Since winning independence from France in 1962, Algeria has been a secular state, but in the mid to late eighties, fundamentalists are beginning to take over mosques in areas where they know they will be able to recruit. Initially keeping a low profile in the community at large, they gradually began to expand out from their power base in the mosque.

In the Casbah of Algiers, where Nafa Walid lives, the changes are only gradually noticeable. When he loses a job yet again, this time after refusing to be party to covering up the murder of a young woman by his employer, he turns to the mosque for comfort of the familiar and to try and deal with his shame for having been involved in what he believes is his complicity in the girl's death.

In his disillusioned and despondent state he is ripe for the picking by the fundamentalists. Like any cult, they find those who have been alienated and then move in to fill the void. They offer a ready-made purpose, a sense of belonging, and best of all they've reduced everything to a black and white equation. Something is either right or wrong and there is no room for debate.

Algeria was short of everything. Demonstrations turned to riots so bad that the army was sent in. Not trained in crowd control, somebody panicked and they began firing at a crowd and nearly five hundred people eventually were killed with thousands more arrested. It's not until after the food riots of 1988 that the fundamentalists hit their stride in Algeria. Contending that they were the supporters of the poor and downtrodden, they said, "Follow us and we will change the way things are run."

In their brave new world it would be the righteous being taken care of, while those who had been sucking the country dry would be gotten rid of. They offered a banner that people could flock behind and feel like they were on the right side. Those who would openly speak against them became fewer and fewer as it became less and less healthy to do so.

It wasn't until the election of 1991 when the fundamentalist party was leading after the first round of voting, looking set to form the next government and the army declared the elections null and void and took power for themselves that the terror campaign began. Car bombs, ambushes, and any other means at their disposal, and always the same targets; the police, the army, the intellectuals, the scientists, women who wouldn't wear the wear the hijab (veil), and the artists. If you were not one of them, you were the enemy and didn't deserve to live.

Nafa stays on the fringes, telling himself that he doesn't want to kill anyone. Instead he works for them. He takes on the job of ferrying packages through roadblocks. He drives a taxi and doesn't look identifiably like a terrorist so, even though his cab might have its secret panels filled with weapons or money, he's not given much trouble at the roadblocks. He learns the trick of not letting himself be provoked by the police and lets them do as they will even to the point of taking a beating on occasion.

All around him is terror and mayhem, but he continues on thinking that he is staying out of it; he has become used to the sight of corpses, just like the children of the Casbah who have gotten used to the rows of heads left each morning on the spikes of railings. Informants, police officers, anyone who is considered a non-believer or has been fingered for saying anything that sounds heretical are all equally guilty in the eyes of the Front Islamique du Salut (FIS - Islamic Salvation Front).

Nafa is happy for the first time in his life. He tells himself he is doing something useful for the community. The taxi he drives was once the property of an arrested freedom fighter, and the money he earns goes towards feeding the family of the jailed person. The salary he draws is sufficient to bring food into the house for his family, and finally prove to his father that he is not the wastrel he always took him for.

Of course it can't last forever and the police come for him one night when he's out. He comes home to find his family's apartment surrounded and only a hastily whispered warning tells him to leave. He is taken into hiding until it can be figured out what to do with him. On the second day he receives a visit from a comrade who tells him that the police killed his father when they came looking for him.

From then on he becomes a killer because he believes he must avenge the death of his father in any way that he can. The first time is hard, it's true, but it's not his fault. Why did the magistrate have to be the way he was so that he, Nafa, had to kill him? Why did the revolver keep shooting the man long after he was dead? There was no reason for it to do that.

The leader of his group says not to worry — after the third one it gets easier — and Nafa is relieved to find out that is true. Why, he can even be present at the murder of someone he knows and watch him have his throat slit in front of his family calling out Nafa's name. Of course he did have a little problem sleeping that night, but it passed.

He is living the life he always wanted with his group. They are to pretend they are the children of upper class families and they live according to that lifestyle, with dispensation to frequent dens of iniquity in order to ferret out targets. Nafa even has his own room with a large screen television.

Even in among the most paranoid of organizations betrayal can happen, and in one fell swoop the police manage to arrest the whole national leadership. After the dust has settled and all the infighting is done, Nafa finds he has been transferred out of the city and into the countryside. Someone who he had pissed off at some point in time is now in charge.

He has an hour to go and say goodbye to his mother and she barely lets him in the house. She accuses him of abandoning her and his sisters. He won't stand for that and gets indignant and exclaims, "I've been avenging the death of my father at the hands of the police."

She laughs in his face. "You killed your father. When he demanded of the police what they wanted of his good son who provided for his family they showed him proof you were one of the terrorists. He was so upset he dropped dead of a heart attack on the spot..."

In the countryside they are the kings. They are like armies of feudal lords who collect tithes from the surrounding villages through threats and intimidation instead of having to work. They hide out in their mountain redoubts kidnapping, murdering, and looting, keeping the people in the surrounding villages "loyal" to the cause and safe from any retaliatory strike the local militias can mount.

Nafa works hard to prove himself, although his pride is injured that they won't let him kill people and only be a goat herder. It's not fair, he says quietly to himself, knowing that any word of disquiet can have you killed as non-believer. Hadn't he proven that he knew how to kill? He begins to sulk and feel hard done by again.

The inevitable happens, and even though Nafa gets to prove himself time and time again when the army uses artillery and helicopter gun ships, they haven't a chance. Hoping for something, he and a couple other survivors head back to Algiers, hoping to hide out in the Casbah; surely somebody will want to shelter heroes of the revolution? The answer is no and they are destroyed.

Terrorists aren't fanatical believers to start with. They are empty shells of people lying scattered on the ground waiting for something to come along and fill them with hope. If not hope, then purpose will do, and if that fails, anger. Nafa, with his head full of unrealistic dreams which are constantly dashed, with no real hope of doing anything beyond menial work for people who despise him and don't even recognise him as being of the same species, is the perfect terrorist.

Like In The Name Of God before, what is so chilling about Wolf Dreams is how the author shows how easy it is to become something that has no sense of right or wrong anymore. No matter how much they bleat about God or the good of the people, for the average terrorist, none of that really means anything.

If on the same day that they had taken the first steps towards becoming a terrorist somebody had been able to convince them of the virtues of male prostitution, they would have done that instead. A terrorist is a person who takes the path of least resistance when it comes to living - whatever looks easiest and with the highest reward is for them.

Maybe that's why they call them resistance fighters.

[Al-khiyal]

At the beginning of January 2007 I was introduced to a writer whose work I had not only never read nor heard of. I just naturally assumed that Yasmina Kahdra was a woman until I received the first books from his publisher in North America for me to review. Yasmina Kahdra is the pen name of Mohammed Moulessehoul, an Algerian now living in France.

I have to confess that Yasmina was the first writer I had ever read from the Arab world, and even though the 1988 Nobel Prize for literature went to an Arab I have made little or no effort to educate myself. But since reading five of his books and conducting this interview, my interest has been piqued.

This was a bit of an awkward interview to conduct, because Med Kahdra only reads and writes in French and Arabic, while I can only handle those duties in English. I must say that Google translation performed admirably well with only one question causing confusion. I utilized three separate translation programs, to bring his answers back into to English to try and capture the word and the spirit of his answer.

Med Kahdra is a fascinating man who provides us in the West with a different perspective to life in Arab countries to the one being presented in our media on an almost daily basis.

I would like to thank him for taking the time out of his day to participate in this interview and I hope you are as fascinated with his responses as I was:

1) Tell us a little about yourself, where you were born and other biographical details.

I was born, 52 years ago, in the Algerian Sahara. My father was a male nurse and my mother a settled nomad. My tribe has occupied Kenadsa (the village where I was born) for 8 centuries. She is known for her poetry and her wisdom. She has always welcomed, without regard to race or religion, all the travelers who knocked on her door: the writer and explorer Isabelle Eberhardt, the Minister Charles de Foucauld, as well as the missionaries who crossed the desert in the direction of Tombouctou and Africa.

I was born in a tribe of poets and warriors. This is why I never felt out of place in the army as a novelist. It is my tribe which taught me how to share myself between the two.

2) Your father had been a soldier, and you became a soldier. Where did the desire to write come from? Most people don't think of soldiers becoming writers.

My father had been a male nurse. Then, there was the war for the Independence of Algeria, which had been colonized by France, and my father joined the National Liberation Army. After 6 years of war (1962, was the birth of the Algerian republic), he came home as an officer and chose to embrace a military career in the young Algerian army. In 1964, when I was 9 years old, my father placed me in Cadets School, the military institution concerned with officer training.

I ,thus, spent eleven years at this military boarding school before moving on to the Academy to begin my career as an officer that lasted 25 years. But I was always writing. From the time I was 11 years old, I tried my hand at fables tales. My first published work, (Houria), I wrote when I was seventeen years old. When I became an officer, I continued to write. I published 6 novels under my real name, Mohammed Moulessehoul before seeing any reaction from the hierarchy in 1988.

Seeing that I had begun being recognized in the media in Algeria the High command imposed a committee of censorship to supervise me. I refused to subject myself to them.

This is how my first pseudonym came about, from that decision in 1989. It was Police Chief Llob's name that appeared on two small novels The Nutcase With The Lancet (1990) and The Fair (1993). In 1997, my Parisian editor wanted a name which sounded less like a profession for the publication of Morituri, I chose my wife's first two names,: Yasmina Khadra. Since then I have kept this pen name, which has now had work translated in twenty-seven countries.

3) What did your family, your mother and father, think of you writing?

My family have always respected my choices. They know that I am a healthy in body and of spirit and do not look to debate my career choices. My father is proud of the direction I've taken while my mother, who is illiterate, knows that it is a good thing, but is not quite sure why. She had always wanted me to quit the army so that makes her happy. My brothers and sisters encourage me to go from the word one

4) Were there any writers who inspired you when you first started to write? Your Superindent Llob books reminded me a little of the books by George Simenon and Nicolas Freeling.

I did not read Simenon, at the time. Our bookshops were disaster victims and our old books managed to do little more then make us dream. We lived in a country with a horror for writers and artists. However, I really liked the American Blacks literature: Chester Himes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.

By creating the Superintendent Llob character, I wanted to have a typically Algerian character. Moreover, in my noir novels, Algiers is also a central character. I did not seek to imitate my preferred authors. I wrote in French, but with my sensitivity Bedouin, my Algerian glance, my anger and my Algerian hopes.

Anyway, we also have our own artists, as beautiful and rich as Western literature. I far prefer Taha Hossein (Egypt), François Mauriac, Abou El Kassam Ech-Chabbi (Tunisia), or Pablo Neruda, Naguib Mahfouz, Malek Haddad (Algeria) etc, to European flashes in the pan.

It's a pity that you do not have access to our culture. The Arab world is not just a postcard with dunes and caravans, nor is it only about terrorist attacks. The Arab world is more generous and more inspired than yours. Do you know that El Moutannabi is the Humanity's greatest poet since the dawn of time? It's a pity that you do not know anything of it. I was initially inspired by mine. I have had the chance to get maximum benefit from a double culture, Western and Eastern without ever losing sight of where I come from.

5)Where did the idea of Superintendent Llob come from? What made you decide to write about that subject?

I created Superintendent Llob as a diversion for the Algerian reader. I have already told you, in Algeria, we did not have a large selection in our bookshops there, and the publications revolved around the political demagogy, nationalist chauvinism and the romantic mediocrity praising the Algerian Revolution in Stalinist speeches. I dreamed of writing station books, books funny and without claim that you could read while waiting for the train or the bus, or while gilding yourself with the sun at the seaside. I dreamed to reconcile the Algerian reader with his literature. I had never thought that Superintendent Llob was going to exceed the borders of the country and appeal to readers in Europe, and America.

6) In your books Wolf Dreams and In The Name Of God you switched to writing from the point of view of the police to that of the terrorists. Why did you make that choice?

What police, and which choice? These two novels give a truthful account of real social and identity mutations that drove the emergence of fundamentalism, then terrorism in my country. They are used as references in universities today.....

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7) Why do you write about terrorism?

For two reasons. Initially because it is a planetary danger, that I know of from the inside and that I can describe with clearness and intelligence. Also, because Westerners understand nothing, and never say anything important on the subject. My books consist of explanations to clarify the consciences and alleviate the spirits traumatized by the political handling of media misinformation.

That being said, I make a point of recalling that my novels are not testimony. They concern fiction and assert their literary values. I am sorry to see people throw themselves on the topic and to neglect the manner of treating this topic. I basically make literary work. I have a language, a style.

8) In your early books you talk about the corruption in Algeria and had characters say that the terrorists were being used to allow certain interests to seize power. Is the situation in Algeria still as bad as it was, or have there been improvements since the time of writing those books?

Nothing has changed in my country, when it comes to this topic. The corruption prevails more and more; predation and opportunism has became the favourite sport of the nation. Most of our elite was forced into exile, and the people are without guidance, delivered to the robbers and to the charlatans, and have come to believe things will always be the same.

9) In your more recent books Attack and Swallows of Kabul you've started writing about life outside Algeria. Why?

Why not? The real question is to know if I succeeded or not. I think that I am well positioned to speak about what occurs on our planet. My double culture makes me believe that I am capable of doing this. It is grand time, for you, to hear the bell ring somewhere else.

10) Reading your books I could tell that you really loved Algeria. It must be hard to be in exile. Do you want to go back to Algeria? What would have to change there for you to want to return?

I like my country very much. I try to support it with my modest means, to give courage and confidence again to the young Algerian who reads me. But I am not exiled I am an emigrant. I am living in France to work, and not to take refuge. I return in my country when I want, and nobody, neither the President nor the emirs can prohibit me to go back there. Algeria is my country, and I do not have any other. I do not want to have any other.

11) What has been the reaction to your books in Algeria and other Muslim countries? Or does the fact that you live in France answer that question?

The Algerian reader likes me a lot. They read me in French because I am not translated into Arabic. I am translated into Indonesian, Japanese, Malayalam, in the majority of the languages, except in Arabic. But that has nothing to do with the Arab peoples. It is the leaders who seek, as always, to dissociate the people from the elites so they can continue to reign and cultivate clanism and mediocrity.

12) The Sirens of Baghdad is your new novel. Does it explore the same themes as your earlier books?

(This question got slightly skewed in the translation - instead of themes as we would interpret it, it translated as subject matter - hence the answer)

I never explore the same topic in my books. Each novel deals with a different phenomenon. It is you who do not manage to separate the different subjects I treat. You are constantly in a state of confusion. The Swallows of Kabul speaks about the dictatorship of the Talibans and the condition of the Afghan woman. The Attack speaks about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Sirens of Baghdad speaks about the 2nd war of Iraq. Radically different topics, but everywhere you retain only terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. My novels do not speak about terrorism; they talk of human brittleness, anger, humiliation, the fears, sometimes the hopes; and of this burning and fatuous actuality which spoils our life.

13) What are your plans for the future?

I live from day to day. It is more prudent. I do not make plans; I prefer to take the things as they come.

Interview with Algerian novelist Yasmina Khadra

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The Sirens of Baghdad by Yasmina Khadra

Review by Tess Taylor:

Yasmina Khadra's searing new novel, the third in his haunting trilogy about Islamic fundamentalism, is the first to enter Iraq. Coming after the much-lauded "The Swallows of Kabul" and "The Attack," "The Sirens of Baghdad" tells the story of a Bedouin boy, the son of a well digger in the sandy village of Kafr Karam. He remembers his village as peaceful and tradition-bound, a place he describes as "so discreet it often dissolves in mirages, only to emerge at sunset." He's suspicious of big cities, respects his father and has just begun studying at the University of Baghdad. When bombs drop, he's forced to leave school and the girl he's just begun to eye.

The novel follows the nameless young man on a tumultuous journey from ex-student to terrorist. As war begins, Khadra (the nom de plume for Mohammed Moulessehoul, a former Algerian army officer) depicts the rising pressure, the straws that break the camel's back. For a generation of men, manageable anger - first of living under sanctions, then of having no work then of losing loved ones because of no health care - spills over in the face of seemingly small yet resonant insults.

After one or a collection of these affronts become too much, we follow the boy into the tangled back alleys of Baghdad. There, he aligns himself with one of the squads who not only resist the Americans, but also act as local thugs, brutalizing one another with varied and grotesque forms of mob-style violence.

Weirdly, his own stay among his gang is mostly boring, as he gets bossed around, does mundane errands and sweeps the front of a repair shop whose back area is devoted to making bombs. This also is a truth (reminiscent, in its way of Orwell in the midst of the Spanish revolution): that sometimes in the middle of the action one feels the doldrums.

What is interesting, in this time of extreme cultural misunderstanding, is the opportunity Khadra offers us by allowing us to inhabit his narrator's mind.

Through him we can see how the faceless, muscular Americans arriving in Iraq can appear hideous. It isn't merely that they are trigger-happy - shooting to a pulp a mentally-deranged boy who doesn't understand them - but they're blissfully ignorant of the traditions they violate as they go about their business. They humiliate revered old men and, at one point in the novel, shatter a delicate, centuries-old lute.

In this climate, the young man's anger is stirred up by the rhetoric around him, which begins swirling like desert sand.

He meets people such as Dr. Jalal, a formerly moderate Muslim who has come home from the West and begun to use his considerable rhetorical power to provoke outrage. Khadra gives a remarkably nuanced account of how this anger works. Hearing a terrorist speech, the narrator says, "I was completely bamboozled. I felt as though I were in the thick of a farce, in the midst of a play rehearsal, surrounded by mediocre actors who had learned their roles but didn't have the talent the text deserved, and yet - and yet - and yet, it seemed to me that this was exactly what I wanted to hear, that their words were the words I was missing."

Indeed, part of this novel is about how and where to search for a new voice. One of the book's most memorable moments comes when a pacifist Muslim author arrives in Beirut from France and challenges Jalal, his old friend.

The debate between the two is haunting, a heartfelt battle of ideals between two Muslim intellectuals confused about how to face the world's varied and multiple springs of hatred. Both men are victims of racism: The novelist is devoted to continuing to press for dialogue and peace, while Jalal asserts that talks are no longer worthwhile. The French novelist claims the war is not between Aryans and non-Aryans, but between Muslim intellectuals and their visions of what Islam should now be. Muslims need, he says, "someone capable of representing them, of expressing them in their complexity, of defending them in some way. Whether it's with pens or bombs makes no difference to them. And it's up to us to choose our weapons, Jalal. Us. You and me."

Jalal disagrees. "True racism has always been intellectual," he cries. "The West is nothing but an acidic lie, an insidious perversity, a siren song for people shipwrecked on their identity quest."

Nevertheless, the novel argues that the tragedy is that though the West may be a siren, so is Iraq. The country terrorists purport to be fighting for already seems unattainable, broken and peopled with ghosts. The narrator longs for his former world: "For generations beyond memory," he writes, "we had lived shut up inside our walls of clay and straw, far from the world and its foul beasts." That world, however, is gone. And the sirens of the book's title refer not only to the wailing noises of a city beset by bombs, or to the urban pleasures that lure pious young men to sin, but also to the siren of a violence whose maelstrom is impossible to resist.

Meanwhile, the terrorists decide to infect a traveling jihadist with a virus, giving disturbing meaning to the words "foreign body." In their minds, the West is not only attacking them, but also infecting their region. They want to infect the West back.

Khadra's work has been compared to that of his Algerian compatriot Albert Camus, and "The Sirens of Baghdad" has a similar blaze of heat, the same heavy, insoluble questions and the same need to face them down, even to one's death. As the young boy from Kafr Karam decides whether to accept his jihadi mission, the novel builds to a startling and wrenching finish.

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Les agneaux du Seigneur de Yasmina Khadra

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Cousine K de Yasmina Khadra

Entre les murs d’une grande propriété isolée, un homme et sa mère vivent dans l’attente du retour du fils aîné. Torturé par un amour qu’il dit avoir à jamais perdu et par le manque de sentiments que lui témoigne sa mère, l’homme se souvient de son enfance et des épisodes tragiques qui l’ont rythmée.

Récit flamboyant d’une souffrance incandescente, 'Cousine K' relate la folie d’un homme et ses efforts désespérés pour conjurer une enfance vécue comme une malédiction. Une enfance faite de lambeaux, une île maudite, désertique, comme une prison aux grandes fenêtres de ronces. Survivant de ce long hiver, le personnage campé par Yasmina Khadra nous conte l’enfer quotidien de celui qui attend un geste d’affection comme on espère sa libération de l’antre de la mort. Avec une justesse qui fait de ce texte bref une perle noire aux émotions contradictoires, il confirme son sens de l’observation dans cette exploration de l'esprit humain en proie aux démons de la haine.

~ Hector Chavez

L’enfance n’est pas toujours un paradis perdu. Elle peut être, bien au contraire, un monde fait d’injustices et de frustrations. Et qu’y atil de plus terrible, pour un enfant, sinon de se voir négligé par une mère qui sait si bien adorer le frère aîné, et d’être le souffre-douleur d’une cousine tellement admirée. Par bribes, et sans pathos, le passé ressurgit. Un roman poignant et dérangeant où le lecteur assiste de l’intérieur au mécanisme qui pousse un être simple à la folie meurtrière.