Assoc. Prof. Dr. Elsa Skënderi
No matter what you believe or where you grew up, Kamel Daoud's "Hyria" (2025, Botimet "Buzuku") will leave you with a hole in your throat, like that of Agima, the novel's narrator. This book will leave you speechless in your quest to find your voice - the truth, the one that tries to cover up and hide from everyone, the perpetrators and victims of Algeria's brutal Civil War of the 90s.
Agimja (Faxhr) is a 26-year-old woman who lives with the indelible scar of the macabre nature of this war. She is disfigured because when she was five years old, terrorists slit her throat to kill her, her sister, her mother and her father. Her entire family perished in this massacre, while she herself survived death thanks to Hatixha, the woman who found her stabbed in the hospital, took care of her and then adopted her.
In Agime's portrait, there is a trace of stitches on the skin, from her throat to her chin, like a big, bitter smile. Meanwhile, in her throat, she has a visible tube, through which she exhales the few sounds she makes from her larynx, left without vocal cords. The tube in her throat, her muteness, and the smile "detached" from the stitches are irrefutable evidence of the terror she experienced. On the day that Agime's family was massacred, a thousand other people were sacrificed just like the sheep.
But, almost two decades later, the numbers of victims are being covered up. Evidence is being hidden. Confessions are being suppressed. The country's religious and political authority no longer accepts anything that could incite "disunity" among people of the same people.
“They have truly shown themselves capable of burying an entire war, with 200,000 dead and ten years of taking each other for sheep and prophets […]” (p.73). Through an amnesty law, silence is demanded for the sake of national unity. The Civil War is not remembered. It threatens the superficial peace, it threatens the false order, woven and depraved by men, for so long.
This type of order is worth dissecting through the concept of the symbolic order, outlined by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. A woman who has remained mute cannot penetrate the symbolic order of this society as an individual. In it, everything breathes in accordance with the religious dogma that oppresses women, almost hates them earthly, while lovingly befriends men only for the entrances of the afterlife.
Dawn is doubly excluded from the symbolic order of her place. Once by physical impossibility and once by essential changes in mentality. Therefore, the symbolic order, which has the form of a dense weave of signs, can be accessed by Dawn only through external language.
In fact, in the novel, the dichotomy of internal language - external language is among the central motifs, which serve to capture precisely this exclusion from the symbolic order of society.
This society, on the one hand, will remain united, mythologizing the war with the external enemy (France), and, on the other hand, refuses to give a name, a number, or a commemorative plaque to the internal Civil War, whose source is Islamic extremism. How can it not point the finger at the internal enemy, who has killed and cut off a part of itself. How can it silence the truth!
Agimja considers herself a book – an artifact of memory, testimony and fate all at once. But her inner language is not just telling us, the readers. She tells us about her little daughter, who has just sprouted in her womb, as the fruit of an act without any clearly outlined love. People wrapped in the tangle of macabre cannot love, as long as they only want to escape themselves and their harsh reality.
But how can a half-dead woman give birth to a girl; there, in a place where hatred towards women is preached every Friday, especially if the latter raise their voices and even slightly question the moral and religious teachings. According to these teachings, women are systematically to be sacrificed, just like sheep!
“You don't even understand the hell we have to go through when we are born a woman in this country and we don't have a father to stand up to men and when we are an abandoned child. […]
The women have their own place (in heaven) and we, at the bottom of the stairs, are stuck here, in this life, in Algeria. Eden is undoubtedly our lost homeland, of all women! That is why men have it with us. That explains the male resentment, the murders, the headscarves, the spitting. A story of male jealousy, all of it. Do you understand me?” (p. 83)
Dawn is caught in the trap of doubt to abort (with three pills) the fetus, her little Hyuri, her fleshly flower, her wingless dragonfly, her womb. It seems best to return her unborn daughter to the foliage of paradise before she comes to life. This earthly world is not for a girl without a father and a family without men.
But she decides not to say goodbye to the "pearl in her belly" without telling her her whole story. Without leading her to the truth that cannot be openly accepted. So, after 21 years, she decides to travel to her native village, where her family and many others were massacred.
On this journey, which will share the fate of the newly conceived fetus, the narrative becomes polyphonic. Her inner voice, heard only by her unborn daughter, is joined by the voices and testimonies of others, who have lost part of their human essence in that terrible civil war.
In silence stands Hanani, the worker at Agime's hairdresser, who no longer speaks due to sadness. She "finds herself elsewhere, locked in herself for years", also rejecting the symbolic order networked by men, also lost. The lack of speech is another echo of the narrative polyphony of pain. It is present even when the vocal cords are not or cannot voice it.
Also silent and taciturn is Mimuni, the fisherman father of the little girl. The man whom Agimja allows to see and love his belly and the intimate tattoos on his body, to remain in the dark as a genetic trace inside her. This man, left with nothing, the only sign of identity has the nickname "bastard", in fact, without being anything like that. He has simply been destined to be the unfortunate son of a father, a soldier, who was beheaded, a month after his marriage.
Mimuni has no possessions, nothing to keep him connected to the place where he spends his days. All he has left is a photo of his father's funeral, his dream of swimming to Spain, and the story of his mother, Zehra. He also becomes the voice of that story, which is also terrifying.
The most vocal of all, desperate to tell everyone what has happened, is Aisa Gerdi, the illiterate bookseller, but she possesses the gift of memory. A gift that in a country where forgetting is salvation, is both an eternal punishment and a curse. The emir, who killed Aisa's family, has mutilated her leg and one eye. But he has left her to live only so that she can tell everyone about the horrors that he and his lieutenants have committed, in the name of jihad.
But now, after the amnesty, no one will accept the stories that Aisa tells anymore. He wanders the streets distributing books, looking for evidence of everything he knows and has seen, and as soon as you tell him a number, he begins to tell you a macabre chronicle of the murders during the Civil War. Every date has at least one tragedy to tell.
"Back then, my sister, the stories of massacres were true. Give me a figure!"
-Six.
-January 6, 1997. Massacre of the residents of the town of Ulishte in Duaduda (Tipaza). Toll: 31 dead. Among the victims were 3 children and 6 women. Another figure?” (p.)
"I know why I carry these stories. I know a lot of numbers that are like marble stuck in the ground of a cemetery. Give me another number, please! Quick!
(Disgusted and disgusted, I say: '31'. My life number)
-31? December 31, 1998. Three boys, ages 9, 6, and 3, and their sister, only 22 months old, were slaughtered, while their mother was taken hostage and killed in the village of Xhebaberë, between Hamam Riga and Haxhut.” (p. 188)
The polyphonic narrative of pain is joined by the voice of Hamra, called a terrorist, because after terrorists abduct her from her family at the age of 18, they forcefully marry her to one of the jihadists, who impregnates her. Her child dies.
She becomes pregnant again with an unfortunate man, who is killed in the camp. To take revenge, she plants bombs and destroys the entire camp. She tries to leave and ends up giving birth to her daughter in the middle of the four roads. She can never escape persecution or the "terrorist" stigma. This stigma is not easily atoned for by women, unlike what happens with men.
"What I want to say, my sister, is that this work is different for men. They, when they came out of the mountain after the law of "Reconciliation" as they call it, were offered dates, milk and pensions; but widows like me they left in the night of old, and did not accompany us in the light of day. We, the terrorist women, are always in the mountains dying of hunger, hidden in caves or under the bushes.
We are the shame of this war. The male terrorists have taken our virginity, our honor, our youth, and when they came out of the closets, they stole our profession and our excuses: they all declared themselves “cooks”. They became as you can see for yourself: clean, smiling, healthy: they can walk in the streets, pray and argue about whether to eat donkey or sheep. What about us women? We are eternal terrorists, forever. They neither want to bury us nor exhume us”. (p. 309-310).
Thus, the voices catch the echo of each other's pain, seeking compassion in the testimony. Dawn is already in her native village, trying to find a sign from her 8-year-old sister, for whom she feels guilty that she died in her place. The sign that will come to her from her dead sister will help her decide whether to continue living or go with all the Hyuria in her womb, towards death.
And the sign is life.
Agime's daughter, the little girl, Kaltumi, comes to life. "It's the name of a great Egyptian singer, a voice. Kaltumi stutters and each of her stutters brings me back to myself, revives me. My voice is there, outside of me and in me." (p.378)
The novel ends with a plea to count the stars, but the echo of the voices of such a book cannot be erased from one's mind.
Besides the shocking plot, what impresses you in this novel is the ability that Algerian writer Kamel Daoud demonstrates to write from a woman's perspective. To tell a story with the same sensitivity as the opposite sex, something beyond superficial and shallow perception is needed.
Capturing and expressing a woman's emotional expressions, intimate motives, and sensory sensitivity, as if you had experienced them yourself, is undoubtedly a skill that distinguishes the great writer from the average writer. Daoud overcomes this challenge quite naturally.
When I read his novel, I see a kind of feminism not as a scheme or slogan that tries to sell a socio-political cause, but as love for women, as genuine co-suffering for their historical oppression. This kind of feminism in literature is offered, first of all, as a spirit and demand for humanism.
“Hyria” is an excellent novel, both in terms of its narrative and its very rich language, which inevitably evokes the ornate imagery of Eastern literature, although written in French. The translator of the novel into Albanian, Urim Nerguti, tested over time and by the great works of French literature (brought with devotion by the publishing house “Buzuku”), has managed to skillfully translate this linguistic idyll into Albanian, without destroying the linguistic richness of the novel.
Reading brings before your eyes a fascinating array of metaphors, which serve to conceptualize horror, the macabre, pain, and scar, making you also experience the mutilation and trauma of exclusion from the symbolic order, thanks to the narrator's inner language.
In fact, the desire to experience both the terrible and the tragic is the essence of the aesthetic literary experience. The question of why the reader/audience is drawn to such performances is one of those themes that Aristotle has been discussing since the beginning of time. No matter how tragic the event narrated, no matter how graphic the horror depicted, the reader tends to give in to tragedy in its aesthetic desire that leads to catharsis.
Writing such a work, which combines history, social criticism, ethical teaching, and catharsis, marks a rare narrative achievement, making Kamel Daoud a writer of the caliber and proportions of Nobel laureates in literature.
Thanks to such people, literature has made historical events indelible, as it has elevated horror and pain in art, constructing another symbolic order, imbued with the inner language of the soul.
