Your latest novel What the day owes to the night takes place in Algeria during the colonial period and the decolonization, and tells the story of characters from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, who, similarly to your previous novels, are thrown into conflicts and sufferings due to political contexts which are beyond their control, yet absorb “simple” humans. You explain in several interviews that you want to promote the Franco-Algerian reconciliation through this new novel. Do you feel you are invested with a mission? Do you think that a novel can contribute to solving a loaded history: colonization... Algerian War... and nowadays social problems in the French suburbs along with an increasing fear of immigration and of the rise of radical Islamism among the French and the westerners?

Being invested with a mission is not sufficient to accomplish it, you need to believe in it. I believe in the triumph of common sense over the traumas and the resentment. I believe that the best treatments to heal our moral wounds are a lucidity that we need to first apply to ourselves. Anger has always been a bad advisor, and hatred is a destructive concubine. Forgiveness belongs to nobility and reconciliation to intelligence. The novel has the power to reunite these two redemption elements, provided the author is sincere. Clearly, the official speeches have no more soul than an electoral promise, and the political stakes are based on calculations; but a writer should be beyond demagogy and political manoeuvres. He doesn't address a state or a nation, but a reader in a inviolable intimacy. It’s only by managing to convince this reader, that the strength of the novel message extends to the rest of the readership before fuelling an enthusiasm capable to help overcome the sequels of war and stupidity. I believe my novel has succeeded in doing this. Readers’ reactions reach me every day to tell me how much their vision on this painful period has changed, how happy they are to open the mourning veils and rediscover, intact, their childhood memories, their little joys, the streets of old and the happiness that they had shared with their neighbours, who were transformed into enemies. Man is only an urn where are kept the ashes of his own memories. He is sad when you lament over him; but raises from his ashes when called back to reason. I have always written to bring everyone back to reason.

You mention in an interview that you took one year to write this novel, while your previous novels were generally written in three or four months. Is this because this latest novel concerns Algeria, and thus calls on your own souvenirs, your own emotions?

It is not an autobiographical novel. I thus did not call on my memories nor on my emotions. For more than 20 years, I have been dreaming of writing an Algerian saga, my own “Gone with the Wind”, and the colonial period has all the ingredients for such a project. My discovery of Rio Salado (El Maleh) was decisive. This colonial village has kept much of its past glory. As soon as I saw it, I knew it would be the stage for the novel that is so dear to me. It’s true, I write very quickly, because my stories are built in my head long before I start writing. But, this time, I wanted to take all my time, as I relished writing this novel. I wanted this pleasure to last. At no point did I have the least doubt about my writing. I was carried by a flow of light and sublime smells.

While reading your novels inspired by the current situation in Israel and Palestine, in Afghanistan or in Iraq, I wondered how you succeed in telling these stories which are remote from your personal experience, in different places, cultures and situations… Do you do a lot of research before starting to write?

My experience is my best nourishment. People don’t realise that the most intense inspiration, for a writer, is to evolve in a world that is totally remote from the universe of his novels. And my former experience in the army turns out to be the most enriching of all experiences. Isn’t it submission while writing is rebellion? Isn’t it a chain to orders and sectarian dogmas while writing is freedom? It is the permanent confrontation of these paradoxes that has made my vision more attentive to humans and things. When you have spent 36 years of your life sharing your room, your barracks, your days with thousands of people, you acquire an extraordinary knowledge of the human factor. So, let’s leave aside these clichés that pretend that militaries know nothing but war… As for research, it is not necessary. Generally, I first finish the novel, and then only I do some specific research on certain points or certain places to avoid saying something stupid. I try and tell countries through the mentalities, and not through essays or tourist guides. This way of approaching an issue, going first through the cultural prism of the one who suffers it, has enabled me to tell things from the inside, deeply, rather than gravitate on the periphery of things.

You also explain that you wish and hope that your novels will contribute to a better understanding, to a better dialogue between the West and the Orient, in a world context that is particularly difficult. You have certainly reached your objectives, at least partially, in the West, given the success of your work. What are your readers’ reactions in the Arab world?

The Arab world has always had a difficult relationship with literature. It is true that there was a predilection for poetry before, but the novel is considered as an object of scandal, and the writer like an agitator through whom problems arise. And when this writer is so offensive that he writes in a different language to his own, he no longer interests many people. I am very well known in the Maghreb, a bilingual region, but totally unknown in the Machrek, which remained introvert. (…). Although I am one of the most read Arabic writers in the world, it is only after a translation in 30 languages that I was finally translated into Arabic. What is your vision on the role of the novel in today’s Arab world? How do you see this literature evolving? The Arab literature struggles to exist at home, in these countries where there is limited reading tradition. Then you have what Balwin named “the intellectual imperialism”, which consists in minimising oriental writings and reducing them to literary sub-products with no true point nor intellectual reach, barely good enough to produce a few exotic lines. What is even more shocking is this imperialism often ends up labeling a single writer as representative of the whole literature of his region or nation, which is totally untrue.

Helene Poirier