Review: “The Scar” by Kamel Daoud

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

In a massacre, the arbitrariness of the violence is inextricably linked to its cruelty. It is often chance that decides who in a group is killed and who survives. The survivors receive a different punishment. They become witnesses and are forced to make lists of the executioners and their victims. A witness is someone who has seen. Who knows something about history that needs to be preserved for the future?

The main character in Kamel Daoud’s Goncourt-winning novel “The Scar” cannot say what she saw. During the Black Decade, her vocal cords were severed. From 1992 to 2002, a bloody civil war raged in Algeria between the authoritarian military regime and religious fundamentalists. Hundreds of thousands were murdered before the perpetrators were granted amnesty. Today it is forbidden by law to be near war. But Daoud, whose debut novel “Fallet Meursault” from 2016 made him a global star, wants to testify and is therefore now living in exile in France.

When we meet Aube, she is an adult and runs a hairdressing salon. Yet everything in her life revolves around the night her throat was cut as a five-year-old and she miraculously survived. Her sister and her parents weren’t so lucky. Instead, she was adopted by Khadija, a devoted mother in a desperate search for a surgeon who can restore her daughter’s larynx. But the great thing about Aube’s condition is that her muteness has made her the ultimate witness. Her injury is as permanent as it is visible, a scar from ear to ear, a wordless reminder:

“Your history cannot be erased, it is written on your skin,” my mother used to say. How proud I was of this picture as a child! Was I a book? Was my body a big book full of secrets? A writing about what has happened in Algeria over the last ten years so that no one can forget it?

Now Aube is pregnant herself and despite her longing for the child, she doesn’t dare to keep it. Both because her father is gone and because the country she lives in is a corridor full of thorns for the girl she carries. Undecided about the abortion, she returns to the original scene of the massacre. She goes to her home village to interview a still silent witness, the sister who accidentally died in her place.

On the way she meets the other main character of the novel, a restless man whose writing family was also murdered in the war. He himself treated a leg injury and complied with the executioners’ request to witness their cruelty in order to terrify the rest of the population. During the journey, which takes place during the Muslim festival of sacrifice, he repeatedly asks them to say different numbers. No matter what she whispers, it reminds him of the bloodshed:

– Give me a number, sister!
– Sex.
– January 6, 1997: Massacre of citizens in the Oliviers neighborhood of Douaouda (Tipaza). Number of dead: 23. Among the victims: 3 children and 6 women. Another number?

But despite his incredible memory, the man has a problem. In protest against his father, he refused to learn to write. He’s full of stories, but he can’t write them down. Aube becomes the evidence he is missing, a book about the massacre that has already been completed.

Kamel Daoud’s symbol-saturated fiction is rooted in a lived experience of the events he describes. Together with his – and Ulla Bruncrona’s – skillful language, it makes the story as hair-raising as it is convincing. The move of having a mute woman address an unborn child is genius. It allows her to speak, even if she lacks the voice, and to tell the author herself without having to teach Algerian history.

Instead of the future, he cleverly witnesses someone who has not yet been born, who does not know the events, but is nevertheless involved in them. He returns several times to the actual question of historiography, in particular to the connection between the civil war and the liberation struggle against the French in the 1950s. About the latter he writes: “This war behaves like the only child in the family, it conquers all commemorations.”

In France, Daoud’s texts on Muslim immigration are a hotly debated topic. In his columns he often sounds like a Sweden Democrat in 2016 or like any Swedish politician in 2026. He doesn’t just criticize the connection between political power and religious fundamentalism in North Africa and the Middle East. He also repeatedly portrays Muslims as a threat to Europe. The “scar” may not be for those who are tired of the accusations against Islam. Religion cannot be separated from the violence in Algerian society, especially not from the patriarchal one. At the same time, the victims of the book are themselves believers and call on God as their witness.

The Daoud case is reminiscent of that of Imre Kertész, another great literary witness writer. A Holocaust survivor who sounded more and more like Jean-Marie Le Pen towards the end of his life. It teaches us that someone who has seen cruelty in one age may not necessarily recognize it in another.

Last year, Kamel Daoud was sued by Saada Arbane, a woman who attended psychotherapy with his wife. She accused him of stealing her life story, and the details of her story are strikingly similar to Aube’s: a hair salon, a murdered family, and, most notably, severed vocal cords after being the victim of an assassination attempt during the Civil War.

Daoud accuses her of collaborating with the Algerian state. But in some ways the court case makes his point about the book clear: when Arbane emerges as a survivor, when she presents a scarred body as evidence and links her muteness to the novel’s narrative, it becomes irrefutable testimony to the massacre.

Read more Texts by Athena Farrokhzad and other reviews of current books in DN Kultur