“To Write Is Already to Choose”

In the context of today’s world, the awarding of the Peace Prize is particularly moving and heartening, as it testifies to your interest in the efforts we, the peoples of the South, are making to free ourselves from the evil and archaic dictatorships in our countries in a once glorious and enterprising Arab-Islamic world that has been insulated and stagnant for so long that we have forgotten we have legs, that we have a head and that legs can serve to stand, to walk, to run, to dance if we so choose. And that with a head we can do something inconceivable and magnificent, we can invent the future and live it in the present in peace, liberty and friendship.

This has a particular resonance for me at a time when a wind of change is blowing through our Arab countries, bringing with it those humanist values, born of freedom and hence universal, which are the bedrock of my commitment. Literary merit, however great, is, I believe, worth little unless it is in the service of a great cause, the promotion of a language, a culture, a political or philosophical vision.

I would like to believe that what we do, we writers, filmmakers, poets, philosophers, politicians, has contributed, if only in some small way, to hastening this Arab Spring which made us dream, made us impatient as we watched it unfold, driven as it was by the spirit of freedom, of newfound pride and of courage, facing down every threat; and if I have contributed to it in some small way, it is only as one among many Arabic intellectuals and artists who are infinitely more deserving. Some have achieved great fame and their name alone can bring a crowd to its feet.

Some Arabic intellectuals and artists have achieved great fame and their name alone can bring a crowd to its feet.

In 2000, my compatriot Assia Djebar was honoured here who has done much to broadcast the obvious fact that, even in Arab-Islamic countries, every woman is a free creature and that unless women are fully possessed of their freedom there can be no just world, only a sick, absurd, vicious world that cannot see it is dying.

You can imagine how bewildered I was by the news of the price. Flattered, but bewildered. It was a quantum leap into another world, that of a fame that is greater than you, where the individual disappears behind the image people have of him. A world of great responsibilities which demands ambitions of equal greatness.

Life has something revealing about it, they say; every day you become more ... what you are. Only at the end will we know who we were at the beginning. 

In Algeria, the resistance, true, deep-rooted noble resistance is essentially the preserve of women.

Relativity again. Believe me, I had my doubts: I’m being given a peace prize? I who have lived with war my whole life, who talk only of war in my books and who, perhaps, believe only in war, because it is always there blocking out path, because, after all, we exist only because of war, it is war which makes us cherish life, it is war which makes us dream of peace and strive to find it.

Sadly, as it happens, such is the history of Algeria down the centuries that we have never had the choice between war and peace, but only between war and war, and what wars they were, each forced upon us, each all but wiped us out until the last, the long, savage war of liberation against colonialism from 1954 and 1962 which, as massacre followed massacre, we discovered was like a Matryoshka doll: nested within the war of independence with its air of nobility was another war, a shameful, cruel, fratricidal war; we fought the colonial powers and we fought each other, FLN (Front de Libération Nationale) against MNA (Mouvement National Algerien), Arabs against Berbers, the religious against the secularists thereby preparing the hatreds and divisions of tomorrow. And within that war was still another war, the insidious and odious war waged by the leaders of the nationalist movement in their race for power leaving the future of freedom and dignity for which our parents had taken up arms no chance.

We fought the colonial powers, and we fought each other, Arabs against Berbers, the religious against the secularists thereby preparing the hatreds and divisions of tomorrow.

And yet, after eight years of war, came peace, but it was a curious peace, it lasted for only a day, long enough for a coup d’état, the first of many, for on the day after the declaration of independence, July 5 1962, the freedom earned in blood was stolen from the people, brutally, contemptuously as one might steal money from the poor, and so began the dark, tragic endless trench warfare that pitted the people against an invisible army, an omnipresent political police supported by a sprawling bureaucracy against which we could do nothing, only through patience and cunning could we resist, survive.

The liberation did not bring liberty, still less civil liberties, it brought isolation and shortages. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Then, in 1991, without so much as a pause in which to assess the psychological damage inflicted by that long and humiliating submission, we were pitched into the worst of all wars, a civil war, an indiscriminate barbarity foisted on us by the Islamist hordes and the military-police complex which left hundreds of thousands dead, left the people destitute and which sundered the miraculous bond which holds a nation together. 

Now, this barbarism has declined, the protagonists (the Turbans and the Peaked Caps as we call them in Algeria) made a lucrative deal, they shared out the land the oil revenues between them. These mafia-like arrangements were enacted under cover of impressive legislation likely to win over even the most difficult Western observers, and their stated aim was civil harmony, national reconciliation, in short complete, fraternal, blissful peace.

The military made much of their power to protect Western countries from Islamist terrorism and illegal immigration, which, like the dramatic rise of the black market, were simply by-products of their disastrous leadership. And so, in this new international division of labour, random torture and murder were sanctioned in our country. 

Roles were assigned: the South became the lair of the invader, an expedient bogeyman; the North a beleaguered, threatened paradise, and – the height of madness – our dangerous, insatiable dictators were elevated to the rank of Guardians of World Peace, benefactors of mankind, the same rank conferred on Bin Laden by millions of indolent souls in what in the Middle East is called the ‘rue Arabe’ – ‘Arab Street’ – and in the West as ‘problem areas’.

In a country that has known only dictatorship, military and religious, the very idea that peace is possible means submission, suicide or permanent exile. The absence of freedom is an ache which, in the long run, drives one mad. It reduces a man to his shadow and his dreams to nightmares. 

The painter Giorgio de Chirico said something troubling: there is much more mystery in the shadow of a man walking on a sunny day, than in all religion’s past, present and future. It is possible, it may even be true, but in the pain of a man reduced to his own shadow there is no mystery, only shame. 

Those who are not free will never respect another, not the slave, whose misfortune reminds him of his own humiliation, nor the free man whose happiness is an insult to him. Only the pursuit of freedom will save him from hatred and resentment. Without that conscious pursuit, we are not human, there is nothing true in us.

Those who are not free will never respect another, not the slave, whose misfortune reminds him of his own humiliation, nor the free man whose happiness is an insult to him.

This is my country, miserable and torn apart. I don’t know who made it that way, whether fate, history, or its people, I would be inclined to say its leaders who are capable of anything. My country is a collection of insoluble paradoxes, most of them lethal. To live in absurdity is debilitating, one staggers from wall to wall like a drunk. For the young, who must find a future, who need clear landmarks to guide them, it is a tragedy, it is heartrending to hear them baying at death like wolves in the darkness.

The first paradox is that Algeria is an immensely rich country, and the Algerian people are terribly poor. It is as maddening as dying of thirst in the middle of a deep lake. What is not squandered is guaranteed to be lost to corruption. 

The second paradox is that Algeria is a perfectly constituted democracy, with political parties of every possible stripe, including some peculiar to itself, a press that is as free as it can be, a president elected according to law and all sorts of institutions whose stated business is justice, transparency, the separation of powers, public service, and yet at the same time the everyday reality of the people is the cruellest despotism, the famous Oriental Despotism which nothing down the centuries has succeeded in humanising. 

The third paradox, and to my mind the worst since it is the cause of incurable mental disorders, is this: Algeria has an extraordinarily rich and rewarding history, it has lived cheek by jowl with all the civilisations of the Mediterranean and has loved, embraced and valiantly fought with each of them. The Greek, the Phoenician, the Roman, the Vandal, the Byzantine, the Arabic, the Ottoman, the Spanish and the French, but at independence, when the moment came to rally the people, including those most recently arrived, the Pieds-Noirs, to marshal their talents and move forward, it erased its memory at a stroke. 

In an inexplicable autoodi, an act of self-hatred, it renounced its ancestral Berber and Judeo-Berber identity and everything it had learned over thousands of years of history and retreated into a narrow history which owed much to mythology and very little to reality.

The reason for this? It is the logic of totalitarianism, the Unity Party system wanted Their religion, Their history, Their language, Their heroes, Their legends, concepts dreamed up by a select group and imposed by decree, and propaganda and threats guaranteed the condition necessary for these stillborn fables to work: a terrified populace. 

The sweeping pageant of human diversity became a crime, an insult to identity. The struggle is not over, the hardest part still lies ahead, we must free ourselves and rebuild ourselves as an open, welcoming democratic state which has a place for everyone and imposes nothing on anyone.

We know that it is this violence, this endless persecution, this appalling interference in our private lives that led to the rebellions in our countries which have erupted, one after another, like fireworks. These events have brought many tragedies, but we accept them because at the end of the road there is freedom.

For having written these things which everyone knows, my books are banned in my country. This is the absurdity dictatorship feeds on: my books were banned but I, who wrote them, still lived in the country and was free – at least until further notice – to come and go. If a sword of Damocles was hanging over my head, I do not see it. And if my books still circulate in Algeria, it is thanks to the invisible and highly dangerous work of a number of booksellers.

In a letter addressed to my compatriots, published in 2006 under the title “Poste Restante Alger”, I wrote the following:

“But for the fear of pushing them to breaking-point (I am talking about the intolerant), I would tell them I did not write as an Algerian, a Muslim, a nationalist, proud and easily-offended, had I done so I would have known exactly what to write how to be discreet, instead I wrote as a human being, a child of the earth and of solitude, distraught and destitute, who does not know what Truth is or where it lives, who owns it, who apportions it.

I seek it out and, truth be told, I seek nothing, I do not have the means, I tell stories, simple stories about simple people whom misfortune has pitted against seven-armed thugs who think themselves the centre of the universe, like those who loom over us, grinning crudely, those who seized our lives and our possessions and who, in addition, now demand our love and our gratitude.

I would like to tell them that the bureaucratic, sanctimonious police state they support by their actions troubles me less than the embargo on thought. Granted I am in prison, but my mind is free to roam, this is what I write about of my books, and there is nothing shocking or subversive about it.”

In The Rebel, Camus says: “To write is already to choose.” And that is what I did, I chose to write. And I was right to do so, the dictators are falling like flies.