Kyle Berlin at Harper’s Magazine:
The legal dossier filed by Daoud’s lawyers must be one of the strangest and most extraordinary documents I’ve ever read. In their brief, Daoud’s lawyers, Benjamin Moisan and Jacqueline Laffont-Haïk, laid out in meticulous detail a counterhistory of each piece of inspiration that Saâda Arbane’s lawyers had insisted was “stolen” from her life. According to Daoud’s lawyers, the massacre in Houris was not inspired by the massacre of Arbane’s family, but by the massacre in Had Chekala that Daoud had witnessed and reported on as a young journalist. Was it true that the families of both the fictional Aube and the real Saâda owned small farms in a remote mountainous region? Perhaps, but so did Daoud’s family, which was part of a Berber tribe called the Beni Ouragh, whose members were spread across many small villages, including Had Chekala. Was it true that both the fictional Aube and the real Saâda underwent tracheotomies and had cannulas inserted? Yes, but during his research for the novel, Daoud watched documentaries in which Algerians who had been égorgés also had cannulas inserted. Was it true that both Aube and Saâda lived in the neighborhood of Hai El Yasmine in Oran? Well, so had Daoud.
more here.
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