“In the army, you use your head to wear a helmet, not to think, certainly not to write,” he says. “I was in the army for 36 years, since the age of nine when my father sent me to cadet school. I wrote eight books under my own name, not novels dealing with the real questions. The trouble started in 1988 when I began to get famous. I was told to submit future manuscripts to a censorship committee, which I found unacceptable. But I was determined to write.” At first he wrote under the pen name of Police Chief Llob, cloaking a hardhitting commentary on Algerian society as a crime novel. Almost a decade later, he took up his wife’s name.

Born in the Algerian Sahara in a tribe of poets and warriors, he has no doubt about where the writing gene came from. “My mother, a settled nomad, was well loved for her poetry and wisdom,” says Khadra, who has always written in French.

Now living as an immigrant in France (he dislikes the term exile), he has several critically acclaimed works behind him—he was shortlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in 2006 for The Swallows of Kabul. He has also retained his nom de plume. His novels have been translated into several languages including Malayalam. And recently, after years of ignoring him, the governments of Lebanon and Algeria permitted translations of five of his books into Arabic for readers. 

The Sirens of Baghdad, Khadra’s new book that was recently launched in India, completes the trilogy that started with The Swallows of Kabul and continued with The Attack. In these books, the focus shifted from Algeria, the subject of Khadra’s earliest works, to Afghanistan under the Taliban, the Israel-Palestine conflict and the second American invasion of Iraq.

The Sirens of Baghdad follows the aftermath of the second American conquest of Baghdad, when “brutes festooned with grenades and handcuffs burst into the gardens of Babylon, come to teach poets how to be free men”. There are no-holds-barred accounts of US marines’ disregard, sometimes complete ignorance, of Iraqi customs, exacerbated by their unabashed display of gun power—shooting down a loved village idiot, bombing a wedding party. The American atrocities soon take an unforgivable turn, violating the protagonist’s sense of honour and pushing him towards revenge.

All through the pages of brittle anger is the smell of sand and echoes of the haunting music of Sabah Fakhri and Wadi es-Safi. “The fact that people want to harm one another is proof of the immaturity of humanity. I try to explain today’s world, try to save human stupidity from political manipulation and disinformation by the media,” says Khadra. “In The Attack, I wrote that there is nothing more beautiful than your life and your life is not more important than another person’s life.”

But wasn’t Khadra himself a part of an army that was accused of excesses while combating armed Islamic radicals in Algeria? “I would have been in prison if I had massacred anybody. The excesses were individual excesses, by individuals who had lost it. They have been tried in Algeria. I made war for eight years and it was a war against terrorists. There was no conflict between citizens or ethnic groups. It was war against international fundamentalism. Terrorists have no country or religion, they are just a travelling nightmare.”

Just as all Arabs are not terrorists, all Arabic women aren’t passive victims of patriarchy. That’s one of the many stereotypes Khadra breaks. In The Swallows of Kabul, the lovely Zunaira is the epitome of grace and beauty, while in The Attack, the female protagonist Sihem is a suicide bomber. The female presence asserts again in The Sirens of Baghdad, though silently and from the background. “During the war when there was terrorism in Algeria, women taught us how to be men and how to defend our dignity. But, I am not going to fantasise when I write, and invent for Arabic women, roles that she is disqualified to play in society,” he says.

What’s important, says Khadra, are human relationships that build bridges that politics cannot. “My novels are part of the commitment to build these bridges. I know war, I know how it comes and how it develops,” he says, satisfied with the way The Sirens of Baghdad has turned out. “I have visited Iraq twice—once well before the war and once just before it. I wanted to tell the Americans the mistakes they made. A number of Iraqi artistes and intellectuals have congratulated me for this book,” he says. Khadra, however, continues to stay in France. “I am a man of peace who writes about war. France allows me to write freely, so I stay there as a cultural ambassador of my country.”