“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.
... contd.
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