| Friday, April 27, 2007 5:36PM | | | | Yasmina Khadra's sirens song | Posted By: Catherine Texier
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| Tags: The Little Mohammed, pseudonym, sirens | The Sirens of Baghdad, Yasmina Khadra’s new novel, was reviewed yesterday by the New York Times, the day after he appeared to a packed house at the French Institute Wednesday evening. The timing couldn’t have been better for him. And he sure seemed to bask in the glow of his popularity. The evening took place entirely in French (it was the Alliance Française, after all). The audience, mostly French, included a few American who understood French well enough to follow, and ask pertinent questions at the end. Yasmina Khadra was charming, poised, and so at ease with the format of the evening that he sometimes forgot to answer the questions asked by the interviewer, and just went off on his own, catching himself with a smile. He certainly knew how to play his audience, all fans, who lapped up the details of his story.
He started by saying that one time out of three he has problems at the airports with his Algerian passport. Even with visas and invitations in hand, he gets interrogated. “It’s the image of the bomb,” he said, in his softly Arab-accented French.
Born in Algeria, Khadra started military school at 9, although he had no interest in it, but his father was an officer. He dreamt of becoming a writer almost as early as that. He started by writing fables, adapting them to his Algerian reality. Instead of writing Tom Thumb (Le Petit Poucet, in French), for instance he’d write The Little Mohammed – in Arabic. As a young man his writing became more serious, and he started getting into trouble with his superiors, and was punished by being sent in Tamanrasset in the Hoggar.
But the question that everybody wanted answered, Yasmina Khadra almost didn’t answer at all. He teased the audience with many stories about the army and his writing - how he has difficulty writing in French because it’s not his mother tongue, how he had so little time to write in the army, that he had to write a whole book in his head, and then put it all on paper within a month - until he finally got to the point with a mischievous smile.
So what’s up with that woman’s pseudonym?
Well, apparently, he owes it all to his wife, who told him two things: first, “if you have the courage of your convictions, choose a pseudonym.” Which allowed him to keep writing and still stay in the army. And second, his wife made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: “you gave me your name when we got married, I give you my name for posterity.” Isn’t that a wonderful proof of love? Certainly the audience thought so and everyone laughed with delight. And smiled with even more delight (especially the female part of the audience) when he declared he was “more woman than man” and that “women taught us how to become men.”
He revealed his identity in 2001, after he had already emigrated to France and retired from the military career.
Hiding behind a pseudonym had its perks, though: he received love letters from men, attracted by his dreamy first name, Yasmina. And the French press wasn’t always benevolent. He became “the military man who writes.” “Who do you think you are? Do you really think you are a writer?” a journalist asked him. Khadra complains the French critics didn’t support The Swallows of Kabul, that it’s the booksellers who made the book, his first best-seller.
Clearly, Khadra happily consoles himself with his readership – a term that came back several times in his mouth: 400 000 copies of The Attack sold, for instance. He is proud to be one of the “French” writers who have the most translations of his books in the world.
Yasmina Khadra rung a more somber note when he mentioned the theme of Islam fundamentalism – which he called “intégrisme.” “The youth” in Muslim countries “are lacking points of reference. They are lost. They have given up on hopes and ambitions. They have been influenced by another discourse. That’s the double meaning of the ‘Sirens of Baghdad’. The same could happen in the States if you are not careful. We are all fragile.”
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