Among the many congratulatory messages Said Khatibi received after becoming the second Algerian novelist to win the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, one stood out: a video from a rural village on the outskirts of Algiers.
“It was this lovely woman who told me she was part of an all-women book club reading Swimming Against the Tide,” Khatibi tells The National. “When they heard I won the award for the novel, they celebrated by sharing halwa when they met. That was probably even more satisfying than winning the award itself.”
More readers and book clubs beyond Algeria will soon encounter Khatibi’s work. Part of the prize for Swimming Against the Tide will go towards an English translation, while his 2023 Sheikh Zayed Book Award-winning novel The End of the Desert will also be out in English in the coming months.
More than a sentimental gesture, Khatibi says the book club’s response touched on several of the questions at the centre of his work: the place of women in Arabic storytelling, the role of novels in confronting Algeria’s tumultuous history, and what it means for literature to find readers in a country where, as he puts it, “there are more football stadiums than libraries”.
He hopes the award, with its international profile and $50,000 prize, will bring overdue visibility to Algerian literature in Arabic, which he says has long been overshadowed by assumptions about the country’s francophone identity.
“We have really rich Algerian literature, but for a long time it did not receive recognition in the Arab world or in the media,” he says. “For many decades, Algeria was seen as a country with a literature that belonged only to France. That is why this prize means so much. It gives a chance not only to me, but also to other Algerian novelists who prefer to write in Arabic.”
That tension between Arabic and French is not abstract in Khatibi’s life. He grew up in what he says was a familiar environment for many Algerians of his generation: a household where his father did not read Arabic, and where the newspapers and books at home were all in French.
Rather than pushing him away, that absence deepened his attachment to the Arabic language.
“I developed a deep love for Arabic because it was something I missed,” he says. “If I had been born in a house where Arabic books were everywhere, maybe it would have felt ordinary. But when you miss something, you fight to have it.”
That growing command of the language also gave him a form of freedom.
“When you start writing, you are afraid of patriarchal control, of someone checking everything you say,” he says. “I was happy because I was writing in a language my father did not understand. I could say what I wanted.”
As a teenager, he began absorbing Arabic through poetry, especially the work of Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani.
“Well, that began for a more practical reason,” he says with a chuckle. “My real education in his work started as a way to impress girls at school. It was something all the boys knew: quote a few lines of Qabbani and you had a good chance of getting their attention.”
Later, at university, he began translating French novels into Arabic for pleasure. In hindsight, he says, it was less a professional exercise than an apprenticeship disguised as play.
He would tackle well-known works such as The Stranger by Albert Camus and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, while also reshaping them as he went.
“It was a game. I would translate the novel, then change the characters, change the ending, change the plot. I did not even know whether they had already been translated. I was doing it for pleasure,” he says.
“Later, I realised I was learning a lot about narrative and characterisation. For example, in Camus’s novel, which is set in Algeria, a Frenchman kills an Arab. At one point, I changed the plot and imagined the Arab killing the Frenchman. I wanted to see what could happen if the story turned another way.”
That instinct to re-examine history also informs Swimming Against the Tide. Set in the spring of 1990, a month before the elections that preceded Algeria’s civil war, the novel begins with a respected ophthalmologist accused of poisoning her husband.
But the inquiry opens into a wider investigation of how the brutality of the civil war was preceded by smaller cruelties, compromises and tragedies.
“My question was not what happened. We can find that in archives and in other books,” he says. “My question was why it happened. Why did violence come from inside Algerian society? ”
For Khatibi, the crime at the centre of the novel is more allegorical than personal.
“In reality, it is a crime against a country,” he says. “This character is symbolic and everybody is suspected. All Algerians, in one way or another, are suspected of participating in what led to the civil war during those 10 years.”
He argues that Algerian literature still has unfinished work to do in reckoning with what is referred to as the Black Decade – the civil war from 1992 to 2002, which is estimated to have claimed about 200,000 lives – particularly as public memory of the period has often been suppressed.
“It became forbidden to talk about this period in literature, cinema and theatre,” he says. “They want to erase memory, maybe in the hope that forgetting is useful. Because if you do not forget, you will judge them. You will ask why it happened. And they know they made mistakes.”
That is why, for Khatibi, who has published five novels, fiction is never a form of escapism.
“When I write, I feel I am fighting against amnesia,” he says. “Everything risks being forgotten, and I am trying to keep the memory of the country alive. There is a beautiful country and beautiful people, but there are those who want to erase everything. I am fighting that forgetting.”
That kind of recognition can only last, however, if there is a reading culture strong enough to receive it.
Khatibi says Algeria has strong contemporary writers, but too few libraries outside major cities and too little serious investment in building a wider literary culture.
“Algeria has various ministries that can support this, but it feels they prioritise building more football stadiums than libraries,” he says. “It is the same with cinema and theatre. We have the material. We have literature and the arts. But we do not have the connection.”
In that sense, the significance of Swimming Against the Tide lies in finding readers despite those conditions.
“The appetite for serious Algerian fiction is there,” he says. “The bigger challenge is building the cultural life that allows it to grow and continue.”
