Said Khatibi and the Algerian Crime Novel

Algerian novelist Said Khatibi’s crime novel End of the Sahara is out this month in Alex Elinson’s English translation. The novel, set in late ’80s Algeria in the town of Bou-Saada, won the 2023 Sheikh Zayed Book Award

This year, Khatibi’s latest novel, I Resist the River’s Course, is on the shortlist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction. In I Resist the River’s Course, set in the early 1990s, just before the start of Algeria’s “Black Decade,” an ophthalmologist and her husband—a doctor in charge of a morgue—steal corneas from the recently deceased. When the husband is murdered, the secrets of their relationship begin to flood out, just as things are turning dark in the country.

Here, Khatibi talks with us about organ theft, the global shifts in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, and what he hopes to illuminate with crime novels: not the whodunit, but the why.

In another interview, you mentioned that the seed of the idea for this novel was a childhood friend who lost his sight at a young age—a boy whose sight could have been saved by a corneal transplant. How did you make the leap from here to organ theft? And from there to collaboration?

Said Khatibi: Organ theft is a fact that many people in my country, or elsewhere in the Arab world, can relate to. There are laws that regulate organ donation, yet we are trapped behind a wall of myths and rumors. The dead have dignity, so why shouldn’t the living? Organ donation promotes a culture of tolerance in society and helps prevent organ trafficking. And when there is no organ donation, there will be organ theft. This is something we see a lot of. In my view, the heroes of our time are those who donate their organs after death, to give life to others. Every person has the right to aspire to immortality, and organ donation allows them a kind of immortality. This novel begins with a tendency toward death but ends by clinging to life. Hope comes from giving the living the right to see.

As for the shift to the topic of collaboration, the two themes are connected. Some people are blind in their eyes, while others are blind in their hearts, accusing others of the opposite of the truth. Some look at life with their eyes, some with their hearts, and some turn off both, seeing life only through their own interests or goals.

It is also a novel about women and their right to dream and to claim their rights.

This novel, like The End of the Sahara interrogates Algerian collective and official memory. Also like The End of the Sahara, you choose a moment that is pregnant with change; this time, the early 1990s, or the start of the Black Decade. Why this moment?

SK: It is also a novel that is different from The End of the Sahara. This is not just about Algeria. It’s also true that, in some other Arab countries, what we are experiencing today is the result of what happened at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. It was a period of transformation, influenced by global events such as the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. During that time, some countries in Europe disappeared, while new ones emerged. In the Arab world, some resisted these changes wisely, while others were deeply affected, as was the case in Algeria.

In Algeria, this era marked the end of great dreams and the beginning of crises. But in my novel, I am not concerned with recording or debating history; rather, I tell the story of how history affects individuals. I write about people on the margins, who were not heroes, yet who bore the consequences of broader historical events.

Place is also such an important aspect to your work; why Bou-Saada? You said you wrote part of the novel there? Did you do research there, for the book? 

SK: I was born and grew up in Bou-Saada, a small town in southern Algeria. Although I have lived and worked abroad for years, because Algerian literature is a literature of diaspora (from Saint Augustine to Mohammed Dib and Assia Djebar), when I close my eyes at night, I see myself back there. This small town is like a microcosm of Algiers, and it could resemble other Arab regions as well. In this small town, a mosque, a church, and a synagogue once stood side by side in harmony. It was home to well-known writers and artists, such as André Gide (Nobel Prize in Literature 1947), Isabelle Eberhardt, and Étienne Dinet. Karl Marx also visited it. One of the most famous Sufi orders in North Africa was founded there. Famous films were shot there.

Until the 1980s, foreigners lived there in peace alongside the townspeople. But at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, everything changed. The town lost its many colors and became monochrome.

I am interested in understanding this transformation through literature, by exploring the destinies of the characters and how they were affected by the events around them. I do this not by focusing on public events, but by following the lives of ordinary people. And I am one of them.

What is missing or absent (or flawed) about collective memory of the early 1990s in Algeria? What absences did you want to address? 

SK: Many things, among them that people are almost losing their passion for life. They speak of death more than they speak of life. They long for the past instead of trying to improve the present or shape the future. They are sometimes reducing history to a single corner instead of seeing its diversity and multiplicity.

I feel that people are losing faith in dreams and are becoming resigned. They want change, yet they also fear it a state of doubt and suspicion. That is why, in the novel, I try to place my bet on hope, despite the hardships of life.

How does domestic violence connect to other layers of violence in the novel?

SK: When a person feels the fragility of the world around them, sensing that things are falling apart, it reflects in their behavior and leads them toward domestic violence. Those who close their eyes and hearts to the smallest beauty around them may turn to violence. Violence is not a choice, but the result of an era and the pressures of life experiences. Yet, despite these societal constraints, the characters of my novel make their way toward a point of light.

What opportunities does crime present the novelist when excavating history and memory? Why do you find yourself returning to murder and mystery?

SK: I am an Arab writer, and Arabic literature is one of the foundational grounds of the crime novel. If we go back to One Thousand and One Nights, from first pages, we face a serial killer: Shahryar, who kills a woman every day. Then the stories continue with twists and turns, in line with the essence of crime literature. In the Nights, the margin of freedom expands through eroticism and imagination, because crime literature also widens the space for freedom.

People sometimes forget that one of Naguib Mahfouz’s most important novels is a crime novel (The Thief and the Dogs). In recent decades, other significant works have included elements of crime literature as well. This genre is also an extension of nineteenth-century classical literature, due to its reliance on realism, as seen in the novels of Balzac or Tolstoy. A crime novel depends on realism, and therefore it is part of the literary tradition. The crime novel follows the same mechanics as the great classical novels, especially in the way the text is constructed.

Many contemporary writers have written or are writing in the crime genre, including Mario Vargas Llosa (Who Killed Palomino Molero) and Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead).

When we speak of a crime novel, some might think it only means a “mystery,” as it was in the past, a novel that simply asks: Who killed whom? Why do we write a novel just to answer who killed whom? Because the larger question in modern literature is: Why? And to answer that, we need to write and read a novel, because the tendency toward violence has roots in the depths of the human being. We must understand a person’s present and past in order to understand why they resort to violence. We must understand his psychological depth, and the sociology of the characters.

Some critics like to say that the novel is a literary form capable of encompassing other types of writing (poetry, theater, and so on) while the crime novel, at its core, contains all other kinds of novels. It requires effort, research, and perseverance. It connects the past and the present, not by placing them side by side, but by making one complete the other.