Hamida Ayashi: Open Letter to the Short Story Writer, Kamel Daoud

Hamida Ayashi’s Open Rebuke: Kamel Daoud’s Fall from Cultural Conscience to Colonial Mouthpiece

✍️ Translated by: Dr. Hana Saada

Kamel,
Frankly, I cannot fathom such a calamitous collapse.
You have every right to express your opinions—when they stem from a living, critical, and truthful conscience. But to become a disgraceful voice, distorting facts, and choosing to dance on a stage you neither built nor own, is both shameful and repulsive.

Tell me—how did you choose this path?

I once knew you as a man of honor. You worked with me for years at Algerie News, and your friendship was marked by the pursuit of truth, by standing up to falsehood, and by refusing to yield to those who sought to swallow us whole. What drove you into this dismal abyss?

At first, I tried to find you an excuse. I imagined your missteps were the work of those who despise the independence of thought. I believed you were a devotee of freedom, a guardian of your own autonomy. But here you are today, indistinguishable from those who willingly don the garb of a jester—trading integrity for a deceptive light that feeds their vanity and kills their conscience.

How could you, Kamel, accept to join a sordid play—so poorly written and staged—crafted by the malignant forces in France that never cease plotting against your own country, against its image, against its dignity? How could you consent to play such a filthy role, knowing full well who reaps the greatest benefit from your words?

You have deceived yourself before you deceived your homeland. You have dulled your own conscience before you could mislead others. Today, you are no longer the writer we once knew—you have become a pale reflection in someone else’s mirror, summoned only to play the part of the Algerian who attacks Algeria, offering through your betrayal a counterfeit stamp of authenticity to an old, racist discourse.

Know this, Kamel:

The fall of an intellectual is far graver than the fall of a politician. A politician may lose power, but an intellectual loses history. And those who fall from history find themselves only in the footnotes of treachery—where names are written in indelible black ink, read by our descendants as a cautionary tale for every soul that would sell its pen and spirit for a meager price.

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