Novelist 'Yasmina Khadra' was deemed the authentic voice of Arab women. But she turned out to be a man. Mohammed Moulessehoul talks to Stuart Jeffries
Near the end of Yasmina Khadra's novel, The Swallows of Kabul, a Taliban jailer desperately runs around the Afghan capital trying to find the beautiful woman who has redeemed his miserable death-fixated life. Not an easy task, given that all women - the beautiful, the hideous and those in between - are required in public to wear the burka, the head-to-foot mobile prison with a little grille for the eyes.
No matter: Atiq must find his enchanting Zunaira. Falsely accused of murdering her husband, Zunaira has been freed by Atiq so she could avoid public execution. She is the only lovely thing in his otherwise broken world. So he rushes up to several women in the street and tries to pull off their masks. It is a lovely, desperate romantic scene, with just a touch of surely unintended humour. Naturally, though, this being Kabul under the Taliban - a place where smiling on the street could get you a good whipping - the scene doesn't end happily.
Reading it, I couldn't help but think of another public unveiling. It happened four years ago in France when Khadra lifted her mask and revealed that she was in fact a he. The woman who had written several well-received novels in French and who had as a result been clasped to the Gallic literary bosom as a writer who would, finally, give an insight into what Arab women were really thinking, turned out to be a man called Mohammed Moulessehoul. And not just a man, but an Algerian army officer with three decades of military experience behind him. And not just an army officer, but one who had led a struggle against armed Islamist radicals and who, as a result, faced opprobrium in the French media for being tainted with the blood of civilians killed in brutal oppression by the north African state.
"There were many misunderstandings because people found it hard to understand a writer who was a soldier," says Moulessehoul (formerly Commandant Moulessehoul), who settled in France to pursue his writing career in 2001 after quitting the Algerian army. "I had to really fight against those who did not appreciate my work because they pigeonholed me as some sort of brute who was responsible for military massacres. In the eight years I led the fight against terrorism, there were no massacres. Let me tell you, it was a hard battle - there is no honesty or integrity among the pseudo-intellectuals I had to take on. There's much more honesty and integrity among soldiers, trust me."
The veil lifted, Moulessehoul continues to write under his female nom de plume, though to be honest, you would be hard-pushed to convince yourself that the novels were written by a woman or even by a man trying to write as a woman.
Surely, I say, as we settle down in the bar of a London hotel for our interview, the really baffling thing is not so much that you write under a female pseudonym, but that you chose your wife's name to stick on your book jackets.
"You don't understand," says Moulessehoul. "It was my wife who suggested that I use her name."
Very self-sacrificing of her. But why?
"You see, I wrote six books under my real name in Algeria," he explains. "I was happy with that until 1988, when they imposed on me conditions that were abominable. Unacceptable. The army required henceforth that I submitted my manuscripts to a committee who could censor my work. I refused, and so I risked having to stop writing - but what could I do? It was my wife who proposed to write under her first two names, Yasmina Khadra."
So why had he decided to lift the mask?
"When I settled in France, there were so many rumours flying around about the true identity of Yasmina Khadra that I wanted to put an end to them," he says. "This put an end to the rumours perfectly."
He wanted to leave the army and write under his own name, he says, "but I didn't have the means or the courage to do it. I was made for the army, you see. At nine, I was sent to military academy by my father. I continued my career as a soldier until 2000".
Why, when it frustrated his literary ambitions?
"Because, for my mother, it was her greatest hope that I was a soldier and continued the work my father had done," he says. Moulessehoul's father, now dead, fought and was wounded in Algeria's liberation struggle, rising to become a National Liberation Front officer. "I did that to console my mother. I willingly sacrificed 36 years of my life for her."
In The Swallows of Kabul, the latest of his books to be published in English, Moulessehoul writes about a land he has never visited during an era he says he understands very well - the time when the Taliban were in their grisly prime.
"I understand that Taliban mentality very well," he says. "The landscape, the struggles, the hardness of life - all these are just like my homeland."
He points to the jacket of his book. "Look at that photo [ of a woman in a burka crossing a parched, desolate cityscape]. That could be the Saharan village where I was born."
The Nobel laureate, JM Coetzee, wrote: "Yasmina Khadra's Kabul is hell on earth, a place of hunger, tedium and stifling fear." Words that only a brave publisher (hurrah for Vintage!) would put on the dust-jacket, but ones that are none the less true.
"I have never been to Afghanistan, but I met a lot of journalists who worked there who told me that they read the book and said: 'I see these incidents all the time, but I never noted them,' " says Moulessehoul. "All my literature takes place in that space, it deals with that which has not been attended to. I wanted to bring a new look from a Muslim on the tragedy of Afghanistan. And to bring to it a western perspective at the same time - I have written a western tragedy, but also a book that is filled with eastern storytelling. When there are two perspectives there's a better chance of understanding."
But in your otherwise powerful, tersely Camus-like novel, I tell him, I found that the Taliban were just two-dimensional bullies rather than comprehensible human beings. Isn't that a problem for your book? Moulessehoul suddenly looks cross.
"The problem is not elsewhere," he says. The problem is not in Afghanistan. The problem is in you."
Oh dear, is it, I say, looking nervously at my straw. Why?
"Because you have never accorded the importance necessary to the world that surrounds you," he says. "You've interpreted the world according to your convenience, you define the universe and the world as you have arranged it - and you do not know that there is another reality. It doesn't conform to the idea you have of the world."
All this may be true, though it's surprising when somebody makes a snap judgment about you after 15 minutes' acquaintance. Do go on.
"I gave a talk in Amsterdam recently, and a woman said to me: 'Monsieur Khadra, when I finished the novel and left that world I felt I was re-entering the light. Could you tell me why I felt that?' I said the light is the luck you have in not being an Afghan."
He looks at me sternly. "What you need to do is re-read my novel. You need to have the right attitude for reading about a heavy world."