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Knowing an Arab: Yasmina Khadra and the aesthetics of didactic fiction

ABSTRACT In his trilogy of novels on contemporary misunderstandings between East and West, originally published in French between 2002 and 2006, Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra came across as an educational interpreter of Middle Eastern culture, Islamism, and self-sacrificing terrorism. The critics described Khadra as a messenger capable of representing the Eastern world in a way that made Westerners feel that they were getting to know it firsthand. However, Khadra had not visited the countries he depicted, and his representations were at times historically inaccurate. This article discusses the aesthetics of knowledge transfer through fiction, suggesting that the impression of learning from Khadra’s novels depends on the acceptance of the writer as an authority on the East. The neologism didafiction is proposed for this kind of realistic fiction in which polarizing rhetoric is integrated into a didactic aesthetics.