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Prunes and apples, a financial inspector under Vichy, a world “to be rethought”, a capital “signed” by pataphysics and an overly loaded box.
Stories
Slimane Touhami, the princes of plenty
The New Editions of Reveille Cherche Midi, 120 pp., €12. (ebook: €13).
Boulahqal invites Slimane for a coffee in his ten square meters where he lives eleven months out of twelve, the twelfth he returns to his village in the Rif. Old Ahmed, who arrived in France from Tetouan a long time ago, manages with “a bit of the RMI. A bit of prunes, apples…” There is also Habib, a quiet person, who shares a house with other Moroccans. “His salary fueled the social advancement of his younger brothers. One became a doctor, another an executive in a bank. […] Their name, once ignored, is today respected in the country.” The Princes of Cocagne of the title are “Arabs of the fields”, “too often absent from the official narrative on North African immigration”, writes the author in the foreword. These agricultural workers worked on a farm in Gascon country in the 1970s. The author's grandparents lived there “among the apple trees, after leaving their douar from l'Oriental in 1965» to follow their boss, “a pied-noir from Oran who had sold his plots of orange trees” and relied on the intensive cultivation of Golden and Canada. Slimane Touhami, who became an anthropologist, chose the path of personal memory to reconstruct these portraits, the daily life of poverty, solitude and social rejection of these invisible people. He manages to bring this era back to life, his outlook and his experience as an adolescent. F.Rl
Pascale Tournier, A double fault
Le Cherche Midi, 192 pp., €18.80 (ebook: €13).
The author of this sensitive biographical investigation, moving but without effusion, is the
France
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