Rachida Bakri signs her father’s book

“Kaddour” is not a book settling scores. Rachida Brakni has nothing to reproach her father. She devotes a vibrant and grateful story to him. Kaddour is the name of this man who came young from his native Algeria to work in France. He is the diligent worker who will lose two fingers on the job and who will manage to give his family a roof over their head and enough love so that his disappearance leaves them deeply desolate.

The author constructed her story from this pivotal moment when she received the news of Kaddour’s death, which occurred in a hospital in the Paris suburbs. The young woman is already the well-known personality that she is today, having passed through the National Conservatory of Dramatic Art in Paris and the Comédie-Française, becoming a film actress and theater actress, wife of a famous Eric ( Cantona), whose first name alone is cited in “Kaddour”.

A proud and honest man

The preparations for her father’s funeral plunge the young woman into the atmosphere of her childhood. Around her grieving mother, her brother and her sister, friends from the neighborhood crowd, most of them of North African origin. The details of the Muslim funeral rite are evoked, the weight both reassuring and suffocating of the group, of the community places Rachida face to face with her primary identity.

We understand implicitly, and not only that, that a shallow but very present gap now separates the actress from the Arab daughter of Morangis, who she once was. Which does not prevent him from devoting himself entirely to the last duties owed to the deceased, in particular the thorny question of the return of his body to Algeria, expressly requested by himself. A real headache.

The story alternates between live scenes painted with tenderness and humor and the memories that come back, gradually forming the portrait of a proud, honest man, a hard worker, a good husband, a good father, but not very expansive. It was from this silence that his daughter’s project to write about him was born. To somehow give him a voice, which he had never spoken during his lifetime. Neither by voice nor by writing, because not having had access to the French colonists’ school, this poor orphan had landed in France very young without knowing how to read either Arabic or French. Kaddour will remain illiterate all his life.

Rachida Brakni came to the Reading Society at the end of November to talk about her book. By chance, she met Coline Serreau in Cornavin, in Geneva for the premiere of her play “The Crisis”. The two women know each other because Rachida Brakni played in “Chaos”, a film by Coline Serreau which earned her a César for Most Promising Actress in 2002. Hope confirmed on the stage and on the screen, and since this year in literature.

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