The Swiss poet reconstructs the story of a young amnesiac migrant in gentle narrative poems.
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At the origin of the book by the Swiss poet Eva Marzi, there is a story which is already poetry, something at the intersection of the tragic and the beautiful. That of a young man who, after a bicycle accident, regains consciousness in the hospital and in his past. The diagnosis is simple: “Loss of consciousness with head trauma. Amnesia. Empty of memory.” At his bedside there is an unknown young woman. He is in Geneva but he thinks he is in his native country, Tunisia, projected into the memory of another hospital, a few years earlier, of another accident, the one that cost the life of his grandmother – “I woke up in a memory”. In the last months, since his arrival in this country, he has forgotten everything. Even the girl, who swears they were in love, despite the suspicions of the medical profession (“if you really loved this girl, you would remember her”).
“Doctor: Do you recognize the girl?
Malik: No.
Do you remember that you had a girlfriend?
I remember a woman, yes. But it wasn’t her.”
Little by little, fragment by fragment, everything must be rebuilt. The girl stays, the memories slowly return. Eva Marzi immersed herself in this true story which she reconstructed and transformed with incredible gentleness, to tell it in narrative verse from the inside. Implicitly, behind this out-of-reach internal memory, behind the memories of this other who was him and whom he must tame, exile emerges, the country that Malik left behind him and which comes back to haunt him, like he refused to let himself be erased. A very beautiful collection on the wandering of the body and the mind.
Eva Marzi Seahorseeditions La Veilleuse, 120 pp., €16.
The extract
Each day
we weigh my soul
Is there in me
someone to save?
Having survived
is not enough to prove
that I exist
They want me to be able to tell myself
tell me
check true or false
in the white boxes
of my story
Each day
I learn to disappoint
