During a meeting hosted by Hubert Artus, in an Irish pub recreated for the Cognac European Literature Festival, Abdellah Taïa opens the doors to his writing universe. “ I constantly have ideas for books running through my head. », he confides with a thoughtful smile, facing a curious audience.
A story to reconstruct
« My books are fragments of a larger story », he begins with conviction. In 2022, when he publishes Live in your light(Threshold), Abdellah Taïa pays tribute to his late mother, and retraces a part of her life. Still young, she lost her first husband, sent to Indochina by the colonial authorities. Following his death, she found herself dispossessed of everything, including her young child. More than a family story, the character played by his mother highlights the injustices of French colonization.
Two years later, in 2024, the author continues this family cycle with the publication of The Bastion of Tears.This time he adopts the point of view of Youssef, a professor exiled in France. When his mother dies, the protagonist returns to Salé to settle the family legacy, bringing back a past of love and pain, notably through the memory of Najib, his former lover, broken by corruption and corruption. violence in Moroccan society.
Find the front door…
« I have my own way of writing», reveals Abdellah Taïa, facing a still intrigued audience. “ Where some people spend hours documenting themselves in the library, I do the opposite: I believe that everything is already within me.»
To clarify his point, he continues: “These two books were published in 2010, the year my mother died», he says with emotion. It was at that moment that he discovered, through his sisters, a family secret: his mother had been married for the first time and had had a child. As inLive in your lightshe finds herself destitute after the death of her husband in Indochina.
« I had never heard of this episode in his life, and I felt a deep shame about it.“, he admits. “I said to myself: everything she has just revealed deserves to be written, but this time through the voice of my sister“. This is how, fourteen years later, the idea ofBastion of Tearstook shape.
“I was very in love with Najib”
« I was waiting patiently to know where to start», he breathes. Then, in June 2019, while he went to Morocco to sell the last vestiges of the family home, chance led him to attend the funeral of his childhood sweetheart: Najib.
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« I was deeply in love with him, but he was a broken soul», he begins before sharing the tragic story of his former lover. “Najib suffered numerous rapes. My sisters told me that he had made his fortune while I was in France, buying several properties in his hometown. A sort of revenge on life. »
This story becomes for Taïa what he calls “an entrance door» in his novel. “It was the missing piece of the puzzle. In a single day, life gave me the structure of my work. » He continues: “Najib embodies the destruction of childhood in Morocco, a reality that repeats itself, regardless of the country. »
Reviving voices from the past
« You’re chasing ghosts», Launches the host with a touch of irony upon learning that Najib really existed. The author, without hesitation, confides to him: “Literature does just that: we run after the dead to continue to hear them. »
More sa «great story» family does not stop there. Abdellah Taïa, although he still does not know how to go about it, promises himself to one day tell the story of the life of his father, this silent and enigmatic figure who died in the mid-90s. “I have been preparing this book for twenty years», he reveals, his eyes shining with hope. “I’m just waiting for life to show me which door to enter. »
Image credits: ActuaLitté / CC-By-SA 2.0
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By Louella Boulland
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