overwhelming irreparable wounds of the earth and the soul

It is undoubtedly appropriate to take literally the name of the collection that Lucie Taïeb is inaugurating at Flammarion: “Terra incognita”. It is an “unknown land”, in fact, that this book with its beautiful, slightly mysterious title invites us to discover, The Inland Sea. There is no paradox if it rather suggests maritime promises, because it is indeed in the heart of a new territory, perhaps metaphorical, that it takes us “in search of an erased landscape”its subtitle. What landscape is this? To understand it, we must agree to enter into the narrative kaleidoscope that the writer sets up, both essayist and poet, researcher and dreamer, surveyor of a prose whose genre she invents through fragments, outbursts of voice. , pieces of stories: a writing that also advances in unknown territory, somewhere between documentary and fiction, social investigation and autobiographical reverie.

Let’s say then that we are, essentially, in Germany, where Lucie Taïeb, academic and Germanist, author of a noted essay on a New York landfill transformed into a green park (FreshkillsLa Contre Allée, 2020), is interested in the fate of villages that disappeared during the time of the German Democratic Republic, because the priority was coal and a mine had to be dug in their place…

The book thus opens with the image of a disoriented couple, the Domains, who refuse to leave their house, the last one in place in a disrupted environment, emptied of its identity. The violence of the forced excavation: here is launched the motif of loss, the musical key to a confusing and magnificent text, which seems first to seek its object, recounting this very quest as the hunt for a secret. We are in Horno, Lacoma or Cottbus, in the region of Lusatia and the Land of Brandenburg, in what was East Germany. Houses were razed to exploit open-air lignite mines, before attempting to create lakes to fill in the gaps and restore the landscape, rebuilding something of what was destroyed. But it is as if the damage has been done, once and for all, and there is not enough water to invent an “inland sea”: an irremediable wound seems to forbid belief in the artifice of a possible new world.

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