Vietnam found by Vidya Narine

From a political sequence from the mid-2000s, remaining in media memories, this singular story seems born, almost without premeditation. Carried by the voice of Nicolas Sarkozy, Minister of the Interior then President of the Republic, a concept promised to have a great and conflicting future, “national identity”, is gradually corrupting the French public debate. In a few words (“scum”, ” veil “), in a few speeches (in Dakar, at Inalco), Vidya Narine summarizes a shift that is leading her. She, “the child of the 1980s who was able to benefit from his destiny, carried by a white dream”ce “dream” what was universalism: “We were all French, I was too, and suddenly”… Suddenly, we no longer know, and the story begins. Starts again, in fact, thousands of kilometers away, in a ghostly French Indochina where his mother was born. Starts again, a few centuries earlier, on the island of San Salvador (Bahamas), which Christopher Columbus landed at the end of his wandering, on the night of October 11 to 12, 1492. Always starts again, in the whirlwind of existences, the motif of the wheel of Dharma as a standard.

There was certainly a need for a writer with a language as unusual, always clear, always unusual, as that of Vidya Narine, author of a noted first novel, Orchidist (Les Avrils, 2023), to dust off a resonant but too often hollow quarrel, having long since emptied the words of their meaning. She substitutes others for them and lets hair-raising metaphors proliferate on the rhizome. She cuts off fragments of humanity with a poetic hand to bring them back to life. True-false family album, The sky is my flag is one among 300,000 potential stories of French people whose country of origin, ” Vietnam “ (according to its Vietnamese spelling) of French colonization (1858-1955), “no longer exists”. A paradoxical story, a tale of fortune, since, in fact, for the author it is a question of “tell a country [qu’elle n’a] not left, a past [qu’elle n’a] not known ». Between sincere modesty and impressive literary recomposition that refuses any categorization, this book by Vidya Narine is unlike any other, it is the plant that was still missing from the catalog, at the heart of an ecosystem that is all too well known.

You have 48.42% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.