In “An Old Anger”, Sylvie Tanette, journalist and literary columnist who also collaborates with RTS, explores her youth in Marseille. Between autobiography, essay and introspective novel, she traces the history of her Italian family and takes on the collective story of Mediterranean immigrants.
Being angry is healthy! At least this is the experience that Sylvie Tanette has when probing her memories. She recalls the murder convictions of two of her cousins and wonders: “Why did they kill? Why were they so angry that they did the irreversible? Was this long-standing rage which flows in our veins, in our hearts, binds us to each other? Is it a family heritage or determinism? To answer these questions that torment her, Sylvie Tanette decides to settle for a month in Marseille and examine the family experience a little more closely.
Anger and memory, the roots of identity
“I’m still just as angry. If not more so, given the current events,” underlines Sylvie Tanette in the QWERTZ podcast on November 6. This rage, this fury which emerges between the pages of the story, which slips into the margins, finally expresses the singular story of a family of Italian immigrants in Marseille.
This rage takes, under the author’s pen, a particular form, split between past and present, between introspection and construction of the self. By questioning the sacrifice her ancestors made when coming from Italy to stop in Marseille, Sylvie Tanette takes in hand the narrative of immigrants from the last century who were often invisible.
There is real anger in the northern districts of Marseille, which has always been there. I don’t know if it’s the fact that these are displaced populations, who didn’t choose to be there, or maybe that we were angry before leaving our countries of origin.
Without having really planned it, the author, while working on her family, takes stock of her life. Anger becomes a catharsis, allowing him to explode his story into wanderings. Daydreams of a solitary walker, the story is built in the dust of the roadsides on a real road trip on foot, in the smell of the sea coming from the coves, in those of moped engines or pasta with ragù and in the sounds of conversations and union fights.
Sylvie Tanette gets lost in her city to better find herself and talk about the complexity of family ties while speaking out against all forms of injustice or prejudice. We are angry or we are not!
The freedom of the book
Using the free form, drawing on its own narrative, in conversations gleaned here and there, this novel-story becomes a declaration of love to a common history of the “little” people deposited by the Mistral on a given territory, but also to literature, sanctuary of epics, repository of legends, opener of possibilities.
It is thanks to books – or because of them – that Sylvie Tanette moves away from her roots. Drawing on this space of freedom and transformation, the author redefines her being, moves away to Paris, becomes a literary critic and not a truck driver as she had dreamed of as a teenager.
When reading “An Old Anger”, we are struck by the self-deprecation, by the humor that emerges from it and by its sociological depth. A novel about the construction of a hybrid identity on the shores of the Mediterranean, “An Old Anger” makes you want to question your own ancestors.
Catherine Fattebert/sf
Sylvie Tanette, “An old anger”, ed. Aprils, October 2024.
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