Mona Chollet talks to us about Palestine, and it’s like an anthem that covers the noise of hatred

The author of “Witches” was the guest of “La Grande Libraire” on Wednesday, on France 5. She read a vibrant and intimate text, evoking the flavors and sweetness of a colonized but “stubborn” territory.

SSuddenly, everything disappeared. The belching, accusations, manipulations… all the verbal noise that the war in the Middle East brings with it into conversations. Suddenly, there was only a voice and a look, two eyes sparkling with suppressed emotion. And words, like a painful lullaby chanted at the bedside of all Palestinians in the world. “Can we love a country that is not even a country? A country whose soil we have never set foot on. […] Can we love a country that so many people around us are delighted to see burn? »

Wednesday, at the end of The big bookstore, the literary program of France 5, the feminist intellectual Mona Chollet, who claims family and sentimental links with Palestine, read on camera a text written for the occasion. And what a text… In a sensual evocation – “a splash of olive oil sprinkled with za’atar” –, the author of the bestseller Witches. The unconquered power of women (and, more recently, Resisting guilt) wonderfully expressed what sometimes connects exiles to their lost country: the memory of a flavor on the tongue. “The sweet part” of a colonized territory that many would like buried under the word terrorism, supposed to silence all others.

The force of the terms and the way of saying them – with as much affect as dignity – miraculously drowned out the noise of hatred and insults. On Wednesday, for three minutes, Palestine was entirely in the voice of Mona Chollet. And his text, both intimate and political, elegiac and ardent, vibrated like the anthem of a country without a state. A “disfigured” but “stubborn” country, in dust but still standing.