You tell us about a little girl…
Who is already twelve years old but looks nine and who discovers winter in a country at peace, she caresses the first snows which fall on Stockholm and confuses the flakes with white down… A little girl who seems nine years old, ten years old, but her gaze is that of a woman, she has seen so much, in Stockholm she tells in a conference a story of soldiers who come to her village, a story of shooting and of a mother who turns around at the moment of fall, she says that she was almost crushed under the body of her mother, and that she ended up extracting herself from the shelter of the pile of dead, her and her little sister and a friend, and she tells how the bombs fell too, how the ants reds attracted by the blood stung the surviving children…
He is in Humanitythis story which could be from today but it is nevertheless old, 54 years old, the newspaper published it for the first time in November 1970… it bears witness to a village in Vietnam at the time of the American war, when the world lefts demonstrated against the abuses of the GI's, who came to contain communism in the Far East… this story testifies to a great committed journalist, a communist, who for Huma in a harsh, urgent language, had relayed the story of the little girl, her name was Da, this orphan, and the journalist's name was Madeleine Riffaud, who died yesterday, a hundred years old, without having known that Donald Trump, in America, was triumphant…
You will read on the sites of the World or from Liberation warm portraits of Madeleine Riffaud, who we were going to visit at her home in the evening of her life, blind, smoking Cohiba cigars… She had become a light in our uncertainties, a comic book was dedicated to her, we were going to touch the heroism in her the war, recount again and again a young woman joining the resistance, executing a German soldier at point blank range on the Solferino footbridge, capturing an enemy train on the railway tracks of the Parc des Chaumont Buttes…
You will read this, perhaps have already read it, and have already seen her radiant beauty, her intensity which never left her, the Vietnamese braid which adorned her face, the friendship with which Picasso and Eluard who honored her after the war loved her poems… But humanity has the good taste to also forget some of her reports, she was from the house, and offer us what she was then after the powder, a pen fighter, who tells us about ourselves French oppressing in Algeria, them Americans killing in Vietnam, also recounting the great misery of our hospitals… She was a poet, but in her articles she fought – she was one of the absolute sincerities of this country…
She was also – I discovered – a teenager raped by a smuggler under the occupation, before the resistance, which was to make her cross the demarcation line… This story was not at the center of her life of her stories, how not to think that she also constructed her anger?
We talk about other women…
Women of combat and suffering that I find in Le Figaro, the literary notebook, where two books enlighten me on our current affairs…
The first book is called “The Forgotten People of Arkansas”the author, Monica Potts, is a journalist, she returns for an investigation in her hometown, Clinton, Arkansas, which she fled; “a hole, a washer, a machine to crush its inhabitants”, writes Le Figaro, where girls get pregnant at 14, get married at 15 when they don't overdose, kill themselves or sink in alcoholism. The parents are evangelical, anti-vax and pro-Trump…. » In Clinton, Monica, who is investigating the growing mortality of uneducated white women, finds her childhood friend Darci, who she has not left, a drug addict in a relationship with a guy who is no joke, she also thinks Monica to her mother's failed destiny…
The mother who is also the subject of the Italian writer and journalist Maria Grazia Calandrone, author of “My mother is a news story”, who also went back to the origins, to the destiny of the women of Abruzzo where girls were beaten so that they would consent to marriage, in the photo of hers, Lucia the author's mother, with a split lip, ” the opaque eyes of the prey which pretends to be absent. In 1965, Lucia threw herself into the Tiber and died, having left her baby daughter sleeping on the lawn of the Villa Borghese in Rome, and having sent a letter so that she could be found and known that she was entrusted her “to general compassion”, the word was beautiful, the letter had been sent to Unita, the great Italian communist newspaper to which Le Figaro pays homage – Madeleine Riffaud smiles, where she is… I wondered to which point the ordeal and bravery of Lucia, whose burial did not take place in the church, belong to the past.
In Philosophy magazine and the New Obs, I am told how a philosophical dispute became an affirmation of identity in pictorial art… It opposed Averroes, the immense philosopher of Muslim Spain in the 12th century, who made Aristotle intelligible to his contemporaries, and the Dominican Thomas of Aquinas, of whom the church made a healthy… To put it very quickly, you will read, Averroes had maintained that the intellect, intelligence, was the same for all men, was eternal and separated from men – our individualities of thought born from our fantasies, our imaginations… Thomas Aquinas decreed that Averroes' conception denied thought and made man an animal, we were rough then, and Averroes was dead when Thomas attacked him… But even more than the argument, it was the representation which was violent, which a medievalist historian, Jean-Baptiste Brenet, analyzes in a brilliant book… For two centuries and in our museums today, Thomas was represented as a triumphant sage, overlooking Averroes dressed as a Saracen warrior – and it was no longer a question of debating intelligence, but of expressing through images the superiority of Christianity over Islam , excluded from thought… Thus already, by clever shortcuts we transgressed reason…
You finally tell us about an expulsion…
Who threatens a man named Abdi, under the influence of an OQTF, but whom we came to defend yesterday before the administrative court of Rennes, I read this in Ouest-France… We, that is to say around fifty people among them Isabelle Clément Vitoria, mayor of the commune of Hédé-Bazouges, where Abdi lives, and also the boss of Abdi, he runs a restaurant, and also friends of Abdi, volunteers from the Etonnants voyageurs association, and companions from Emmaus too, because Abdi is at Emmaus… And they all describe a good guy, a beautiful person, a facilitator of connections, a committed man… And they surround him after the hearing, tell him to stay strong…
And what I am telling you, already moving, would only be one of these episodes of popular solidarity which opposes the logic of the State if Abdi was not an individual deportable…
Abdi was a pirate at home in Somalia, and if he lives in France, it is because in 2009, he was among the pirates who had kidnapped the crew of a Breton sailboat, the Tanit… The affair had turned to the tragedy when the French navy, to recover the hostages, killed one of them by mistake… We find this story in the archives of Ouest-France and other newspapers. Sitting in front of the court, Abdi and two other pirates had recounted their lives of misery, if they had been born French, they would not have become pirates…
When he left prison, Abdi discovered that he was French, at least in heart and friendship… But after so many years the administration remembered his past that sometimes his friends discover, when he is defended … They don't defend it any less, we understand that we are changing, you have the right to be forgotten.…
Chloé Lemaçon, the widow of Florent Lemaçon, the skipper killed by our sailors, is one of Abdi's friends, she supported him yesterday in Rennes… So life takes us where we didn't expect.
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