TRIBUNE – “End of dream?” is the title given by JMG Le Clézio, our Nobel Prize for Literature, to his platform where he says he does not understand what pushed the leaders of the most listened to station in France to put an end to a program which promotes the French language and literature throughout the world.
With a stroke of the pen, impulsive, offensive, iconoclastic, the management of France Inter has just put an end to a beautiful dream, the show “La Librairie Francophone” created and hosted for years by Emmanuel Khérad. For what ? What underground revenge, what unacknowledged grievance, what cowardice motivated this gesture, which is that of a death? Or is it a concern for the economy – and then it would be very miserable – that the apparatchiks who govern the public radio service have decided by dismissing without notice, without trial, without compensation, a creator of French culture and his team – make them mute, relegate them to oblivion?
Emmanuel Khérad: “The ferryman of the two banks”
Emmanuel Khérad is not just anyone. He belongs to a long line of literary reporters who have given their letters of nobility to the radio – nothing to do with the spectacular splendor of television literary broadcasts, prone to grandiloquence and artifice, such as Dumay and surreptitiously filming the anguished hands of Christian Bourgois. I’m talking about charismatic personalities like Germaine Beaumont, Laure Adler or Paula Jacques, Michel Polac, and today Bernard Lehut. I see in Emmanuel, as I wrote in the preface to his book, the memory of Augustine the Berber, who I like to imagine resembles him, the “crosser of the two banks”, the trait of union between the bank of the Seine River and the distant shores of writers who have chosen to speak and write our language, to invent it by praising it to the skies. La Librairie Francophone is the work of Emmanuel Khérad, it is his voice put at the service of other voices of the French-speaking world. During his wanderings, he listened and held out the microphone to all that was truest and most exciting in French-language literature.
It is this family that the silence will strike. These writers, men and women of theater, of writing, of songs, are the inventors who give life to our language. They are not exotic. They invent words, phrasings, expressions, thoughts and refrains, they take risks, venture out. Emmanuel, using his microphone/memory, goes from place to place, capturing noises, silences, rumors. In Africa, in Lebanon, on the pontoons of ships, in train stations, on the esplanades of the giant cities of the modern world, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Montreal, New York, or at the crossroads of humanity, in Beirut, in Bamako, in Ouagadougou, in Bucharest, he is looking for all those who carry the message of the French language: Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Alain Mabanckou, Dany Laferrière, Nathacha Appanah or Ananda Devi, those who have been recognized, but also all the others who are waiting to be, who deserve to be, in Mali, in Senegal, or in the cities of Europe, Annie Lulu, the Romanian Congolese, Jean Marc Turine, the voice of the Gypsies, Sami Tchak , the Malian, Khalid Lyamlahy, the Moroccan, Wilfrid N’Sondé, the Congolese, Richard Sedley Assonne, the Mauritian Creole, Yamen Manaï, the Tunisian, or Marcel Melthérorong, the Kanak from Vanuatu.
These are all those who the brutal decision of France Inter will plunge into the dark corridor of oblivion, for the benefit of a few privileged, praised, academicized official cantors, who reign in the narrow antechamber of power.
So what will remain of this narrow time, what future for the French language, what improvement to expect for the creators, lovers of literature in freedom? Is this what we want? I’m angry…
