Benaouda Lebdai – Mohammed Aïssaoui or the unveiling of cracks

 

From the first pages of a strong and daring narrative, the narrator’s childhood memory rises to the surface, indicating the roots of the story that follows. These are found in North Africa, in Algeria more precisely, and the link that the reader will establish at the end of the story is far from trivial. Indeed, the new life of the adult narrator as well as his profession are in a way linked to this Algerian childhood. The narrator is none other than Kateb, the one who writes, an implicit reference to the novelist Kateb Yacine, who tells, throughout the novel, several intertwining stories: the family story, the story of a nostalgic love and the story of several characters breaking with active society, and therefore that life has given up, who find themselves on the margins.

Who is Kateb?

Kateb’s character is concerned with all of these human experiences that he puts into words. He keeps in the bottom of his heart his early childhood in Algeria without a father, which reveals his crack, his skin-deep sensitivity whose cause is the absence of the father who is worse than death. He is in search of meaning and therefore, unconsciously, he goes towards the “disfigured” of life that he wants to help so that they leave a trace of their passage on earth.

Kateb works as a biographer “for anonymous”; thus, it enters directly into the lives of the left behind, the poor, the homeless, the homeless as they say, asylum seekers and others in need. These life stories are told in snatches, in a loop, intermittently, in a fluid French language, evocative, rich, realistic and poetic at the same time, in an elegant language, despite the difficult subjects tackled, the places revealed, those of the suburbs where the HLM bars serve as a perpetual decor, sinister and poetic at the same time, because, under the pen of Mohammed Aïssaoui, they become places of life and exchange, having a soul, despite the fact that the narrator and others of his childhood friends have left or dream of moving away.

A powerful text

Mohammed Aïssaoui signs a literary text of high standing, with flawless literary character, and that is why I regret that it was not maintained in the final final list of the 2020 Goncourt Prize. Tightrope walkers is a powerful text, in the sense that it approaches in an original, very elegant and dignified way, the question of the pauperization of a whole section of French society, including those originating from the emigration of North Africa, Spain. , Portugal or Poland. The originality lies in the construction of the story, which is based on the fact that the narrator is in a way a “negro” since he writes autobiographies of public figures, which reveals funny situations to him, like this personality who tells, in an interview on television, how difficult it was for him to write his own life, and how he suffered from the blank page!

Being the anonymous author of the autobiography, his anger against so much cheekiness and lies is immense. His generous side, linked to his life trajectory, leads him to volunteer to allow homeless people who wanted to tell their stories, to the poor who frequented the Restos du cœur, ATD Quart-Monde, Les Petits Frères des Poor, the collective The Dead of the Street, to leave a trace of their difficult life if they wished. The meetings in these places of giving and generosity are enriching for Kader, who describes through life stories the circumstances which make these poor people not manage to feed themselves and children every day, and properly.

Kateb is admittedly accepted in his role as a public writer, but often he lets go of certain stories because they are too difficult. Nevertheless, it is an opportunity for him to ask the right questions, always benevolent, at the right time, when these poor people want to tell their stories. The story does not fall into sentimentality, despite the violence of life, because the narrator Kateb shows, at the same time, how much these charities can look like real companies, hierarchized at will, with its leaders and its executors, with its strong heads and its subordinates, with its ambitious volunteers, its helpers who are only present for purely selfish reasons, not to mention those who appropriate the charity by using the first person singular, an “I” which them values, but which humiliates the help-seeker, the poor, the helpless. Kader claims that “there is no shame in being poor”.

A palette of characters

The novelist thus offers a palette of characters where all human feelings, good and bad, are present and subtly described. The writing of this fiction is based on a great sensitivity and an immense humanity, because it leads the reader to penetrate in the meanders of the souls in pain, but also in the meanders of what is worst in the man. Mohammed Aïssaoui is of Algerian origin, and it seems to me that, in this second novel, after The Affair of the Slave Furcy, he kicks in touch, because, in reality, he implicitly reveals a part of himself, a part of life, the one that we keep secretly deep inside, when we have succeeded in extricating ourselves from a world for which history has programmed you, or even assigned you.

From the departure from Algeria to France, decided by a courageous, voluntary mother who had become “bilingual illiterate”, Kateb knew how to build herself thanks to reading and to the school of the Republic, which saved her from the life of suburb with its various quirks. Considering this trajectory of life, it is not surprising that his generosity turned towards those who are in dire need of help, towards those tightrope walkers who have become “companions in misfortune”. A novel to put forward in these troubled times. Kateb, while not forgetting his roots, knew how to adopt the country, as he says, “the one who welcomed me deep inside me, with his language, his culture, deep inside me, at most deep crack ”. Mohammed Aïssaoui’s novel brilliantly demonstrates that “every being is an exile”.

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