The storyteller’s body is dragged up a flight of stairs like a commodity. He barely had time to start: “Here and there, ruins. Pretty rubble illuminated by a ray of light. His arms twist at an ominous angle, dislocated by a fellow whose face is covered with a teddy bear mask. Thrown to life on a page without boxes, the little human finds himself tossed about violently through a crowd whose individuals all have the heads of cartoonish animals with large, frozen cretin eyes, terrifying like characters from Anouk Ricard emptied of their souls. .
The story itself, indicated by a cover page which gives the title, author and publisher, only begins about forty pages later, and this long prologue indicates that it takes place under duress: like Scheherazade, the storyteller is held captive by an all-powerful entity (here, a gigantic kawaii bear head), sole master of his fate. The market : “A story every night or death. And beware if the story is not good!”
Defense mechanism
The unease one feels in the face of these expressionless and ill-intentioned hordes is profound, as is most chilling in the drawings of Abu Zubaydah, the Guantánamo prisoner who depicted the famous “enhanced interrogation techniques” encouraged by the Bush administration and of which he was the victim, it is probably these sketches where those who inflict abuse on him have only empty heads, no mouths, no ears, no hair, barely a nose, a kind of mask of welder instead of the look. Putting the human in front of you at a distance, a defense mechanism used by both victims and perpetrators, whether to support or to justify cruelty.
The story of Simon Liberman, unfolded by this storyteller who has no “no choice”, is that of an executioner. An executioner who becomes one almost without realizing it, an endearing kid who loves running and drawing, grows up in a loving family, until “day of departure” at the garrison (on the train, he eats biscuits in the shape of animals, probably slipped into his bag by his mother). The sequel: a metamorphosis, with gunshots, alcohol, gambling, sex, violence, up to the ultimate initiation rite, transmitted by “the old”the only one of the gang to have stayed in “the Zone” where they will be catapulted. THE «talisman» which gives its title to the book, it is the supposed mental technique “immunize” the executioner against the folly of his act. The soldier there becomes blind to his victim, superimposing on him the image of a loved one whom it would be a question of helping to «passer»and whose face he fishes out of a river every morning.
Falsification of memories
In a booklet that accompanied the release of his book, Liberman confides that he has been collecting material for ten years around all the conflicts since the Second World War; in 2014, he signed with the editions l’Employé du Moi the beautya small book of about twenty pages which bore the seeds of this masterpiece that is his Talisman and told the story of a soldier who practiced torture and escaped reality through filmed images. Fascinated by the falsification of memories that takes place in combatants as victims of wars, he makes the choice, “rather than persevering in the impasse of documentary realism”, in a form that resembles a fable. Without names, without identified places, but also without explicit morals. At the end, a mask rises; below, a child. He goes to snuggle up in bed with two of the animals from the beginning, magically rid of their evil aura. Phew, it was all just fake.