Kaddish for a love
by Karine Tuil
Gallimard, 124 p, 14 €
By Karine Tuil, we know the novels, whether Human things (Gallimard, 2019), Interallié and Goncourt prize for high school students, or Decision (Gallimard, 2022), when a judge, caught in a personal imbroglio, must decide the future of a young person suspected of terrorism. This new book is a long prayer for a love that has died out. A poetic form which explores the feelings of a beloved woman, who is no longer so, who expresses her sometimes contradictory reactions. Bruised, loving, revolted, free, disoriented: “I can no longer see the face of the One who loves me / Without crying / The bitter herbs I ate / From Your mouth. »
The kaddish is the Jewish prayer of mourning, which is also a kind of momentum, of trust, of the reminder of the past, of life. By “singing” a kaddish for this deceased love, Karine Tuil enters into this rite that remembers and invokes greater than loss: “I walk through a land wet with tears / I knew there would be an end / You said: I love you for eternity. »
Nothing is sadder than a love that is no more, but nothing is more precious than the memory it leaves behind. The opportunity for Karine Tuil to discreetly draw a parallel between this love story and the hope of the Jewish people: “I told you: You are my promised land/Let’s go together/I will receive/Your law. » And we still find in this long poem accents of Song of Songs: “I believed You/I left/But You weren’t there/When I arrived/At night/From Jerusalem/And at dawn either/I didn’t find You/ I looked for You / In the burning desert / I called You / You didn’t answer. » With a capital “T”, to designate the loved one, the absent, sovereign, mute, erased. The petition mingles with the psalms, even though the text is deeply human, first of all, like the Bible after all: “I was made for this silence/I can live without You/There is only the desert/And the words/Who needs more to live? »
Poetic writing feeds on this Jewish culture of questioning and contradiction. approaching the ambivalences of the feeling of love: “We can’t be together / we can’t be apart. » The kaddish becomes the tomb of deceased love to preserve it, to save it from oblivion: “Write us in the book of happy life/Write us in the book of love/Remember that we loved each other. »