2023-06-05 11:43:54
Attack the earth and the sun (the Tripode) is a short text in which each word seems to have been weighed with a trebuchet. From the very first pages, we are bewitched by the dry and poetic writing of Mathieu Belezi, a French writer established in Italy where Freed had met him at the end of March, who recounts the daily life of Séraphine, a settler woman who arrived in Algeria in the 1840s with her husband, children, sister and brother-in-law. No ideology in this woman, she was content to follow the advice of the French authorities who dangled a virgin land to exploit. The disappointment will live up to the hopes. “The paradise that the government of the Republic had promised us was a long way off, and we weren’t close to reaching it, we were all crammed into military tents in the middle of nowhere, in this lost hole that the military authority had dared to call it an agricultural colony, we were not close to reaching it, and perhaps we would never reach it, this much vaunted paradise, perhaps we would never reach it because it didn’t exist, never had and never would, at least not for people like us.”
The disillusion will be even worse for this French soldier who is the other important character in the book: he believes he has been sent to take part in the «pacification» of the country, this is how his superiors presented the operation to him – Vladimir Putin did not invent anything – he will witness the worst atrocities there, and will even end up taking part in them in a kind of intoxication of violence, without even understand its meaning. Thus of this operation at Christmas time: “And it is with a more Christian rage than usual that we attack the fondouk, dilated pupils, throbbing nostrils, lips drawn up on our snags which are like fangs ready to bite, we rush under the porch, and our bayonets skewer the cries of impotent breasts which raise supposedly peaceful arms to the sky while our captain slays two or three burnouses…” His editor compares Mathieu Belezi to William Faulkner. Its publisher compares Mathieu Belezi to William Faulkner and this title is not usurped, we feel in this book the earth, the mud, the misery and this incomprehension of a world capable of inflicting such ordeals. After the World Prize in September 2022, Mathieu Belezi was crowned Monday June 5 with the Inter Book Prize.
#conquest #Oued #Liberation