2023-09-18 22:04:00
Reserved for subscribers
INTERVIEW. The poet and journalist, who came from Syria in 2012, returns with a new novel Being French, political manifesto and declaration of love to his new country.
Comments collected by Alice Pairo-Vasseur Omar Youssef Souleimane by Sébastien Leban (credit Flammarion) Published on 09/18/2023 at 10:04 p.m.
He meets us in a café in the lively Bastille district of Paris, where he wrote his latest novel. “I became a Syrian bobo,” he jokes. Nothing predestined this thirty-year-old to live in France, nor in its capital, he likes to point out, as if he himself struggled to believe his journey.
Born in 1987 in Damascus, Syria, into a Salafist family, Omar Youssef Souleimane spent his adolescence in Saudi Arabia where he followed a Koranic education and quietly fell in love with French poetry. Hunted by the Syrian intelligence services for his participation in the Arab Spring, he fled Homs in 2012. And chose France, the country of Éluard and “gentleness”, for his exile.
A French citizen since 2022, the poet and journalist – who became an atheist after reading the Koran – p…
I subscribe
#France #deserves #protected