“Perpendicular to the sun” by Valentine Cuny-Le Callet read by Viviane Delieuvin, decorator – Liberation

2023-06-11 16:07:00

Book of Libédossier

Each week, a reader chronicles a favourite. Today comic book boxes against prison box.

In 1981, at the wheel, I listened to Pink Floyd and the conversation of my friends seated in the back: death penalty, Badinter, abolition. At 22, we, the children of May 68, only had this subject in our mouths. The years pass and Valentine Cuny-Le Callet takes hold of this subject – American version – with her first graphic novel, Perpendicular to the sun.

At 19, she begins a correspondence with Renaldo McGirth, a young man sentenced to death, incarcerated in a prison in Florida. There is no particular procedure, a simple recommendation from Acat, the organization Action by Christians for the Abolition of Torture: you have to let yourself go. Easier said than done. “I don’t know how to address someone I know nothing about. However, I refuse to go and type his name on the Internet. I don’t want a news item to be my first contact with him. We will start on equal terms, each on his own, with only one name. The rules are laid down by them and by the prison administration. There are formats and materials to respect, words to avoid, drawings to cut out to avoid censorship. Their letters are read by the supervisors, sometimes they are rejected because they are judged to be “a security threat”. “I feel like they censor anything that doesn’t fit their way of seeing things, especially when it comes to black culture, or cultures that don’t conform perfectly to the ideal American. Where is the racism? Do they even know the meaning of this word? This discrimination does not facilitate their collaborative work, behind this epistolary exchange hides the idea of ​​creating a comic book with four hands. She, the art student and he, the American death row inmate. And the hands are important: they come back all the way, in close-ups, in black. In addition to being creative tools, they are a link between her, him and us in this place where touch does not exist. Valentine Cuny-Le Callet’s woodcuts reflect this anguish of the prison world, of this death row where dreams and hopes are forbidden. Only breath, a double white page where are printed sketches made by Renaldo McGirth. This graphic novel is as a whole a breath or rather a reflection: “Dear Valentine…I am still breathing…one moment at a time…. and always perpendicular to the sun.

Valentine Cuny-Le Callet, Perpendicular to the sunDelcourt-Encras, 436 pp., €34.95.