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Le livre expliqut bien que, même si tous les vieux animaux perdaient un peu la mémoire et « déraillaient du ciboulot», la maladie de l'Oublie-tout était une forme plus grave que les simples oublis de vieillesse: c'était prendre un train en aller simple vers son passé, sans espoir de retour, un périple dont les gares disparaissaient au fur et à mesure du trajet...

Je ne veux pas me lever non plus. Une créature pourrait se cacher sous mon lit. Je l’imagine attraper mon pied avec ses grosses pattes. J’ai des frissons.

Soudain, la porte de mon placard grince. Criiiiiic!

Maman 😊 : Les monstres ne sont pas réels! Je vais te raconter une histoire pour te changer les idées.

Au seuil de l’automne

  

  

  

  

Au seuil de l’automne

dans un crépuscule

muet

tu découvres l’onde du temps

et ta reddition

secrète

comme un vol d’oiseaux

léger

chutant de branche en branche

que leurs ailes ne portent plus





/traduit de l’italien par Thierry Gillybœuf

De bric et de broc

derrière la maison abandonnée

la niche du chien



Chantal Toune

C'est la maladie de l'Oublie-tout, celle qui vient et qui prend tout, des souvenirs les plus fous aux baisers les plus doux...

Mais sa tristesse n’est pas seulement due au fait de se trouver dans ce Centre. Je mettrais ma main à couper qu’il a un SECRET. Je le sens. Je le sais. J’ai un sixième sens pour repérer ceux qui, comme moi, ont au plus profond d’eux-mêmes, une souffrance muette. Jamais confiée.

Il paraît si triste. Perdu dans un ailleurs. Un autre monde. Certes, se retrouver dans ce Centre de rééducation fonctionnelle, Sainte-Hippolyte-de-Rietz en Vendée, ne prête pas à rire. À sa place, j’exploserais. Car la brochure de Ciel et Océan a beau se proclamer “Centre de rééducation pour tous”, la moyenne d’âge est celle du troisième, du quatrième, bientôt du cinquième âge ! Même moi, qui n’ai plus vingt ans depuis très longtemps - je ne vous dirai pas mon âge, vous seriez fort étonnés - je sature de ces têtes blanches ou grisonnantes. J’aime bien la jeunesse.

Did you ever watch the Alexander McQueen documentary? There’s a

quote that Jahra pulled from it and shared: I didn’t care about what people

thought of me and I didn’t care what I thought of myself. Okay, we’ve heard

the first part before, but fuck, that second part? To not care what you think

of yourself? You and I talk often about making unleashed work—like what

you’ve done with Vagabonds!—about writing without any censorship,

writing the way we think, not translating it for the humans or the West or

the white people, not worrying if it fits form, if it has precedent, if we’ll be

able to make a living from it, just writing because these stories, these

words, are the truest things we know. And McQueen was here talking about

removing not just the collar other people put on him, but, more important,

the collar he put on himself! It blows my mind—to free yourself from

yourself, to hear the voice in your head saying all the things it’s been

conditioned to say, and then to ignore it and make the work anyway? I love

this idea so much—especially because it doesn’t demand that you not think

things of yourself. You can think whatever you want, just don’t care about

it. That’s wild. That’s some next-level magic.

Toute ma vie, j'ai cherché à contourner les obstacles, à rester dans l'action pour ne pas m'apitoyer, à éviter de penser pour ne pas souffrir.

Hier, allongée dans l'herbe fraîche, j'ai compris que se confronter aux blessures pouvait permettre de les apprivoiser, les faire siennes, les assumer.

« L’argent est l’essence concentrée de la puissance  »

a fenêtre s'ouvre sur l'été

petite musique du jour

le coeur ouvre son printemps





N.Flamel

«  L’obsession du passé a quelque chose de vain et de lassant, »

Cette thèse [Thèse 25 de la SdS], qui confère à la séparation un rôle clé dans la dialectique historique grâce à laquelle les agents pourront retrouver le temps irréversible du vivant que le Spectacle a produit en même qu'il les en a dépossédés, évoque une citation de Hegel, qui apparaît dans les fiches de lecture. Elle est issue des "Différences entre les systèmes de Fichte et de Schelling" : « La totalité dans la vie la plus intense n'est possible que par le rétablissement à partir de la séparation la plus intense. » La notion de séparation construite par Debord provient de la pensée dialectique qu'il puise aussi bien chez Hegel que chez Marx. Dans "La Société du Spectacle", il s'efforce d'inclure ce processus de séparation à l'origine du Spectacle dans une dialectique au sein de laquelle il constitue un moment nécessaire (il incarne en un sens le travail du négatif), à l'image du Socrate de Hegel brisant la belle unité grecque au profit de la conquête de la liberté sous la forme de l'autodétermination du jugement, et de celle de la bourgeoisie chez Marx et de son rôle fondamental dans le développement des forces productives. Cette dialectique de l'unité et de la séparation dans l'histoire façonnée par le Spectacle peut quant à elle être interprétée ainsi : son point de départ est l'unité entre la communauté et le temps social dans les sociétés organisées par les mythes, au sein desquelles il y a en effet correspondance entre le rythme du travail - dont on rappelle qu'il est l'étalon de la mesure sociale du temps - et la cyclicité constitutive du mythe. L'autonomisation des forces historiques (avec la constitution du pouvoir hiérarchique, sur le modèle du despotisme oriental) constitue une étape nécessaire, celle de l'arrachement du temps humain à la cyclicité et de l'introduction d'une direction, d'un sens, d'une irréversibilité dans l'histoire. La tâche de la praxis révolutionnaire est alors de retrouver l'unité entre la communauté et le temps social - irréversible désormais - en tant qu'unité qui précisément contient en elle la médiation.

« des meubles tubulaires en verre et chrome. Ça brillait comme la salle d’exposition d’une voiture de course. »

I’ve written before about being an ọgbanje, that if you are born to die,

then you are a dead thing even while you live. I learned so much from being

a dead thing, unseen even when in bare sight, nowhere no matter where I

go. Every time I made a new home, all my parlors were graves, all my roofs

were earth. I became a void and it was earbleed loud, but I was dead and

happy and just starting. I put my teeth in the back of fear’s neck and shook

it till it was limp, till it surrendered. I catloped after happiness, tackled it

down, and dragged it home by the bloody throat. Who dares tell me I can’t

have everything? My God, I’m coming over the hill, I’m a monster. I tried

not to forget it. You reminded me often; thank you so much for that.

I have a note—something you told me once when we were talking about

humans. “They will serve,” you said. “They are dealing with a god at all

times, even when you don’t remember your own self.”

You were right, I didn’t remember—not because it wasn’t true, but

because it wasn’t true all the time. If a mask is also a face, a collection of

sixty-seven masks is a collection of sixty-seven faces. I’m still counting

them, trying to throw away the ones that are made of poor human skin,

empty-eyed rotted things, puppets. I made the ọgbanje face when I carved

my cheeks in St. Augustine as the new year exploded; that one is

comfortable, but old now. The face of a dead thing, the void—the Baron’s

childwife, really, fuck me in a fresh grave—while that face is true, it

wouldn’t stay all the time. So, I thought I was failing.

« Au-dessus de ma tête, le ciel était d’un beau bleu-noir, avec une profusion d’étoiles et quelques légers nuages qui dérivaient vers la mer. Le mouvement des nuages donnait l’impression que les étoiles tournaient lentement comme les rouages d’une pendule céleste. J’eus un instant de vertige devant la grandeur de ce que je voyais : les constellations qui tournaient, la terre qui tournait, l’allure extraordinaire de ce ciel ouvrant sur le néant, mais un néant bleu-noir, beau et doux comme du velours. Oui, pensai-je, le monde est vraiment beau. »

My childhood can be measured easily, in pools of light spilling onto

pages and books blanketing the surfaces of our house in Aba. When

the electricity died, as it often did, I read by candlelight or with a torchlight

balanced against my body. Both my parents had been heavy readers; they

dragged their libraries into their marriage and kept them separate, distinct,

as if they both knew their relationship would end. My father had a

collection of Reader’s Digest condensed novels on the top shelf of the

bookcase in my brother’s room. In one of them, a little boy called his sister

stupid because she was seven years old. I took it personally when I first

read it, bristling with rage, because I was seven, too. That didn’t mean we

were stupid.

When my parents discovered I’d started reading the sex-advice columns

in my mother’s magazines as a child because I had run out of material, they

quickly bought me more books. Stories became my entire world, unchecked

and unrestricted; I was nine when I read V. C. Andrews’s Flowers in the

Attic, which I think is entirely too young for a child as lonely as I was. My

sister and I rummaged through my mother’s trunk, a steel tomb tucked in a

corner of the house, and we found a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca,

with that haunting first line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley

again.” My father’s library had a copy of Ken Follett’s book The Key to

Rebecca, which I’d read before, and eleven-year-old me was in awe at

finding a book that I’d first read about inside another book; worlds eating

worlds, all made by words.

By the time I started college in the States, I’d read every book in my

childhood home. The white dean of my school kept introducing me as the

sixteen-year-old freshman from West Africa who’d already read Dickens

and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as if any of that was surprising or special. I’d

only read those books because they were there; the awe associated with a

certain European literary canon wasn’t relevant. I’d also read Cyprian

Ekwensi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, the secret

copy of The Joy of Sex hidden away in my parents’ room, every

encyclopedia entry in my school library on Greek mythology, labels on

shampoo bottles, the sides of cornflakes boxes and Bournvita tins during

breakfast, countless contraband Harlequin and Mills & Boon romance

novels bartered with secondary-school classmates, narrative interludes in

my brother’s video games, and all the parts of the Bible that referenced sex.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that there was a canon I was

expected to prioritize, especially if I wanted to consider myself a writer, that

the work of dead white men could be a type of currency.

A few years ago, during a nonfiction workshop at my MFA program, I

read Vladimir Nabokov for the first time. The workshop was mostly white,

except for me and two other writers of color, and we’d been assigned his

memoir, Speak, Memory. I hadn’t expected much before reading the book,

but I ended up delightfully surprised at how strongly it resonated: the ways

in which Nabokov engaged with his own selfhood, the thinking that

unspooled from that, how it reflected what I was doing in the debut novel I

was working on. I felt like I’d found a precedent for what I was creating.

On the day of the workshop, we were all asked to bring in pieces we’d

written, to be critiqued after we discussed the assigned reading. I brought

the requested printout of my work, as did all the white writers, but the other

two writers of color had nothing to turn in.

“It’s Nabokov,” they said. “No one writes like he does. No one can do

what he does.” They were so intimidated by his brilliance that they’d

chosen not to present their own writing. I didn’t know how to respond, but

my enthusiasm about the connection I’d felt with his work dimmed into a

guarded wariness. In the air of that room, as everyone agreed with them

about how untouchable Nabokov was, it felt as if the only permitted

emotion was awe, like anything else would be seen as incredibly arrogant. I

wasn’t supposed to read Nabokov and think, “Ah, we’re doing something

similar with this study of the self.” I was supposed to be intimidated,

worshipful. I was off script.

In the moment, I figured they knew better. They’d read more than I had;

I was clumsy and naive to see a potential peer in Nabokov. As a young

writer working on their first book, it made me even more nervous about

what I was writing, the ways my work deviated from other stories that were

out there. I was besieged with anxieties: What if I wasn’t allowed to do

what I was doing? What if it didn’t get published? What if the gatekeepers

read it and saw it as arrogant, me stepping out of place, writing about

metaphysical selves as if I had the creative freedom of a white writer in this

industry? I knew the world saw me as a Black writer, as an African woman

even though I wasn’t a woman, and I’d read enough about racism in

publishing to worry about how it would play out in real time against me.

I kept looking for stories like the one I was telling, but I couldn’t find

them, and that terrified me. Maybe I was meant to be writing stories that

looked more like what popular African writers had done before; maybe if I

stuck to themes that were familiar, perhaps even expected, I could have

some of the success they had. I couldn’t blame the other writers of color in

my workshop for swallowing their work instead of presenting it. They were

hearing the same message, broadcast by the limited range of our stories

made available to us, a message that seemed to tell us which of these stories

would be allowed through the gates and which would be held back. “When

you read work like Nabokov’s,” the message said, “turn your face away.

That’s not the kind of work you can make. There’s a script for people like

you; stick to it.”

I’ve been a reader all my life; I know books can be many things. My

favorites are the ones that function as portals into other constructed worlds.

I’ve loved those since I was a child; it’s why I read so much speculative

fiction. Some books are windows into another’s experiences, or even into

our own—demonstrating our raging desires to be seen and to see ourselves

—but I wonder if it is enough, this reflection of known things.

As I clawed my way through my manuscript, I remained deeply doubtful

about its future. When it went out on submission, none of the rejections

surprised me. I’d prepared myself for them—not because of the writing, per

se, but because of the market. The book wasn’t “immigrant experience”

enough; it was too internal; wouldn’t it be difficult to sell a book so deeply

rooted in Igbo ontology to a U.S. audience? I occasionally talk about

placelessness as it attaches to myself and my life, but in my fog of worry,

that feeling seemed to extend to my book, wrapping it in blurry tentacles.

Months later, after it finally sold, I was composing a description of it

with my editor and agent when the word “identity” came up.

“We can’t use that word as is,” I wrote in an email. “Everyone’s going to

assume that we mean national or racial identity, just because I’m a Nigerian

writer. We have to specify that it’s about metaphysical identity.”

“Are you sure you want to use the word ‘metaphysical’?” they asked.

“I know it might sound pretentious, but I honestly don’t know another

accurate word,” I wrote back.

My main character’s life and experiences weren’t centered on her being

African, or Black, or an immigrant. Those were negligible, secondary. Her

core conflict was that she was embodied: that she existed, that she had

selves, that she was several. I didn’t know any other books by African

writers that asked or answered the questions I was working with, but I very

much wanted to find precedent. I figured that would tell me if what I was

doing was permissible or possible, that it would allow me to predict the

trajectory of the book and afford me some security. Sometimes we don’t get

the reassurances we want; we make the work anyway. By then, I knew what

it was like to look for books that reflected my world and not be able to find

them. I know the power of people feeling seen, having access to stories that

mirror their own, and what that experience can move inside them.

I wonder if it’s enough. I know, for me, it’s not.

—

IT IS SUMMER in New York and I am at a cathedral uptown, meeting with

Katherine Agyemaa Agard, a Trinidadian writer whose work and mind I

love. We walk past the ceiling that looks like nothingness and climb into the

ornate choir section. I give her a signed advance copy of Freshwater and

she gives me a spray of velvet orange flowers. We eat two tangerines, piling

the rinds sweetly around us. Katherine is telling me about her book Of

Colour and its strangeness, how she’s not sure it is actually a book; we are

thinking about what a book can be. I tell her how I want reflections that are

alive, that shift things for me instead of showing me the familiar. Perhaps

it’s because I couldn’t find my own world when I looked for it in books, and

though I found other worlds there—ones I’ve lived in, pretended in, moved

through—it has never felt like enough.

So instead I turned to work that didn’t reflect my story, but made me

want to write new ones. I fell for books that challenged form and

convention because something in them challenged me. Within the

cathedral’s quiet, I tell Katherine about Alain Mabanckou’s Broken Glass,

punctuated with commas alone, and Helen Oyeyemi’s Mr. Fox, storytelling

within storytelling, blurred realities. I use my phone to pull up the ebook of

Fran Ross’s 1974 novel, Oreo, and show her the first two pages, with the

diagrams and the equations, the magnificent things Ross did with structure.

“That’s an alive reflection,” I say. “It’s the kind of work you’d think only

white writers get to

J'ai enfin pris conscience d'un truc...

Il y en a qui disent que le mariage, c'est l'enfer...

Mais le véritable enfer, c'est d'être obligé...

De faire la même chose toute sa vie.



Les relations avec les parents, les frères et soeurs...

Le boulot...

C'est valable pour tout.

Certains y voient une forme de stabilité...

Il y a bien des gens...

Qui ont des animaux de compagnie... Alors qu'ils ne veulent pas de gosses!



Moi-même, j'ai un chien...

Mais ce que j'apprécie avec eux..

C'est qu'ils ne vivent pas vieux!!

Si c'est juste pour un temps limité...

Même un irresponsable comme moi peut s'en sortir.

My childhood can be measured easily, in pools of light spilling onto

pages and books blanketing the surfaces of our house in Aba. When

the electricity died, as it often did, I read by candlelight or with a torchlight

balanced against my body. Both my parents had been heavy readers; they

dragged their libraries into their marriage and kept them separate, distinct,

as if they both knew their relationship would end. My father had a

collection of Reader’s Digest condensed novels on the top shelf of the

bookcase in my brother’s room. In one of them, a little boy called his sister

stupid because she was seven years old. I took it personally when I first

read it, bristling with rage, because I was seven, too. That didn’t mean we

were stupid.

When my parents discovered I’d started reading the sex-advice columns

in my mother’s magazines as a child because I had run out of material, they

quickly bought me more books. Stories became my entire world, unchecked

and unrestricted; I was nine when I read V. C. Andrews’s Flowers in the

Attic, which I think is entirely too young for a child as lonely as I was. My

sister and I rummaged through my mother’s trunk, a steel tomb tucked in a

corner of the house, and we found a copy of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca,

with that haunting first line: “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley

again.” My father’s library had a copy of Ken Follett’s book The Key to

Rebecca, which I’d read before, and eleven-year-old me was in awe at

finding a book that I’d first read about inside another book; worlds eating

worlds, all made by words.

By the time I started college in the States, I’d read every book in my

childhood home. The white dean of my school kept introducing me as the

sixteen-year-old freshman from West Africa who’d already read Dickens

and Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as if any of that was surprising or special. I’d

only read those books because they were there; the awe associated with a

certain European literary canon wasn’t relevant. I’d also read Cyprian

Ekwensi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, the secret

copy of The Joy of Sex hidden away in my parents’ room, every

encyclopedia entry in my school library on Greek mythology, labels on

shampoo bottles, the sides of cornflakes boxes and Bournvita tins during

breakfast, countless contraband Harlequin and Mills & Boon romance

novels bartered with secondary-school classmates, narrative interludes in

my brother’s video games, and all the parts of the Bible that referenced sex.

It wasn’t until much later that I realized that there was a canon I was

expected to prioritize, especially if I wanted to consider myself a writer, that

the work of dead white men could be a type of currency.