“La Dissociation”, by Nadia Yala Kisukidi: practice of the creative imagination
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“La Dissociation”, by Nadia Yala Kisukidi, Seuil, 348 p., €20, digital €15.
Nadia Yala Kisukidi has no problem with failure. Before publishing her first novel in this literary season, the philosopher, lecturer at the University of Paris-VIII, had written another fiction. “It was too literal, you could guess that I was marrying the voice of the narrator, but I didn’t want to tell my life”, she confides to the “World of Books”. Yet, rather than throwing out the narrator, Nadia Yala Kisukidi added what she calls “an operator of indiscipline”by giving it a very small size, “in order to explode the writing, to play with dimensions and worlds”. Thus was born The Dissociationthe story of a young mestizo fleeing the madness of her grandmother, who discovers on the way that she has the gift of extracting herself from reality by her imagination alone.
The power of the imagination fascinates the philosopher, a specialist inHenry Bergson (1859-1941). At the author of Creative Evolution (1907) interests him “a certain dimension of the imagination as a focus of metaphysical creation”. It is through the same prism that she devoted herself to postcolonial studies and approached fiction. “The desire to follow characters, to mistreat the boundaries between reason and madness, to play with levels of language has always been with me. »
The idea of madness
In 2017, the researcher (born in 1978) therefore tackled what would become Dissociation, by reconnecting with the heroine of his first text, who embarked on a “rail-movie” through France. Here, it moves from Villeneuve-d’Ascq (Nord) to Ivry-sur-Seine (Val-de-Marne). The places in the novel, where she dreamed a lot as a teenager, are the only autobiographical data that Nadia Yala Kisukidi recognizes. Les Etoiles d’Ivry, these concrete buildings designed by architects Gailhoustet and Renaudie, inspired the utopia of the local L’Indépendance, which occupies an important part of the plot. ” My father, who was very politically involved, met his friends there every June 30, the day of Congo’s independence, to tell anecdotes and continue to dream of the country.she recalls.
The starting point of The Dissociationhowever, was not this image, but the idea of madness. “The one we suffer and which diminishes us”, says the author. That of the grandmother is expressed through various racial and racist tropes, enclosing the heroine in “a prison of language”. So the narrator escapes. The author sprinkles the story of her trip with tales that she invents, such as “The Fable of the Baboon and the Warthog”. These tales are like interludes that allow “not to always have to give a strict account of what happens to the characters, but to feel caught up in a thickness of time”, she says. Added to this is a final layer: the “Notes and remarks for the drafting of the Manual”, in which the heroine records her “Ideas”. “I wanted to show that the violence of the world does not systematically dry us out. The book wonders how to produce waking dreams, precisely because reality only offers the perspective of a shrunken world. »
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