Mathieu Belezi chants Algeria in blood of 1845

“Attacking the earth and the sun”, by Mathieu Belezi, Le Tripode, 160 p., €17 (in bookstores on 1^er september).

One day, generals pass on their high prancing horses, “ruddy cheeks, full bellies, freshly polished boots”glorious speech – France, civilization, barbarism, gleaming balloons agitated above the mud, the barracks of boards, the dirt and the anguish. “They saw far, they saw big”, said Seraphine. And then they leave, and the life of the settlers resumes. Séraphine’s two boys died of cholera a few months earlier; she stays with her husband and daughter to plow the rockery. Further, the French soldiers massacre, rape, plunder, furrow Algeria in blood. France, civilization, barbarism: very good. But “we are not angels”repeats the captain. “No, we are not angels”answer the soldiers, and they advance among the terrified Arabs.

A protest never extinguished

Writer of revolt and cruelty, of the incandescent breath of history, Mathieu Belezi For nearly fifteen years, has not ceased to return to the colonization of Algeria, in a series of novels that hold the hammering, the angry repetition of a protest never extinguished. Staging different periods and characters, sometimes in opposite forms but united by the return of motifs, landscapes, historical facts, sometimes scenes, It was our land (Albin Michel, 2008), The Old Fools (Flammarion, 2011) and A false step in the life of Emma Picard (Flammarion, 2015) should, in the mind of the author, form a trilogy. False surprise, so much Algeria saturates the imagination of Belezi, Attack the earth and the sun comes today to break this closed whole by prolonging it, and by bringing it to its highest degree of intensity.

Fifteen years have passed since the French army landed in Algeria in 1830. Séraphine and her family, attracted by the promise of a new life, have joined one of the many “agricultural colonies” which will eventually return irreversible French presence. This is also the situation from which A false step in the life of Emma Picard, except that Emma had believed in the speeches of the Republic: the novel told of the slow decomposition of her dreams. Nothing like it in Attack the earth and the sun. Nobody, neither the authorities nor her husband, more gullible than her, could convince Séraphine that there was, here, the slightest chance to gamble. Promises will not be kept. She knows it. This is obvious, an almost carnal awareness of the lie. “Holy and Holy Mother of God, why have you abandoned us”she repeats throughout the book, and the whole adventure of the settlers is concentrated in this murmured litany facing the void, which imprints on the novel its rhythm both elegiac and brutal, its violence and its softness as if paralyzed.

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