Description
Reviews and press:
Dresden latest news:
The French-writing Algerian author, born in 1950, spent two years researching newspaper articles, diaries and letters by contemporary authors. In 2008 "Pierre Sang Papier ou cendre" was published, for which she promptly received the Grand Prix du roman francophone SILA. Christine Belakhdar has now translated the book into German under the title "Madame Lafrance". She came to the Villa Augustin in Dresden for the book premiere together with the author, moderated by Torsten König from the Institute for Romance Studies at the TU. more
Signatures:
Maïssa Bey also tells her story with a view to today and the question that will continue to occupy us in 2018, where the anger of the Arab world towards “the West” comes from. Much of this can be found in colonial history. The nationalism that Europeans brought to Africa and Asia, the anti-Semitism they brought with them, the racism, the hubris, the arrogance of power. The subjugation of countries, tribes and established structures for purely economic and geostrategic interests. more
afarab.blogspot.com:
Madame LaFrance has arrived. She brings strong men with her who will drain the swamps for her, build roads and bridges for her, lay railway lines for her, till fields for her and only her and bring in rich harvests that the motherland urgently needs. (...) more
Jürgen –
When I moved to Algeria in 1988 to work there for the next few years, I knew little about the country's violent history.
Reaching Algiers from the sea gives the impression of coming to Marseille. The city you had just left. The white city on the southern Mediterranean radiates French.
At the top is the Notre Dame d'Afrique Cathedral.
The houses and balconies were French and the plane trees in the streets completed the image of a southern French town.
Only gradually did I realize what it was all about, that the streets in Algiers often had several names, French names on old maps, Arabic names on the new ones.
Even the city names were different.
Even when I was standing on the beach of Sidi Feruch, where today people from the city come to bathe, I didn't realize that I was standing on historical ground, because the French conquered the country from this small town.
Now, reading Maisa Bey's book, it becomes clear to me once again what this capricious Madame "La France", who cannot harm anyone, has done in the North African country.
The translator takes up the restrained tone of the original and transfers it just as carefully into present-day Germany.
The book mentions only a few names, mostly Bey speaks only of "the child, the men".
Whenever the name Albert comes up, when two men talk about the atrocities committed by the French, I immediately think of Camus - Albert Camus.
Despite his entry into the country's bourgeois elite, he increasingly campaigned for the rights of the oppressed, in this case the country's Arabic- and Berberophone population.
So the novel takes me along and guides me through the history of this oppressed country on our European doorstep.
The restraint in style and tone pulls me further and deeper into the story and thus into Algeria's otherwise incomprehensible present.
More and more things come to mind thanks to this book.
Who still knows today that the French had the criminal energy to detonate four atomic bombs in the atmosphere in southern Algeria!?
A country and the people there, to whom so much injustice has been done by "Madame la France", can be encountered through this book in a more open-minded and understanding way than before reading it.
And so the book certainly lived up to its claim.
Through this novel I rediscovered my Algeria.