It is a project which will have had “all kinds of ramifications”, which Mélikah Abdelmoumen really did not expect. “I think it’s because it resonates with questions that we’re asking ourselves today. »The warm writer tells me about the journey that led to the writing – and the people who pushed it – of a text which is the subject of a reading-show at the International Literature Festival (FIL) , Baldwin, Styron and I – and which will perhaps become a piece written by a collective. A text that she then developed as an essay, at the instigation of Rodney Saint-Éloi, the publisher of Mémoire Encrier who will publish it in February.
Originally: an article she published in the journal Spiral, in the spring of 2019. Called upon to contribute to the dossier on cultural appropriation, a polarized subject in which she did not find her place, she then recalled the “extraordinary” relationship between the two great American writers and “the violence of reactions to this friendship ”. A story “which shows the complexity that these issues should have, in my opinion, in public debates”.
In 1967, William Styron – future author of Sophie’s choice – writing The confessions de Nat Turner from a real slave revolt of 1831. Controversy: in 1968, the book appeared Styron’s Nat Turner: Ten Black Writers Respond, where the authors reproach this appropriation and, among other things, “to reproduce clichés” to the one whose grandparents owned slaves.
For Abdelmoumen, great reader of the author of If Beale Street could speak, it is however obvious that the “Nat Turner of Styron is James Baldwin”. “I find you can feel his influence in Styron’s view of the anger of a black man. As if the white author had heard his friend’s voice while writing.
Identity
A debate is then organized between Styron and Ossie Davis, “great committed American actor”, animated by Baldwin, and of which the spectacle translates a part. An “exciting” exchange, because both are right and they know it. Davis tells him, “one of the things that makes me angry is that you did it first.” So much so that the only romantic version of this black revolt is that of Styron.
On the contrary, Baldwin, himself a descendant of slaves, had urged his friend to write this “I” story, trying to understand from the inside the experience of African Americans. “According to him, the whites [ont] a place in history that they must recognize, and the only way is by putting themselves in [leur] skin. »Mélikah Abdelmoumen says he is« more inclined to be on Baldwin’s side. Even if we find that Confessions are clumsy or that Styron was wrong, we can criticize, debate. But at least we broach the subject, and for me, literature is made to provoke these debates. “
She also raises this question: “we want literature representative of diversity, but we don’t have the right to talk about others. How do we do ? Besides the artist’s freedom to speak for the other, this story raises issues of identity. As a racialized woman – a “category” in which we have placed, for several years now, the Quebecer born in Saguenay to a father of Tunisian origin – we assume that “I would have an authority to criticize people who speak Arabs. But there is no way to represent the Arabs. They are not an entity. And in addition, I find myself having to attest to an identity in which I do not recognize myself? “
We want literature representative of diversity, but we don’t have the right to talk about others. How do we do ?
And for her, her identity is made up of several elements. “I don’t accept that she is just ethnic. I find that it is reduced a lot to that in the general discourse. [L’interprète] Émile-Proulx Cloutier said yesterday on the radio, and I think he summed it up very well: we have the impression that it is either the author can do what he wants, and we don’t care about injured sensibilities , or these take up all the space as if the two were mutually exclusive. How do we do when both call out to us? “
Surprise
The adaptation for the stage by the reading director, bookseller Jonathan Vartabédian, combines the author’s words with extracts from Baldwin and Styron’s books. Even more than literature, the theater raises issues of representativeness – in particular because it is a question of work for the performers. “And me in my text, when I quote Confessions, I put quotes and it’s Nat Turner who says “I” from Styron’s pen. But as Émile said: since it is a white writer who puts himself in the skin of a black man, who reads this text on stage? He didn’t want to say it. “
If we reserve the surprise of the Quat’Sous event for him, Mélikah Abdelmoumen knows that his cast (Lyndz Dantiste, Elkahna Talbi and Émile Proulx-Cloutier), which reflects the diversity at the heart of Baldwin, Styron and I, is not confined to the respective identity of each. “They’re going to switch roles. “
The third element of the title (“and me”) is both singular and plural. “In the play, it’s me trying to analyze how it resonates with a woman in my position, with my relationship to issues of diversity, but at the same time, it’s all of us. I don’t think I’m the only one who is uncomfortable with the virulence of the debates. »The clear polarization of the camps, as with SLAV by Robert Lepage, for example.
If there’s one thing we can learn from the Baldwin-Styron connection, it’s humanism, she says. “By dint of stopping at the boxes that speak of only one aspect of us, we lose sight of the common humanity. There is also the fact that these debates on questions of identity are always more complicated than one thinks. And my will was to bring back the desire to have complicated discussions, and not to be afraid of disagreement. “
Even in Quebec, notoriously cautious about it, it is possible. “When we started the project, we had big debates between people all from different origins, and we all made progress in this. “
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