It is to be as close as possible to the works of the Algerian painter Baya that Kaouther Adimi has chosen to spend a night at the Institute of the Arab world. Intertwining the life of Baya and his own, between France and Algeria, she delivers with Enemy joy An intimate story, testifying, to the height of a child, of the horror of the black decade, but also of her love for Algeria which pushes her to write against fear and to “choose joy”.
“Neither dead nor murderer
I hide our losses
To enemy joy “
Highlights to the book of Kaótherher adimibefore entering it inside the Institute of the Arab World, these few verses of Kateb Yacine... We know the principle of the collection “My night at the museum” at Stock: a writer is invited to spend a night in a museum of his choice then to write a text that these hours of solitude in the middle of works of art will have inspired him. IF Kaótherher adimi chose the IMA, it is because there is an exhibition dedicated to the Algerian painter Behind. Revealed in 1947 by Aimé Maeght, famous from the age of 16, rented by Matisse, Picasso, Braque And many others, it will then fall back into anonymity and will not be rediscovered until much later, at the dawn of the 21st century. This is not the first time that Kaótherher adimi has the plan to talk about Behindof which she had “fallen in love” in 2009, at the Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers: in 2018, already, she had spent one night at the Picasso Museum, seeking in the paintings of the Catalan painter of the traces of this young Algerian artist who had attended the Madoura workshop. Caught up in her own ghosts, she had almost fled, carried away in a wandering to which a heavy sleep had succeeded … This time, in 2022, it was very close to the canvases of Behind That she settles, in the second basement of the IMA, determined to enter her universe and not to be engulfed by her own past.
The success of Enemy joy is due to the way the life of Behind And that of the author, his personal history and the great history, drawing the contours of an Algeria seen at a child. One of the interests of the book is to make us re/discover Behind -I did not know it myself before the exhibitions dedicated to her in Marseille recently-and to make us want to explore his works. To bring us, by following the journey of a small native and self-taught orphan, in Algeria in the 1940s and 50s, that tormented relations united to France. But we are mainly attached to the story which is born from the emotional chaos in which this night spent to the IMA plunges Kaótherher adimibringing her to the start of the Algerian civil war. Between two countries, between two languages, between two cultures, the little girl, after a four -year stay in Grenoble, left in August 1994 for Algeria where his father, soldier and a scholarship doctoral student, chose, counterclockwise, to return with his own. She was then eight years old. The joy of leaving Grenoble and its mountains, quickly succeeds the trauma of a terrifying arrest at a roadblock and then of a life marked by insecurity, harassment, fear, the containment of the family on itself, until the suicide bombing of December 11, 2007 from which she escapes very little.
Enemy joy is an intimate account, woven with buried memories since childhood, which testifies to the horror of the dark decade, forever written in the body of Kaótherher adimi. A necessary approach, carried out by relying on the testimonies of his relatives, in order to reconstruct his own story, forever marked, however, by the gaping holes of questions that have remained unanswered. A moving story, told in a vigorous writing and devoid of all pathos, that of a family where, between two languages, will build the love of Kaótherher adimi For literature: seeing herself deprived of books on her return to Algeria, the little girl that her father took every week to the Grenoble library, will be seized with the desire to write. Enemy joy is thus a reflection on the links which unite parents and children, on transmission, inheritances but also the unsaid with which it is necessary to compose. And if he testifies to the suffering experienced, those who twist your belly at dusk, it is also a declaration of love to Algeria which continues to accompany it wherever it is. Algeria, the only country where she really feels herself and for which she set out to listen to what resonates in her, as well “the echo of war” and “the laughter of Baya”, to write against fear and to “choose joy”.
Anne Randon
