Hubert Haddad

In collaboration with the International Organization of Francophonie (OIF)

Crédits photo : Elisabeth Alimi

"Who wrote Palestine? A poet, whose magnificent language restores life and humanity to the daily pain of conflict (...) In its quivering prose, in the physical suffering of characters faced with totally mundane settings, in the enthusiasm of renewed discussions and beyond the suspended destiny of Cham, Palestine is a novel to be shared. This is probably one of the most beautiful books by a committed writer who challenges his contemporaries."

Le Monde des livres, Valérie Marin La Meslée

The Speaker

Born in Tunis in 1947, Hubert Abraham Haddad followed his parents into exile in France several years later, first to Belleville, Ménilmontant, and then to the housing projects. He lived the difficult life of the immigrant growing up with a shop-keeper father and a mother of Algerian origin who suffered from identity problems.

He evoked this childhood in his story le Camp du bandit mauresque (The Camp of the Moorish Bandit) (Fayard, 2005). While under the spell of adolescence-induced contemporary poetry, he founded the review, Le Point d'être  (The Point of Being), influenced by surrealism, working with collaborators such as Stanislas Rodanski, Charles Duits, Robert Lebel, Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange and Isabelle Waldberg.

His first collection of poems, Le Charnier déductif (Deductive Mass Grave), appeared in 1967. His first story, written at the same time and entitled Armelle ou l'éternel retour (Armelle or the Eternal Return), was not published until 1989. Starting with Un rêve de glace (A Dream of Ice) (Albin Michel, 1974; Zulma, 2005), he has continuously produced novels and collections of stories, alternating with essays on art or literature, plays, and collections of poems.

After investigating the realm of the fantastic in a wild, hyper-realistic light, the author of Perdus dans un profond sommeil (Lost in a Deep Sleep) (Albin Michel, 1986), L'Univers (The Universe), a dictionary novel (Zulma, 1999) also ventured into the critical territory of history through myth and legend, notably with Le Chevalier Alouette (Knight Alouette) and La Double conversion d'al-Mostancir (The Double Conversion of Al-Mostancir) (both published by Fayard), dream-like fantasy (La culture de l'hystérie n'est pas une spécialité horticole (Growing Hysteria Is Not a Horticultural Specialty), Fayard, 2003), fictional investigation of contemporary myth (La Condition magique (The Magical Condition), SGDL’s Grand Prix for the Novel, Zulma, 1998) and topical current events (Palestine, Zulma, 2007).

Haddad’s use of different genres and subjects combined with his extensive experience with writing workshops led him to write Le Nouveau Magasin d'écriture (The New Writing Store)(Zulma, 2006), a sort of action encyclopedia of literature and the art of writing, including a number of new literary games in addition to reflections on books and authors.  This volume was followed in 2007 by the Nouveau Nouveau Magasin d'écriture (The New New Writing Store), devoted to the splendors of the imaginary world, with two hundred engravings selected for their evocative power.

Hubert Haddad has received literary prizes for a number of his works, including the 1983 Georges Bernanos Prize for Les Effrois (The Terrors); the 1991 Maupassant Prize for Le Secret de l'immortalité (The Secret of Immortality); the 1998 SGDL (Société des gens de lettres/ Literary Society) Grand Prix for the Novel for La Condition magique (The Magical Condition); the 2008 Five Francophonie Continents Prize and the 2009 Prix Renaudot Poche for Palestine, a political novel of unrelenting tension, which raises romantic passion to the level of myth, and includes a deeply moving call for peace.

Lectures

French Literature and Francophonie, or French as Language of the four corners of the earth
Current French language literature might as easily be composed in Africa, in the Middle East, or in the Caribbean as within France itself. A basic ingredient of its richness at the beginning of the 21st century comes from this prodigious nutritive excess, after-effects former colonial ambitions: the French language has remained on all of the continents, a sort of intangible booty to finally convey the otherness, the ampliative metaphor of “elsewhere.”

Why does the Francophonie remain the last best hope for the langue d’oïl (French)? What are the exclusive relations of a writer with his language, in Paris or on the other side of the world? How does he invest in language vis-à-vis his personal story? In this context, what do the ideological stances related to the influences and the perpetuation of literatures mean?

The comparison of unique, eminently atypical practices in Senegal or Haiti, in Beirut or Quebec might be fruitful, even if it might be a bit audacious to want to apply sociological-like schemas to the disparate exercise of subjectivities wrestling with the mystery of the world. Writing a novel or a poem in Tunis or in Pointe-à-Pitre is to reinvent French beneficially, to recharge its batteries on the edges of the symbol and signs, by a unique quality of memory and history, of distance and exile.

But literary Francophonie -beyond the destitution and splendors of a language- perhaps includes the best of contemporary French literature today due to the violence and singularity of the issues that it covers, assimilates and magnifies.

Far from the dead ends of formalisms and autofiction, praise for imaginary literature in France today and yesterday
French literature, in its “vitals,” probably scarcely corresponds to the public image that we have of it.

The academy, the publishing industry and the media in general remain captive to the vicious circle of popularization and business, forgetting in the process the space outside of the norms of poetic prose or the concealed adventure of the short story.

The New Novel like post-Beckett minimalism will probably prove to have been only an epiphenomenon of Flaubertian realism, rekindled by Kafka’s lesson, in fact symptomatic of the disasters of humanism in France at the end of the Collaboration and colonial wars.

The post-war period, in a less uniform way, was marked by the durability of surrealism and the values of the resistance, with such figureheads as Julien Gracq, Georges Bataille, Jean Genet or Louis Aragon, but also André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Noël Devaulx, Michel Fardoulis-Lagrange and many others.

The false perspective of the relative media coverage of the literary phenomenon hides the multiform reality of fiction in France (a fortiori in its global reception). Just as the 19th century has been actively assessed, the last century should be reconsidered and reassessed by a lively critical -and let us say, poetic-  investigation, breaking with academic formalisms and partisan appropriations of all sorts. The literary field (and the artistic field in general) has the peculiarity of not sticking to its image, of being in a more or less acute disconnect with respect to its topicality and reception.

This lecture will attempt to sketch out another less exclusive panorama which is more attentive to the essential voices which are still infrequently or poorly audible, by gambling on the genius of the language.

Writing Workshop: Perspective on the development of an active method based on the principle of universal analogy (see the two volumes of the Magasin d’écriture (Writing Store), éditions Zulma).
The writer who devotes all of his time to leading writing workshops obviously contributes his practical as well as theoretical knowledge of the discipline. If he is perceived in his somewhat mythic position as author, he encourages emulation.

Above all, his role is permanent invention, the productive testing of his abilities with respect to discovery, imagination and fantasy.

A writer, an artist is someone who is coming out of a long exam in the form of a quest for his freedom. Transmitting this perspective of multiform openness, this spirit of independence and this availability is the lot of the writer.

Furthermore, in the workshop we only extend for general consumption our own solitary, syncretic workshop in order to try out in the open -and this time around in an analytical way, at least from the beginning- the multiple procedure which leads to writing, creating or revisiting a text.

In most workshops, activity is based on a body of knowledge, of more or less identified constraints. My approach is a bit different: I believe that, fundamentally, the first knowledge common to all is the imaginary. By "imaginary" I mean the revival by language -system of symbols organically integrated specifying the human as opening- of all that comprises our presence in the world, with a secret reality composed of myths and their legendary derivations which are the vital movement of the psyche and the fabric of our life from which we even weave utopias.

With respect to invention and creativity, it is of little importance whether we know scarcely two hundred words orally or whether we have accumulated the content of a library. Furthermore, there is no hierarchy in the human condition: language bases us all on a level playing ground in the symbolic space where freedom is invented and won.

Links

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luWbJbFysLg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9LD2xPv9zQ
http://www.rue89.com/cabinet-de-lecture/le-reportage-poetique-dhubert-haddad-en-palestine

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