INTERVIEW
Writer and former deputy editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo , Jean-Marie Gourio has been a poetry for the streets for several years. He published volume 4 of his Brèves de Comptoir at Robert Laffont, a series started in 1985, with which he listed the flashes and other nuggets that people tell, leaning against the counters of bistros.
"These are the people who live outside, these are the people from the outside, markets, EDF, construction sites, the cops, the paramedics, all the people who run everywhere to save us right now, people who are hot in summer, cold in winter, who have curved fingers ", details Jean-Marie Gourio at the microphone of Philippe Vandel, in Culture Médias on Europe 1.
A form of homage therefore, "to the people who work, the workers, the field of workers, of the working class, it is Doisneau, Prévert", he sums up again.
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The French in isolation
The period of confinement that France is currently going through, faced with the Covid-19 epidemic, also reminds him of how much man remains a sociable animal and needs to find himself in the convivial places that are bars and restaurants. "There, we realize how important others are," he points out. "We also see the importance of bistros for people to meet and talk", notes Jean-Marie Gourio for whom, in this compartmentalized period, literature remains the best way to escape. "In this whole country where there is no longer a bistro, there remains an open bistro: the book!"
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And yet, Jean-Marie Gourio almost gave up literature and his short stories . Deeply affected by the loss of his friends after the Charlie Hebdo attack, he then considered that he no longer had "the right to be happy". "I had the feeling that this minute of silence that I had made for my friends must last forever," he says. "I could no longer go to cafes, because there were TV screens and for a week we could only see stretchers. Only dead, dead, dead!" Recalls the writer.