In "Five in your eyes", Hadrien Bels curls the Marseille bobo

Hadrien Bels -

• The Iconoclast publishes Hadrien Bels' first novel,

  Cinq dans tes eyes

  , which is inspired by his childhood in the Basket of the 1990s in Marseille.

• The author paints a portrait full of nostalgia and truth about the neighborhood of his childhood, and in passing denounces the gentrification of his beloved city.

It is a first novel which makes speak about him.

It must be said that he attacks strongly, like this first sentence: “On these heights of Marseille, trendy bars and organic bakeries have appeared as suddenly as a herpes outbreak.

»Video maker and director, Hadrien Bels spent his childhood in the Panier district, behind the Old Port, which we quickly understand that he hardly tastes what he has become with the mass arrival of sores and tourists .

Surrounded by his not-so-fictitious band "Nordine, Djamel, Ange, Kassim and Ichem", the author of 

pieds cheerfully jeers at gentrification.

And offers a tasty dive, both ultra-realistic and sensitive, in the Marseille of yesterday and today.

Where does this first novel start from, why this desire to write about Marseille?

The idea was to write about my childhood neighborhood.

It really starts from there, from this group of friends and this neighborhood that has somewhat disappeared.

I wanted to bring the Basket of the 1990s back to life. I was in a writing residency in Tangier, I had written scenes from the past, like the stabbing, quite strong things, like news.

The narrative thread of this character, nicknamed Stress, who tries to make a film about his childhood neighborhood came next.

I didn't want to confine myself only to the past, I also wanted to talk about today's Marseille, hence these back and forth times.

New reading @ Ed_Iconoclaste #hadrienbels #cinqdanstesyeux # rl2020 #romanfrancais #litteraturecontemporaine pic.twitter.com/f1XKS31h5I

- Sandrine Guinot (@Sandrine_Guinot) September 17, 2020

You grew up in the Basket, "among the Comorians, Arabs and Portuguese, with my pink face" as you write ...

I grew up there, my parents arrived from Algeria in 1978. At the time, it was a family of intellectuals coming to settle in this popular district.

My brother and I grew up there.

My mother, who had spent five years teaching at the Beaux-Arts in Algiers, put us in public school.

Now I know it's something that can be complicated, back then it was done like that.

In the photo, it is not very difficult to find me.

Your mother is a cultural figure in the neighborhood, you also paint a beautiful portrait of her in the book.

Wasn't it finally a booze before its time?

I could blame him for being one of those people who planted the bobo flag in the neighborhood, like Armstrong on the moon.

But as she answered me, you had to go there at that time, no one wanted to set foot there.

The sores come when the place is warmed up, off-piste is not really their thing.

Throughout the novel, you prefer the word you invent of "coming" to that of "bobo", why?

There is a catch-all aspect with the word bobo, we don't really know who it really is anymore, we release it with all the sauces.

With “coming”, which designates someone who comes from elsewhere, I like this ambiguity between the people who arrived from immigration in the 1990s and the character of Stress, who is also somewhere a comer.

There is also an extraterrestrial side in this word, an invader that I like.

The sore is very marked symbolically, the coming is less so, it allowed to say more things.

You are not gentle with these sores / comedians, whether they are from the Panier, the Plaine, the Cours Ju or the Friche Belle de Mai… About the latter, you write for example: “Une hive de Venants which run the hand through the hair.

Few Marseillais work there, except for security or cooking.

"The 

northern districts are sellers and all kinds of artists turn around", you also write.

The book has been reduced a lot to this charge against gentrification.

Things aren't that Manichean, it's a bit simplistic.

I denounce people who are not clear on this, who are part of the equation and fight against that.

When I see “Solidarité Noailles” bags at the Ideal Grocery in the rue d'Aubagne, there is something wrong.

In the book, no one is spared, the anarcho-bobos, the petty bourgeois who go to beer bars, subsidized culture or identity withdrawal.

It is also a book on social determinism.

So this cosmopolitan Marseille from your childhood at the Panier no longer exists?

You just have to take a stroll on a Saturday evening in the Old Port or a Sunday on the Canebière to see that this popular Marseille exists.

What I reproach the most is the lack of life, the loss of a soul, today the streets are empty in the evening at Le Panier.

The neighborhood was doomed to become a political, uh, slip of the tongue, tourist showcase.

Everyone knew it with the Intercontinental under construction, the cobbled streets, we said to ourselves, it was going to be beautiful, except that it was done without people.

It has become a district where we sell ceramics, street art, a kind of tourist tour operator.

Are you worried that Marseille will become like Bordeaux or Lyon?

We are drawn to this city because it is messy.

Then we want cycle paths, that people park normally, we are in this paradox.

It scares me, do we really want this for Marseille?

I like the mess, I like that a city is not too tidy.

We want Marseille to become bourgeois, after that there is room.

In which Marseille do you live now?

It is the Marseille of the comers where I live today, I will not drink shots in a PMU.

My book is absolutely not against them, but those who go too fast, who go to the Vélodrome once in the season when it starts to win and give the impression of knowing everything.

I would like more slowness.

I took 40 years before declaring my love in Marseille.

Like the character in your novel, would you like to make a film about your childhood neighborhood?

Proposals are starting to arrive.

It's very jarring, it requires very great precision, just like a film on Naples.

We do not have the right to miss each other on what people eat, the way of getting around, of speaking ... In the book, there are few errors I think about the language, the physiognomy of the city, the codes.

It is from the inside, not a journalist's job.

And on the writing side, a project is underway, still in Marseille?

I'm trying to catch up, I soon have a writing residency in Belgium.

This is the big dilemma do I come back to Marseille, do I leave?

Five in your eyes, by Hadrien Bels, published by L'Iconoclaste, 18 euros.

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