The impatient -
Emmanuelle Collas
As a result of the health crisis, the Goncourt prize is delayed this year.
By November 30, why not read one of the four finalists, see all four?
Today, our community of readers-contributors recommends “Les impatientes” by Djaïli Amadou Amal, published on September 4, 2020 by Emmanuelle Collas editions.
Marceline Bodier, contributor to the
20 Minutes
Books
reading group
, highly recommends
Les Impatientes
by Djaïli Amadou Amal.
Published on September 4, 2020 by Éditions Emmanuelle Collas, this book is one of the four finalists for the 2020 Goncourt Prize which will be awarded on November 30.
Her favorite quote:
And it never occurred to me to complain about it. It was so, and it cannot be otherwise.
Why this book?
Because the book is built around the story of three women:
Ramla, married at 17 to a man of 50;
Hindu, his half-sister, married to their alcoholic and drugged cousin;
Safira, 35, the first wife of the husband imposed on Ramla.
The first thing they have in common is that they got married against their will.
The second should be a common revolt against men… but the reverse is true: married women jealous of other women and hurt them to keep what little they have;
mothers, they impose the same ordeal on their daughters.
Because it's a novel that gives a voice to a people
we don't know well: the Peuls, Muslims of the Sahel, in Cameroon.
They are settled and settled in town, in Maroua, which is precisely the author's hometown.
Ramla's father is the first generation to leave his native village.
A step towards modernity?
Certainly, but it's still difficult to say when you know that this father cuts his son abruptly with "Get the hell out of me, insolent little one" when he begins a sentence with "the world has changed!"
Girls have the right… ”.
Because we want to cry out to these women to run away,
until we realize that even if they all think about it, they cannot because they would not be punished alone: they would condemn their mother and their family… If such an inhuman system can hold up, it is because it functions like a gigantic trap, where one even wonders what is the interest of men: Hindu may be married to her torturer, she notices in him "Many wounds and an immeasurable frustration which he masked by a great contempt for propriety".
Because it is also a universal book.
Certainly, the enormous difference between Fulani society and ours is that what is experienced there as terrifying, but normal, is terrifying and repressed by the law in ours.
But alas, that does not mean that it does not exist… When the author denounces the vision according to which marital rape, “It is not a rape.
It is a proof of love ”, it is addressed to all the women of the world.
And unfortunately too often when she adds "We all the same advised Mubarak to curb his ardor given the stitches that my injury required" ...
Because the book had a first life before being published
by Emmanuelle Collas, under the title
Munyal
.
This term punctuates the entire book and means "patience": patience sums up the unique possibility offered by the patriarchal system.
“Patience, my daughters!
Munyal!
This is the only value of marriage and of life.
The title "Les impatientes" therefore takes on a very precise connotation: to publish this book in France, to make the author's voice heard, is to make the voice of women heard who no longer want their lives to be reduced to waiting. with patience that it is finished.
The essentials in 2 minutes
The plot.
Ramla lives in a society where for other women "the greatest happiness was to marry a rich man".
However, at her forced marriage, “without false modesty, they display red eyes.
Through us, they relive their own marriage ”.
A world of terrible pretenses ...
Characters.
Men, women.
Men are the dominant, women are the dominated.
The young men change, but they are dominated by the old ones, who can take their 17-year-old lover as a second wife as they please… The characters are those of a very heavy patriarchal society.
Places.
Maroua is a city in the far north of Cameroon.
There live sedentary Peuls, “who have left their native village”, keep a herd of oxen there because “the ox makes the Fulani”, but have become “businessmen” in the city.
Business "men", but not "women" ...
The time.
The novel relates facts which appear from another age, resemble those experienced by the author in the early 1990s, and against which she still fights today in her association "Women of the Sahel".
The author.
Like her characters, Djaïli Amadou Amal, 45, is a Fulani, Muslim and from Maroua where she has located her novel.
Forcibly married at 17, had the insane courage to flee.
Admittedly, the book is not its story, but it is all the same "a fiction inspired by real facts".
Global francophone feminism has found its voice, and it is time for it to be published in France.
This book was read with
great admiration for the author.
For us, freedom is a motto inherited from our history;
for her, it was a revolt and a conquest obtained against her history, with the extreme strength of character that this implies.
To crown his book would honor the Goncourt Prize.
Buy this book on the Internet
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To read also >> Prix Goncourt (1/4): “L'Anomalie” reveals the prodigious singularity of Hervé Le Tellier
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