Jean-Paul Mari was born in 1950 in Algiers. He is a journalist, reporter and writer. Albert-Londres Prize, Bayeux Prize for War Correspondents, Grand Prize for “Elle” readers, he is among other things the author of The Algerian Night, No visible injuries and Drunken Boats. His new story forget the night is an autobiographical and journalistic quest.
“I was born in a grave. Not a simple hole dug in the earth, but an all-white rectangular room with whitewashed walls, sanitary tiling where my father was lying, naked, on a marble slab, wrapped in a white sheet. When I kissed him, his skin was warm and I realized he was dead. Shot with a large caliber bullet in the back by the killers who were lying in wait.
I didn’t know it yet, but it would take me a whole adult life, an entire book, to find meaning in this primary chaos.
Wherever I am, whatever I am doing, in a boxing ring, on foot on the green line of Beirut or in Baghdad on the Euphrates, in cursed Jerusalem or besieged Sarajevo, in the dark suburbs of Islam , in the heart of an Amazonian forest or the mass graves of Rwanda, I would have no choice but to seek again and again to solve the same enigma of the shadows. To forget the night. And seek the light. » J.-P. Mari for the Buchet-Chastel editions.