Franco-Congolese, Nadia Yala Kisukidi is a rising figure in African philosophy. Fascinated by novelistic writing, the philosopher delivers with Dissociation, his first novel published this fall, a very noticeable swerve in the field of fiction. Nadia Yala Kisukidi is our guest in Writing paths.
” At the heart of the beatings and fights, I thus had a strange experience, that of dissociation. I was not one, but two. There was this body, which didn’t always react, and my mind – alert, powerful. When my carcass sprawled on the ground, beaten up, my spirit rose, triumphant. He threw insults at the fighters, pursued the assailants, tackled them to the ground. In my head, I was winning every fight. The story was changing. Crushed, slumped, I was reborn. And my mouth, armed like a thousand faces, spat fire at the enemies. »
The above passage is taken from Dissociationthe first novel by the Franco-Congolese, Nadia Yala Kisukidi. The excerpt sets the tone for this picaresque and hallucinated novel, closer to Don Quixote and D’Alice in Wonderland only stories with a social and realistic tone that constitute the African literary corpus.
The Art of Dissociation
Dissociation tells the story of a young orphan of mixed origin, growing up in working class neighborhoods, somewhere in the North of France. At 10, the young girl suddenly stopped growing, to the despair of her grandmother who raised her. Her body suddenly froze, condemning the teenager to remain small all her life.
To escape the abuse imposed on her by her grandmother in the hope of making her grow up, but also to escape the racist violence she regularly encounters in high school where she is cruelly mocked, the orphan runs away from home. she. His only survival weapon is his magic power, which allows him to keep reality and its threats at bay by dissociating the body from the spirit. ” I had the gift of retrenchment. This gift was to save me and feeds the plot of this story exclaims the narrator.
” The dissociation, explains the author for her part, this word does not designate a concept, but a power, even a magical power. It is the power for the spirit to dissociate itself from the body, but this power of dissociation is not simply to resist the violence of this world, but perhaps also to overcome it through our stubbornness, stubbornness for the discovery places where life is not diminished, the stubbornness to make dreams come true against all odds and the stubbornness that none of the characters in this novel is a figure of resignation. »
From philosophy to fiction
Trained as a philosopher and lecturer at the University of Paris VIII, Nadia Kisukidi is a recognized specialist in Bergson and postcolonial thought. Born to a Franco-Italian mother and a Congolese father, she is considered a major rising figure in African philosophy. However, like other philosophers before her – think of Voltaire, author of Candidthink of Diderot author of Jacques the fatalist or -closer to us- to Romain Rolland or to the Congolese Yves-Valentin Mudimbe – the Franco-Congolese likes to recall how much she has always been fascinated by fiction and the inexhaustible imaginative resources of fiction.
She said it again recently at the microphone of RFI: ” What I find very powerful in novel writing is the possibility of giving free rein to an insolent, sometimes wild imagination, which precisely leads us to take the opposite view of reality. Building worlds, and maybe saying that not everything is of this world, that there are other worlds to consider and write about… »
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” Write other worlds », this is precisely what our primo-novelist tries to do in her inaugural fiction. Most of the pages of Dissociation is devoted to the story of the worlds on the fringes that the protagonist discovers while going in search of her family of hearts and fights.
The wandering dwarf
On more than 350 pages, Nadia Yala Kisukudi leads her readers on the roads of the quest for her heroine. His colorful story leads us from brick houses in the working-class neighborhoods of the North to the concrete buildings of Ivry-sur-Seine, via Lille, Villeneuve d’Ascq and Paris.
But each stopover turns out to be a universe in itself, teeming with whimsical, excessive, colorful beings, breaking the ban, but always rich in humanity and creative vitality, like the painter Luzolo who takes the protagonist under his wing. . He accompanies her throughout the novel, first in flesh and blood, then in the form of an invisible spirit prowling above the heads.
The figure of Luzolo is reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Ariel, a spirit whispering in the ears of Prospero, his friend and teacher. We are on the same level here in the phantasmagoria and the marvellous, the realism of the family tragedy of the beginning having imperceptibly tipped over into a novel of post-modern sensibility, à la Salman Rushdie or à la Marquez.
” phantasmagoria, recognize the author, it is really a desire. I wanted to break with a very sociological or autofictional writing. For me, the challenge of the novel is precisely to focus the writing on forms of leaps in a life which, even if it is sometimes subjected to violence, finds the means to project itself into the world and invent worlds. In this context, to be able to show precisely how a life at times resists and continues to unfold, despite everything that diminishes it, the tools of the supernatural and phantasmagoria become fundamentally interesting tools to describe the intense power, the pulsation of which is a becoming subject. »
The most beautiful pages of Nadia Yala Kisukidi’s novel are undoubtedly in the last part of the book, depicting the life and death of a contemporary political utopia in a new town in the inner suburbs of Paris. We are more precisely in Ivry-sur-Seine, a suburb that the author knows well having grown up in her concrete buildings.
She camped there her anarchist citadel answering to the beautiful name of “Independence”, in memory undoubtedly of the lost hopes of the opponents of the Mobutu regime who had found refuge in this city. The diminished life of which the small size of the heroine of Dissociation is an oh so eloquent metaphor that finds in the libertarian ideals and solidarity of the founders of Independence a horizon of expectation, brilliantly exploited in these closing pages.
Ambitious and deeply poetic, structured in layers mixing ideas, politics and myths, The Dissociation is a total novel from the pen of a philosopher who is no less an outstanding storyteller.
Dissociation, by Nadia Yala Kisukidi. Editions du Seuil, 352 pages, 20 euros.