Franco-Algerian, Walid Hajar Rachedi delivers, with What am I going to do in paradise? a promising first novel. Half-autofiction, half “road-novel”, this book tells the initiatory quest of its central character, engaged on the paths of the world which lead him from Paris to London, passing in particular by the Maghreb and Cairo. Double of the author, Malek is located at the crossroads of civilizations and wants to be representative of the fortunes and misfortunes of French youth of the Muslim faith.
” I think the desire to write initially came from the fact that I felt like I was observing things in an offbeat way. I grew up in France from Algerian parents. I was a class defector: I was born in a popular environment, then I went to study in Paris where I saw other worlds. This constant shift, I felt like it wasn’t reflected in the literature I could read. I started writing because I felt like the book I wanted to read didn’t exist. »
So speaks Walid Hajar Rachedi, storyteller of offbeat worlds. Walid Hajar Rachedi is a talented first novelist, as evidenced by the beautiful novel that this forty-year-old has just published in Editions Emmanuelle Collas. What am I going to do in paradise? is, in fact, an ambitious, hard-hitting first book, halfway between autofiction and travelogue, which takes us far from the city of Poplars to Stains where the plot of the story takes its source
Search for meaning
Double of the author, the hero-narrator of the novel, Malek Bensayah is of origin Franco-Algerian. Haunted by the tragic consequences of his youth, he feels cramped in his suburbs where the sky is low and the future somewhat blocked. It was while going to Lille to see a cousin freshly arrived from Algeria that Malek met Atiq, a young Afghan in exile, looking for his twin brother who had joined the Taliban.
Shaken by the story of Afghanistan’s slow descent into the hell of terror and religious fundamentalism, Malek decides to see the world with his own eyes. His quest for identity will take him to multicultural London, passing through Madrid, Seville, Granada, Tarifa, Tangier, Casablanca, Oran, Algiers, Bejaia, Annaba, Tunis, Sfax, Tripoli and Cairo. A long journey, which will be rich in encounters and discoveries on the meaning of life and death, on the challenges of spirituality in societies in search of meaning.
Returning to the story of the book, the author explains that for him, the journey of his character is less motivated by “a quest for identity only through a mystical and existential quest”. And to continue: “Malek’s journey ends in Egypt for the part that takes place in the Arab world and then he goes to London which we can consider the real end of the journey, when he confronts this multicultural world which presents itself as a model alternative to the Western city in which multiple identities are better accepted. With the character of Malek, what I wanted to do above all was to create a character who remains rooted in his faith, who asks himself existentialist questions, who did not reject either France or the West at all, but who found his strength elsewhere, in a mystical quest. For me, it was also to show the reality of young French people of the Muslim faith. »
Afghanistan torn apart
Other stories are added to Malek’s quest: that of the beautiful Englishwoman Kathleen, met on the road to Tangiers and with whom the narrator will fall madly in love, the story of Jeffrey, Kathleen’s father, a humanitarian who deluded by idealism in Afghanistan torn apart by American bombs. The career of this man will cross that of the two radicalized Islamist brothers, Atiq and Wassim, who will burst into Malek’s life in a dramatic way, to say the least. The convergence of these different trajectories constitutes the central narrative thread of Walid Hajar Rachedi’s novel, located resolutely at the crossroads of the intimate and the public.
Explanation of text by the novelist himself: ” A big theme that obsesses me is the question of free will. versus destiny. The history of Afghanistan is fascinating from this point of view because it is a country which resisted all imperialisms, all occupations, and at the same time which was robbed of its destiny. Me, I found that in the destiny of this country, there was something very romantic, almost a character as such, embodied by the characters of Atiq and Wassim. In fact what I meant by that is that the place where we will be born, the way in which historical events will unfold, will have a very great influence on the destiny of the characters and the whole issue will be: what do we do with these circumstances? This is the question of choice. As we see, especially in the epilogue of the novel, each of the characters will position themselves in a rather radical way in relation to that. We are in intimate logics, certainly, but also geopolitics which are very complex. »
“Ionly the voice of the narrator changes »
We do not emerge unscathed from this tale of quests and losses, set in the war of civilizations. There is something War and peace Tolstoyan in this novel which brilliantly mixes the small and the big story. There is also Camus and Richard Wright from which the author admits to having been inspired, while recalling by interposed character that ” all the stories have already been told, only the storyteller’s voice changes “.
A revealing phrase of the poetic art of Walid Hajar Rachedi, as he explains: “This sentence translates my own questioning as an author. When you start writing, especially when you’re in a position like mine, a Frenchman of Algerian origin who grew up in a popular environment, am I going to succeed in creating something new, something that describes the realities in a slightly different way? At the very beginning, as an author, we have a bit of a fantasy of trying to find a kind of hyper-original story, with twists, with incredible things, etc. It’s true that as I progress in writing, I realize that all the great stories are always somewhat the same. We make circles around the same story. Eventually, when you read the Bible, the Koran, even the great myths, the stories have already been told. What changes is the way of dealing with them, it’s the point of view, it’s the sensitivity, it’s the voice. »
This voice, it was not easy to find, admits the novelist. But it is there, this serious music, specific to Walid Hajar Rachedi, which reminds us of the tragic coherence of the world.
What would I do in paradise? by Walid Hajar Rachedi. Editions Emmanuelle Collas, 18 euros.