Testimony ? Confessions? Autofiction? Difficult to locate Berber heart, this second novel by the Franco-Moroccan Habiba Benhayoune. Daughter of a Berber fisherman, the author looks back on her childhood marked by a fascination for the sea and boats. The novel also recounts, with disarming sincerity, the family drama in the shadow of which the author grew up. A graduate in occupational psychology and a lover of writing, she uses “words” to analyze the “ills” of her life.
” No author can deny that in each of his works there is an autobiographical element. For me, creation is rooted in pain and happiness experienced. There are both. I sometimes juggle a little fiction, but the majority of the book is about a true story. Flaubert said ” writing is a way of existing “. So I wrote to say, to tell, to share, but also to give meaning to my existence. This book “Berber Heart” is written by the woman that I am for the love of a mother, Yemma. ” Yemma “means” mom in North African. … This story had started a long time ago… »
So spoke the Franco-Moroccan novelist Habiba Benhayaoune presenting on RFI her new novel published this fall by Ardemment editions. The author comes from the Berber community and her novel, Berber heart, largely autobiographical, delivers a poignant childhood story where tenderness and violence, separation and reunion, fortunes and misfortunes coexist against a backdrop of celebration of Berber identity. We do not emerge unscathed from these pages where the narration of a traumatic family drama is coupled with a quest for identity and feminism.
Martyrdom on a daily basis
As the author announces, the story told by this novel began a long time ago, when the Benhayoune were still living in Algeria, when this country was in the grip of a bloody war for independence. This story is first of all that of Yemma, of her daily martyrdom under the blows of her husband, that also of her overflowing love for her children who protected them from the violence of the father, but also that of history.
If the first pages recount the traumas of war, most of the story takes place on the fringes of History at work, namely war and independence. Once upon a time there was a family of Berber fishermen who lived happily, first in Mers-el-Kébir, then in Coralès, in the heart of majestic nature overlooking the ocean… Until the day when the narrator discovers that behind happiness and beauty, was hidden a black shadow to which she could not yet give a name. This story, made up of fascination and painful revelations, is told through the eyes of Aouïcha, Yemma’s daughter, a privileged witness to the dramas of the family and the author’s double.
The most beautiful pages of the book are those which show the magnificence of nature, the luminosity of the landscape when the sun’s rays pour into ” the shivering sea “. In Coralès, from the top of her childhood home, by the sea, far from the houses of the city center, Aouïcha never tires of contemplating ” the horizon line between the sky and the sea when the calm waves creep forward to flirt with the sand and sprinkle it with their milky foam “says the author. It is a sweet and light childhood whose best moments were perhaps when in the early morning, the little girl proudly accompanied her father fishing, off the coast of Coralès, confronting the elements.
The feeling of happiness and exaltation exhaled by these pages contrasts with the melancholy, the fear that seizes the young girl during the night when the demons are out and the violence of the drunken father falls on the fragile body of his wife, making her ” a helpless woman », « a battered woman “. This surge of violence devastates the narrator, leaves her perplexed. She wonders about her father’s split personality, ” this hero of the seas “.
” This ambivalence, I could not control, remembers the author. Even later, I couldn’t understand. I think he was a man who must have had some difficult adventures since he left for Spain very early on to play the little soldier, when he was not yet of age. There was discomfort in him. There was something he couldn’t express and so he was drowning in alcohol. Is it fear? Is this denial? I never managed to find out at that time. That’s why I made this book. I actually put words to evil. I understood better. »
The murmur of the waves
The passage from adolescence to maturity, from incomprehension to understanding and the possibility of forgiveness, such is undoubtedly the real challenge of this novel. For the author Habiba Benhayoune, who arrived in France at the age of seven, this passage to understanding goes through the school of the Republic, in Perpignan, where she learned to read and write for the first time.
How did you come to writing, Habiba Benhayoune?
” In fact, what prompted me to write is a whole journey, explains the novelist in response. There was childhood, there is this school career in France and the love of words. In primary school, I composed poems because I had a teacher who introduced me to poetry and made me want to create verse. The rhymes sounded good and they made me dream like the murmur of the waves. I then gave free rein to the words. These words, I found them a unique, delicious flavor, because they comforted me. Words, for me, help me heal ailments. We can do everything. Words are a strength for me. Writing has always been for me a space to recharge my batteries, to find myself with myself. »
Berber heart testifies to this immoderate taste for words and for writing, which leads the narrator/author to revisit her past and go back to the origin of her childhood trauma, where the dazzling light of the Mediterranean and the darkness of the human heart.
” I wrote this book, she explains, to ask forgiveness from my mother and free me from my guilt because I watched as a child while she was crumbling under the blows of the shoe. And I also wrote it to share with all the women victims of violence with their children who witness this violence in spite of themselves and who will in turn suffer certain traumas. We always keep it. The wounds of the past do not fully heal. »
Habiba Benhayoune knows something about it. His novel bears powerful witness to this, with cathartic honesty and lucidity.
► Berber heartby Habiba Benhayoune. Editions Ardently210 pages, 19 euros.