Between The War of the Buttons, The Lord of the Rings and The little Nicolas, The Jester’s War is a learning novel with irresistible humour. This first novel published by Clique edition humorously recounts the adolescence of a group of friends in Bondy, a city in Seine-Saint-Denis whose author Idir Hocini brings back the memory of the 1990s and draws the cartography. Meet.
Idir Hocini was born in Bondy 42 years ago, he was a substitute history-geography teacher, he is a well-known writer for readers of the Bondy blog. The Jester’s War is his first autobiographical novel, written in a joyful style, full of verve and published by Clique editions, which recalls the adolescence of Idir and his band of high school friends.
RFI: Hello Idir Hocini, who are the clowns in your book?
Idir Hocini: They are the unloved of the playground, those who are not considered, those who have an activity frowned upon by others such as role-playing games, those who listen to metal music, hard rock… A nothing can make you a fool. I’m talking about the year when I found myself in a so-called class of “jesters”, a class of scientists, because when you get good grades, you’re also considered a jester, and that’s a status I didn’t want. not for me and my comrades.
The Jester’s War is a first novel worthy of 400 shots of Truffaut and The War of the Buttons. Funny, removed, it is the portrait of a band of teenagers, fragile boys, drafts, difficult who have two passions: the girls and the food. And then there is also the family; the Hocini siblings are two boys, two girls and rather tough parents from Kabylie…
They are tough because they grew up in a harsh environment, in the mountains of Kabylie, in an Algeria at war. My father told me that when he was a child, the first time he spoke to an adult, he received a slap. We didn’t talk to adults. It was two different worlds. They did what they could with what they had…
Our nonsense was settled with belts and slaps, which the teachers and college principals appreciated. They took our parents as assistants, with the nostalgia of a time when the school could impose corporal punishment. It must be said that my brother and I like terrible tricks it was there.
The book portrays Bondy figures.
The older brother is Kamel, Idir’s role model.
Kamel, his philosophy teacher had described him very well: ” anomic student “, totally incapable of respecting the slightest social norm allowing humans to live together. He was doing the completely insane stuff. He was Bondy’s enfant terrible. He was driving his teachers crazy.
At each start of the school year, when I found myself facing a teacher who had already had it, I felt fear in the teacher’s eyes, hatred. This did not prevent him from having his baccalaureate and from studying later. The book portrays Bondy figures such as René the postman, with whom we arranged so that our report cards did not arrive in the letterbox.
On the first page, even before reading a line of the book, the reader comes across a map of Bondy drawn in pencil by the author. To the north, “Mordor”, in the middle “middle-earth”, to the south “the Shire” and its green park. An imagination nourished by Lord of the Rings from Tolkien!
But you know, in Bondy, we really call Bondy-Sud “the County”! ” To live in a place is to live it», I surveyed this place with its unnatural borders: the railway line which separates the beautiful districts from the rest of the city, the Canal de l’Ourcq which separates the northern districts from the rest of the city.
In The Jester’s War the years are punctuated by summers invariably spent in Algeria…
We left before the end of the school year and returned after the start of the school year, because the tickets were cheaper. It was 70 days of summer in Algeria, and even during the dark years of civil war, when the country was fighting against the armed terrorist groups of the GIA, we went there. My father was no exception, he wanted us to understand that Algeria was also our country.
I experienced very good times, such as the opening of the country to a multiparty system after the 1988 revolts, but also moments of anguish because people were slaughtered in the villages. We spent our holidays in an isolated house in the middle of a field, because there were bomb attacks, it was holidays in a country at war at a time when Algerian immigrants no longer returned to the country.
The Jester’s War is a story written with the same bubbling energy as the spoken word.
And a double heritage for this teenager, Idir, your fictional double.
Yes, the legacy of the Algerian war. One day when I was called a dirty Arab at school, my grandmother saw that I was ashamed of myself, she could not bear it and told me about my grandfather fighting for independence and a phrase like a mantra, ” better death than a life of shame “. Me, in the village, I always heard that we weren’t fighting France, but that we were fighting colonialism and the status of indigenous people, I had another story from Algeria that didn’t damage my dual nationality.
But I was born in France and my heritage is also that of the French Revolution. In 1989, I was nine years old and France was celebrating the bicentenary of the French Revolution, the sans-culottes who at Valmy had defeated all the kings of Europe fascinated me, as in the mangas of theDorothee Club where the weak triumph over the strong through the will and the desire for justice. I am the heir of these two revolutions.
The Jester’s Waris a story written with the same bubbling energy as the spoken word. At the time, public humiliations were unbearable to me. In Bondy, at the Jean-Renoir high school, only the verb counted, many did not have the codes. Me, I considered myself the perfect Bondinois, I was born in the city, in the north, I had moved to a pavilion, I knew all the codes, it was easier to defend myself with obviously the advantage of working-class suburbs : the humor and repartee that set the tone of the book.
The book ends with France winning the World Cup in 1998.
I wish everyone to experience this collective euphoria. It was the universal reconciliation of all French people. From Bondy, we went down to the Champs-Élysées. The Parisians embraced us warmly, the night was magnificent, for me the National Front and racism were dead. A positive mass movement is rare. It felt like we were experiencing a liberation.
Before that day, France winning was Yannick Noah and tennis. There, the most popular sport in the world triumphed with two goals from Zinédine Zidane in the final, Kabyle like me, it scores! But my hero was Aimé Jacquet, the unloved coach, everyone had been asking him to leave for six months, calling the team weak and he had won a resounding victory, alone against everyone.
The Jester’s War, Idir Hocini, available at Clique edition.