Dream's reality
“Don’t let the sun catch you crying” as Ray Charles once sang. One could think the birth of a new day sawn as a white canvas is a too optimistic life’s point of view, but the reality of an artistic process is not so bright but frequently full of doubts and fears. So the image of a white canvas fits perfectly with the sunrise, and if we live it with a little smile or maybe some joy tears, probably some fresh air will get into our minds. The series called Nouvelles du jour et de la nuit: le jour by Tunisian writer Hubert Haddad have drawn an inner smile on me making my diary canvas become a little bit more white every day.
Poet, essayist and novelist, he was born in Tunis in 1947. He started his literary career in poetry with Le Charnier déductif (Debresse, 1968) and since then he has become one major figure in the current French literature. His writings go from the dream poetry to the current affairs like in Palestine (Zulma, 2007 / Le Livre de Poche, 2009), achieving the Prix Renaudot Poche in 2009.
Nouvelles du jour et de la nuit: le jour is a series of five novels which have a soul mate in Nouvelles du jour et de la nuit: la nuit, creating a wonderful passage from light to darkness between dream and reality. Le jour is formed by Le Cabaret de la Mère Folle, Le Souffle de l’Agone, Le Soleil des scorpions, Un été vaudou and Le jardinière et le Faux Nègre. For the moment, we will dream le jour until the sunset getting into Le Cabaret de la Mère Folle.
“Jetzt aber tags! Je vais m’arracher une bonne fois à ce mirroir”. That’s the first sentence of Le Cabaret de la Mère Folle, a walk along the thin line between reality and dream, between the ones we think we are and the way people see us. Minds living surrounded by fictional mirrors completely broken by fears and becoming millions of painful pieces of glass.“Le monde est le partage des imposteurs …” The joy of life as a fragile and ephemeral dance. Le Cabaret de la Mère Folle is the mother that take us through the day to the upcoming and desperate night of our lives. "Nous quitterons la place en silence, dans un anonymat serein", the novel has the humility the current world seems to have lost. It would be so beautiful if we all were respectful enough to leave this world in silence, keeping a serene anonymity. But finally we all dance as prisoners of the madness born in the cabaret we all call society. Fortunately, poetry still remains thanks to writers like Hubert Haddad.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero