Charbons ardents par Maryline Desbiolles

Abstract

Reviewed by: Charbons ardents par Maryline Desbiolles Kate M. Bonin Desbiolles, Maryline. Charbons ardents. Seuil, 2022. ISBN 978-2-02-149547-8. Pp. 144. The publisher classifies this work of writing under the rubric "roman," but this category is an uneasy fit. The I narrator is demonstrably Desbiolles herself, embarked on a project of revisiting a real-life event: the 1983 Marche pour l'égalité et contre le racisme. This protest march, the first of its kind in France, took place October-December of 1983: a 1200-kilometer trajectory from Marseille to Paris. The proximal cause of the march was a rise in unprovoked violence against French citizens of Maghrebi origin; more generally, it questioned the role of immigrants within contemporary French society. The artistry of Charbons ardents—what differentiates it from a work of history or sociology—lies in the creative juxtaposition of two timelines: the 1983 March, and the author's own moment of 2020, as she attempts to track down and interview surviving marchers, set against a backdrop of the COVID lockdown and the psychic stress it caused ("la pandémie me scie les pattes," laments the narrator, 13). The mobility of the marchers contrasts vividly with the claustrophobia and discouragement engendered by the lockdown. Time, for Desbiolles, is not a linear forward movement, but rather "un paysage où aller et venir, déambuler, errer, se perdre" (122). Indeed, there are subtle shifts in the first-person narrative voice, as the je of Desbiolles gives way (without punctuation or other markers) to the je of various marchers who agreed to an interview: among them, Djamel Atallah, Christian Delorme, Fatimah Mehallel. In this way, Desbiolles demonstrates a conscientious effort to foreground the marchers' opinions of their own experience, both in the moment and in thirty-seven years' hindsight (for example, Farid L'Haoua's sense of disaffection and disappointment with the March's lack of concrete achievements). At the same time, revisiting the March entails revisiting Desbiolles's own past, although she admits having been unaware of the event as it unfolded ("Je ne l'ai pas entendu en 1983. Qu'est-ce que je n'entends pas aujourd'hui?" 53). Desbiolles constantly seeks connections between the marchers' experience and her own (the age of Élisabeth's daughter and Desbiolles's own daughter; the marchers' music tastes in the 1980s and her own, etc.). This impulse to make connections occasionally leads Desbiolles to odd moments of speculative numerology, of identifying emblematic meaning in the roots of words or in names (the activist priest Christian Delorme becomes "un arbre," 103). Clearly, one of the main focal points of the work is Desbiolles's quest to understand her own positionality as an aging baby boomer and soixante-huitarde coming to grips with what she terms "les traumatismes de l'histoire de France" (87): colonization; the Algerian War for Independence, the 1980s rise in racist violence. Recent tragic events—the deaths of George Floyd, Adama Traoré, and Samuel Paty, all of which claim space in Chardons ardents—demonstrate the depressingly persistent cycle of racism: "Le [End Page 228] temps ne passe pas" writes Desbiolles (63). Less predictably, in the same line, she also observes: "Les temps se chevauchent, s'empilent, s'interpénètrent:" a fitting image for this rambling, provocative, and moving work. [End Page 229] Kate M. Bonin Arcadia University (PA) Copyright © 2023 American Association of Teachers of French