Qui a peur de Mariella Mehr ?

Abstract

Mariella Mehr is a Yenish Swiss writer who now lives in Italy. She writes in German poems, theatre plays and novels already translated into different languages, among them, poems mostly, into Romani. Her works, which are usually based on personal experience, are inseparable from the life and destiny of the travelling people of Switzerland. Across her writings one sees unfolding a whole sector of the repressed Swiss history. But does Mariella Mehr really find her place in the volume on « Gipsy Literatures »? In 2001 she claimed her Gipsy identity in participating in the creation of an international association of Gipsy writers whose aim is « to defend their communal interests and make visible their multilingual and multifaceted literary creations ».This was a quest for a writing which would be able to express the unspeakable by a child or adult who has been robbed of his language and on whom the eyes of the other are riveted. The author assembles fragments of texts which are sketches, drafts of an identity which is falling into pieces. The forced marginality and the denial of identity creates an essential composition of minority literature, in our case of Gipsy literature, which seeks its own way of expression while attaining universal significance. Mariella Mehr’s work is nearer to auto-fiction than to autobiography. An example here is her use of psychoanalysis and literary montage in the first novel translated into French The Stone Age (1992) which allows a text within a text, a kind of geological superimpositions and multiple representations of the Ego. They are also a questioning on feminist literature.