From Marseille to Algiers, Marie Cosnay takes us on the trail of Mohamed Bellahouel, a man without history, whose troubled destiny draws the contours of a mythical exile and Algeria.
By constructing a fictional and historical investigation, Marie Cosnay continues the elaboration of a unique documentary writing, marked by poetry. She questions our intimate and political relationship with Algeria and proposes to “put History in body”. While underlining the impossibility of a great narrative or epic, she confronts the reader with the complexity and ambiguity of its place in History.
Inquiry, whether in her novels or her militant writings, is at the heart of Marie Cosnay’s literary work. Inquiry, that is to say, this absence of a straight line, these errors, and, above all, this attempt always doomed to failure to account for the complexity of the real, is what allows Marie Cosnay to refuse simplification, to give back to bodies their centrality in narrative, including historical.
This undertaking to redensify the real, which passes above all through poetry, or at least through a certain twisting of language, arms us politically, in the sense that it immunizes us against simplifying stories, against values that try to pass themselves off as facts.
