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Text Yanick Lahens

Received two days ago in my mailbox from the Bookstore Humor ink Montreuil.

Friday 29 January, we were to receive Yanick Lahens. She stayed close to his family in Haiti. However, we maintained the evening, and tried to breathe life into his work. After reading (very fine, incidentally), we discussed with Sabine Wespieser, its editor. Sabine read a letter Yanick. This letter, all persons present wished to receive it. With this shipment, it will be done. But to those who were not present, I would advice: read this letter, this example of humanity, this definition of literature.

How to write and what to write?

I'm not with you today. I am very sorry. But you will understand that the earthquake of January 12, holds me still in my country in the middle of mine. This event is stressful if it is unable to extinguish the writer in me that arises now more than ever following questions: what to write and how to write?

I started to chronicle a simple accounting of facts and a description that I wanted the most accurate damage. And of course distress. That distant strangers cross the street, in shelters, in hospitals and the nearest neighbor which we followed impotent, the slow agony under the rubble of the Ministry of Justice, that this young woman we have hosted and every morning until nightfall went to this hotel that collapsed to finally locate the rubble after ten days the mobile phone of her husband right next to his hand and then his body five days later.

I started doing it and had to be done. And then came two images remind me and convince me that my role as a writer could not be reduced to a macabre accounting or transcription of a simple fact, but was to invent a world that amplifies or extends resonates precisely this .

The first image is that of a child out of the rubble, arms raised to heaven, a smile like a fruit in season and told his mother "I'm thirsty and I Hunger ". The second is that of a young girl on the outskirts of a market three days after the earthquake is braiding hair and looks in a mirror. I liked this boy who said yes to life, which was almost a foot from nose to misfortune and looked to the future with the Suns in the eye. For the second image I told myself that when the girls still want to be nice to run in front of desire and words on edge, all hope is not lost. Both brought me back to an essential truth: do not celebrate life in spite of everything, do not be transformed by art or literature, it is us to strike a second time by the disaster.

So I had to hurry back all these feelings that I know only too well to my white sheet and my keyboard. First one to be late on life. Then that of wanting to turn around the same questions. In attempting to provide answers to some form, other substantive issues, knowing that I will bring only temporary answers always called to renew. Like the force, that it requires. Because writing is not just write down words, "we must be stronger than the writing itself to address, must be stronger than what we write. " I'm trying hard these days to accumulate a little of that strength to transcend the event and get back to my readers with words that will touch them as hands.

Haiti January 28, 2010

Obviously this is a text which speaks for itself, however, the life force and its primacy over death expressed in this article reminds me of the novel Sarinagara Forest notament the part about the photographer Yosuke Yamahata present just after the explosion of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Here is an excerpt where he describes the last photo taken by Yamahata.

"A mother nursing her child: a very young woman in the splendor of his recent motherhood, torso, white gloss between the skirts of her dress apart, within a short head which the baby's mouth . They both seem to have been only slightly affected: on the right cheek of the woman, her beautiful face, the red flower opens just a notch and if the child appears to have been more severely injured the skull, her skin does that traces of superficial burns and he drank with such concentrated energy, we would say stubbornly committed to life, protected as its mother in the heart of the cataclysm, breathing in the eye of the cyclone disaster, saved, restoring forces with application necessary for repeating a second existence among the ruins. "

" Yamahata knows his job. the image is all done. It remains for him to take it. She said. It is the only image admissible disaster. In fact, it remains the most famous. The melancholy, almost lost the young woman, staring into space, expresses a sorrow boundless huge point to wrap him in distress to the dimensions of the universe. But the gesture immemorial breast she gives, the trusting abandonment of the child in his arms, incomprehensible sense of strength that emerges of the two bodies tenderly pressed against each other, their integrity and unique beauty say even stronger desire to survive stubborn. "

Philippe Forest, Sarinagara, Gallimard, 2004. (pages 234-235)