The feathers in the wounds

I remember Fallujah

by Feurat Alani

JC Lattès, 288 p., €20

The Uncertain Auroras

by Samuel Forey

Grasset, 480 p., 25 €

One, Samuel Forey, received the Albert-Londres prize, the grail of journalists, in 2017, for his coverage of the battle for Mosul. The other, Feurat Alani, was awarded the same prize in 2019 for a graphic novel, Le Parfum d’Irak, a memory of his childhood summers, in his parents’ country of origin. Between the two, a common point: Iraq, therefore, and an intimate, carnal knowledge of the Middle East.

Doesn’t Feurat Alani take his first name from the Euphrates River? In I remember Fallujah, his strongly autobiographical first novel, the journalist-turned-writer pays homage to his father. It all starts in a hospital room, where the old man loses his memory. Before oblivion conquers everything, his son brings him back to the course of his life. “I had never had access to my father’s grand narrative. I didn’t know his past. When Euphrates, as a child, demanded accounts, his father replied: “It’s too complicated.” So who was he? A child from Fallujah. An orphan. A political refugee turned seller of postcards in front of Notre-Dame. “My father was looking for a welcoming land without prison for idealists. He had found himself in France. He who wanted asylum, (…) to flee these madmen who governed Iraq, had become a political refugee without status, an exile without a card, an immigrant without a future. »

Inspired by his father and his silences, his exile in France, it is the history of Iraq that Feurat Alani scrolls through, at the same time as his own journey as the son of an immigrant born in France. If he became a journalist, it was to bear witness to this lost country, his Normandy, his own Ardèche. To speak of Iraq is to avenge Rami and his “failed dreams”. Tender, bountiful, I remember Fallujah exudes admiration for this beloved father.

By a strange mirror effect, it is also in connection with his family history that Samuel Forey, who signs Les Dawns uncertain, embarked on the great report. At the source of his vocation, the death of his parents. He writes: “Confronted with these personal tragedies, I intended to explain, very naively, how much it hurts, how serious and painful death was, and that it had to be told to the whole world. For this, the independent journalist, today correspondent in Jerusalem for Liberation, in particular, will cross the hostile grounds.

“I’m young, I’m free, I’m leaving”, he decides one day in 2011, in front of images of the Arab Spring. Uncertain Auroras is the story of six years of reporting between Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Looking back on his career, at 40, in a book of nearly 500 pages? The exercise may seem self-centered. But behind the life story emerges an enlightening book that looks like little lessons in geopolitics where the memory of the territories intersects with the memory of the author; where the setbacks of the precarious freelancer, capable of writing an article “in the cell, then in the van”, after an arrest in Turkey, encounter existential questions.

In a style rich in metaphors, the book offers warm portraits: Roj, the French fighter engaged against Daesh; Bakhtiyar Haddad, the translator, killed by a mine, in Mosul. They strongly embody what war can do to men. “What moves us? asks Samuel Forey. “Recounting humanity in its extreme like a submarine in the abyss seeks traces of life. His book succeeds in this.

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