Dear Wajdi Mouawad,
Dear authors, artists, philosophers,
Dear friends of the Hill Theatre,
Thank you all for being here.
I would like to begin by thanking Wajdi Mouawad for welcoming us to the Theatre of the Hill.
I would also like to congratulate you, dear Wajdi, on receiving the 2016 Governor General’s Literary Award in the theatre category, the most important literary honour in Canada, which you have just received for your book: Inflammation of the Word of Life.
I have just returned from Lebanon, from meetings at the Salon du Livre francophone in Beirut with authors, publishers and artists, who share with us this pride in your place.
I was present here in September at the first event that you organized, which was also the first on the newly redesigned stage of the theatre: the dialogue with Salman Rushdie and some students.
This evening prolongs this dialogue with the writer who focused on the powers of creation, imagination and fiction in the face of terror and violence.
I would also like to thank the initiators of «General Brotherhood», a movement in which we wanted to include this evening: the philosopher Abdennour Bidar, and the producer Fabienne Servan Schreiber, whom I greet.
As soon as this association was created, I wanted the Ministry of Culture and Communication to be its support and to join the movement whose initiators are companions, as Hölderlin says.
This movement is born of a concern that we all have in mind tonight in this week that opens: we think of November 13, 2015, but also January 2015, Charlie Hebdo, Hyper Cacher, Toulouse and we should actually go back further, remember Daniel Pearl.
At the time of the first anniversary of this tragic event, the General Brotherhood Movement wanted to propose an answer: brotherhood, the forgotten great of our republican motto. He set himself goals: for a week, promote fraternity throughout France to fight against clichés, identity withdrawals; through actions carried out by civil society.
We must probably carry even more to the heart of the Republic the commitment of the Fraternity, as a humanist response to the contempt of the other: how not to be scandalized by the campaign launched by «young people with Marine» who wants to denounce the reception of 80 migrants on a university campus, housed in a reception centre? Culture is also a way to overcome the fear that this foreigner inspires us, whose worried gaze we cross with a certain indifference. Some initiatives, which I wish to salute here, show that some of these uprooted men and women, at the cost of great suffering at times, can find a fraternal refuge, thanks to the power of narrative, theatre and poetry. I followed the initiative taken by ONDA to help some Syrian artists meet French professionals, and thus gain a foothold in France. I closely follow the experience that the Théâtre d'Aubervilliers conducted with director Olivier Coulon-Jablonka. It is also the role of artists to alert us, to awaken us to take into account a reality more harsh than ours. The difficulties exist for these men of «81 avenue Victor Hugo» to take their place in our country, but the progress made is already considerable and I want to believe that it will not be without finding a favorable outcome for others.
A year later, therefore. It is difficult to commemorate, when we have not come out of this time of concern. But we don’t want to be silent, because voices that are divisive are being heard. But we do not want to be silent because we also want to tell the victims, their loved ones, that we do not forget them. So, one way to meet this requirement is to make more room for the thought of complexity, debate, the beauty of texts, the sound of music. That is why we wanted this exchange tonight.
Everyone will have his interpretation, his analysis of the power of creation in this period.
For Elfriede Jelinek, in a recently released text entitled “Bataclan” it is “The body of the woman (who ) is at the heart of political violence, the center of war and the exercise of absolute power. That is where we must fight.”
You will tell us your own approaches tonight. Just after the attack on July 14, this summer, the question quickly arose of the continuation/possibility even of the great festive festivals. We, public officials, have done everything to make them stand, more than ever, and the public was, more than ever, at the rendezvous. That is why we must protect creative freedom and give it the means to exist, protect the conditions of creation such as intermittence, help open libraries on Sundays, and organize the presence of artists in schools.
I want to thank our presenters again. Special greetings to Professor Achille Mbembe and Todd Shepard, who are from South Africa and the United States respectively, for this evening.
Julia Kristeva, Olivier Assayas, Laurence Bertrand Dorleac, Michel Deguy, Cynthia Fleury, Frédéric Gros, Hourya Bentouhami, Joseph Cohen and all of you who will be speaking here tonight and who are both engaged in your own artistic work AND ready to respond to the demands of the times and society.
For it is for you the same attention, the same approach, the heart of your work.
Finally, I would like to thank the students who agreed, with our moderators, to question our guests, certainly with the lucid gaze of a generation that is on the front lines on these issues.
Wajdi Mouawad asked me to choose a quote to illustrate my remarks and our evening. *
I chose a sentence from Platonov by Anton Chekhov.
To avoid sterile commemoration, but to respect the dead and work for the society of tomorrow, we must:
“to bury the dead and repair the living.”
I believe that this double requirement reflects our ambition: the need for memory and transmission, the desire for creation and emancipation.
Thank you all for coming so many times to share these questions and build these reflections.
I wish you excellent work and fruitful debate.
Thank you.