LECTURE

lecture

Produced without images and with the help of my daughter Almée Oulahbib, (then aged six, and who was beginning to learn to read, therefore, practising reading aloud, « Lecture » focuses on an oral rendition; listening to a child reading an extract from the plea of Jacques Verges (For Djamila Bouhired, Algiers 14-15 July 1957) in favour of the heroine of the battle of Algiers and arrested / interrogated by the French parachutists.I chose an excerpt that was related to the facts, free of explicitly violent passages, but upon hearing the reading of this factual account by my child, it was obvious to what extent this violence was apparent. That a child’s approximate reading of a war episode immediately makes one think of war from a child’s point of view. This immediacy functions like a translation, from one text to another (which transforms the text whilst still keeping it « alive »). Faithful to the original text on the one hand, the immediate clarity of the actual story on the other hand, denotes the difficulty in grasping the essence of the « propos » as a result. »