DIEU-DOPE

Tobie Nathan, Éditions Rivages/Thriller, 1995

by Paule Ferran

Here is the second novel of Tobie Nathan, an ethnopsychiatrist known for his work in psychopathology, already the author of numerous specialized works and articles, after Saraka bô, also published by Éditions Rivages/noir.

A disconcerting novel, said to be a thriller, but which I would rather call a story in which death occupies an important place. This story serves as a backdrop for reflections on the adaptation to our world of African immigrants and their children, on the life of characters marked by exile and the haunting memory of painful historical events, on the search for meaning with frequent references to the Bible to find answers, but it also allows our author to make his ideas on psychiatry known to the wider public: “psychiatry,” declares Nessim Taïeb, one of the principal characters, a psychiatrist like the author, “can only be the concrete solidarity of a real group, never the ridiculous solitude of a defrocked little priest, obscene and lying like all apostates.”

For the rest, it is a solidly constructed work: 29 chapters all of which, except the last, titled “the beginning of the world,” bear the name of a character and illuminate him; the story unfolds from a Sunday in December at 8 o’clock to the following Friday at 12:30, between Paris, its Northeastern suburbs, and Bogotá, and turns around the violent death of Black, Beur, and West Indian adolescents under the effect of a new drug distributed to them free of charge, “la Donna.” Inspector Musil investigates, but he will find the truth only thanks to the psychiatrist, himself originally from Egypt, versed in the study and understanding of the African world but also of the Bible, dislocated and dreaming, a poet “who plays it grandiose”: it is a war of the gods, a war of the black/white world, in which pills dispatch children into the world of the night. Judith, the young Jewish woman haunted by her origin and the rafle du Vel d’Hiv — whose every detail she constantly recalls thanks to “the little yellow bible” (Klarsfeld’s calendar of the persecution of the Jews in France) — sensual and vengeful, will be the armed instrument that lays low the evil. The language, very often colloquial, is studded with African terms corresponding to the milieu described and refers to a great many languages that disorient the European reader: Yumba, Fon, Gon, Adja, Mina, Wolof, etc. While there are at times poetic flights, one also finds somewhat easy puns of the type: “there are no more Gabonese at the number you have dialed.”

The reader will find, in the evocation of an unusual world, the description of characters living the contradiction of different worlds to the point of having an inner fault line and moments of violent rupture — “how can one be certain that one will never go mad?” asks a character — and in the ideas that are set forth, the pleasure and the interest that will lead him to the end of the reading.

P.F.