Samira Negrouche is a writer of effort, always renewed. Reading J’habite en mouvement, his personal anthology of poetry (2001-2022), then Stations, a collection of various writings, we are struck by his ability to go in several directions without departing from his trajectory. That of a poet and essayist born in Algiers in 1980, driven by the need to understand her country, Algeria, but also Africa, and of course herself. “It was his generation who had the burden of receiving the legacy, the responsibility of examining the traumas, that, now, of living without reproducing”, underlines the French writer Nicole Caligaris in the preface to Stations.

Rivaled to the history of her country, aware of its past as well as its present, of the diversity of Algerian languages ??and cultures, Samira Negrouche claims her freedom in each poem, in each essay. Speaking of Algerians in a letter to Leïla Sebbar, she defines herself with them as “free people who want to live, write poetry and be happy to drink a cup of tea in some Moorish café”.

“Languages ??that repair themselves”

Bringing together texts published in journals or delivered at conferences around the world, Stations seduces with its thematic construction. In “Who’s Talking?” », Written in Algiers in 2015, Samira Negrouche imagines a response to the reproach made to her for writing in French.

“Genealogy, French, the Algerian language, my three mother tongues… I had the time to dig into several possible answers, each time trying to be as accurate as possible in my thinking, to respond in the least cynical way to questions. questions that hide others, probably more difficult to measure (…)

The three languages ??that were given to me in my childhood are a living triangle on which other languages ??freely aggregate, all speaking and repairing each other. I say repair themselves, because languages ??carry within them moldy costumes that need to be cleared, emotional and ideological charges that need to be shaken off urgently. »

Samira Negrouche knows the pitfalls: discouragement, illusions, beliefs and ready-made ideas. She writes to stay lucid, and avoid them. This is fully apparent in her text “For Women in Black” (August 2007), which questions the place of women, former activists or simply educated and active, in Algeria since the “black decade”.

“God is a black woman”

The acuity of the poet translated into thirty languages ??is just as striking in her anthology. I live in motion brings together poems published in personal (“Jazz under the olive trees”), collective (“I kissed the dawn of summer, in the footsteps of Arthur Rimbaud”); “Departments and territories of ‘outre-ciel’ in homage to Senghor), and other writings as part of a collaboration with an artist.

Thus the sublime “Traces”, imagined in 2019 for the Senegalese choreographer and performer Fatou Cissé. We hear the voice of a woman who does not sleep at night, haunted by “the faces that come back to my memory”. Facing the sea, she watches the ballet of the waves. “Everything about us ends up being covered up/everything about us remains,” she says. The poem ends as she crosses Africa from north to south, then goes up to the Porte de Gorée. “God is a black woman with soot-covered legs,” she says in this text, the blanks and voids left on the page hinting at the dancer’s movement.

This movement that Samira Negrouche inhabits, as she repeatedly declaims in the poem “Quai 2I1”. Earlier in the collection, we read poems about Rimbaud and the Arab Springs; a “Requiem for the Fig Tree of My Ancestors”, burned during the summer 2021 forest fires; a text on migration to Europe (“this dead end, this indeterminate flight”, she writes). As convincing in experimentation as in more classic forms, Samira Negrouche writes as one dives, without hesitation. His prose embraces with equal ardor passion, anger, longing and pain. At the end there triumphs an energetic call to never allow oneself to be put to sleep or confined.

“Child come from the dawn

don’t wait – life is sleeping

on tamed thresholds. »