Like the first images of a film, In Search of Glitter Faraday opens with the beginning of a journey told in voice-over by a faceless narrator: “On February 3, 2017, I bought, for six hundred dollars , an old red and white Buick, in the suburbs of Detroit, to a descendant of Huguenots who had settled in this vast country since the eighteenth century. With this new novel, Kebir Mustapha Ammi, a prolific Algerian-Moroccan writer who has lived in France for many years, skilfully blurs the lines.
Here we are projected with him on this American continent whose entire planet knows, at least through interposed screens, the big cars, the wide open spaces, the long roads watched by suspicious policemen, the sinister hotels, the half-deserted service stations, the “diners” where waitresses in uniform offer a very long coffee. “I took a shabby room, in a motel in the middle of nowhere. The walls and ceilings were carpeted in bright red with garish yellow flowers. It was a woman, who must have taken part in the Civil War, who ran this establishment. »
From the sets to the costumes, and even the hairstyle and make-up of his large gallery of characters, the novelist seems to enjoy sticking to the codes of a genre located between thriller, western and “road movie”, at the risk of flirting with cliches. Until this plot that we think we already know and whose purpose we wonder for a while: the narrator goes in search of a man who can help him find a manuscript that is important to him.
To the rhythm of jazz
But where is he really going? And where does our reading take us through it? The essence of the answer – and the real subject of the book – does not lie in the culmination of its trajectory, but rather in the experiences lived along the way. First you have to listen to the soundtrack of the book. Because in the cabin of the narrator’s car, as everywhere else in the places he passes through, jazz imposes its rhythm and its big names like Charlie Mingus, Archie Shepp or Sarah Vaughan. With these, Kebir Mustapha Ammi sheds light on the underlying chapter of the black condition in the United States and denounces the endless violence of racial segregation.
“An old guy, who had lost an eye in the war, was playing a very old song, which had been covered by many musicians. He had heard Charlie Mingus play it before. It was a very sad song, about the lynching of a poor guy, in Monroe, just before Reverend King’s march. It had been damaged. He was no longer a man. »
Glitter Faraday isn’t really a man anymore either. When the narrator meets him, he cannot guess the once dapper person he was. The subject of many beatings for having made the mistake of falling in love with a white woman, Glitter (which means “glitter” in English) has become a shadow of his former self: a disfigured and soliloquizing poor wretch, whom the power of music alone can still help to live. “Glitter had never seen anyone play sax like this guy before. He was a magician, Archie! Tom Shygulla always said, “Like it or not, there’s only one sax, he’s a Negro and that Negro is Archie Shepp!” »
Promised land
Also thanks to the music, the novelist opens a second, more subtle path which, beyond the roads of deep America, leads the narrator to another continent: Africa and in particular Algeria, land of reception from the 1960s – under the presidency of Houari Boumediene – of militants of the Black Panthers movement, then pursued by the FBI. “There’s a country, Glitter, where you’ll be fine,” a voice told him. Only one country, Glitter… When he touched down on the other side of the globe on December 24, 1975, he cried like a child caught in the act, in the deserted and black streets of a city, Algiers, which he carried always in him. »
Mythified for having also been the scene of the important Pan-African Festival of 1969 – where we could see on stage the jewels of the time, from Miriam Makeba to Manu Dibango via Nina Simone or even… Archie Shep –, the city ??of Algiers appears as a real promised land of revolutionary struggles against imperialism. All the subtlety of Kebir Mustapha Ammi then consists in comparing eras by successive allusions and, ultimately, in questioning the contemporary situation: “He had never stopped thinking about Algiers. I had no right to tell him that there was nothing left of this poor town and that its principles, happily crippled by roughnecks and their henchmen, had melted like snow in the sun. »
After all, who is Glitter Faraday, if not a romantic pretext to invite readers to draw inspiration from the past and, ignoring current disappointments, to revive or recreate new political hopes today? “Algiers was not just any city. Algiers was the sanctuary of all those who wanted to live upright. Algiers was the threshold of all promises. “An invitation, in short, to re-enchant the world for the common good, as a film… or a novel can do.