“So here I am, mixed blood, fruit of the loves of two mountains”: thus introduced Ysabelle Lacamp, actress, novelist and essayist, who died in Paris on June 26, at the age of 68. In the beginning, there is the meeting between a European from the Cévennes and a young Korean student.
In 1950, when the journalist Max Olivier-Lacamp (1914-1983), who had just become a war correspondent, discovered, while attending a cult, the bewitching timbre of a young soprano, he was devastated. He who very early became involved in the Resistance (Lacamp is one of his pseudonyms), becoming one of the founders of Agence France-Presse (AFP), before directing its sector covering “Middle Asia from India to Burma, fell in love with Pyong-You Hyun. He married her as soon as his divorce was recorded, in 1954, then moved to Paris, where from editor-in-chief of AFP he became a reporter for Le Figaro. This is where Ysabelle was born on November 7.
If the young girl carries out brilliant studies, with a degree in Chinese and Korean from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and O’ Languages ??in Paris, she wants to be an actress, appears in a few films (with Berri, Deray, Hanin, Gatlif, Boisset) as in television series, but there holds stereotypical menial jobs that refer to the clichés of the time about beautiful Eurasian women.
Federate energies
But, soon, his literary commitment frees him from these caricatures. Combining her taste for sagas and historical stories, with a rigor that establishes her credibility, Ysabelle Lacamp continues, from Le Baiser du dragon (Lattès, 1986), popular successes, with La Fille du ciel (Albin Michel, 1988), L Blue Elephant (Albin Michel, 1990), then Les Paradis loins (LGF, 1993) or Les Nuits kimono (LGF, 1996), all three co-written with Jean-Michel Galliand.
Soon, the Asian vein responds to the celebration of the paternal terroir. After the election of a sheepfold on an arid land, “where the valleys no longer laugh and where the earth becomes harsh”, facing Mont Aigoual, in the Cévennes, it is at the family manor of Monoblet, near ‘Anduze (Gard), that she retired to write. There, she reconnects with the rough and terrible history of these lands, composing Cévennes, colors of the world (with the photographs of Jean du Boisberranger, Le Rouergue, 2003) after having evoked, in The Man without a gun (Seuil, 2002) , the Resistance at the heart of these fighting Cévennes that his father had once chosen for his only novel, The Fires of Wrath (Grasset, 1969, Renaudot Prize).
Ysabelle Lacamp likes to unite energies. In Lamalou-les-Bains (Hérault), it organizes a day for committed writers. It was there that she invited, in 2011, Bruno Doucey and Murielle Szac, for whom she wrote two pleas in memory of those who resisted: the Huguenot Marie Durand. No to religious intolerance (Actes Sud, 2016), then the essential George Sand. No to prejudice (Actes Sud, 2019). And she collaborated for seven years, as literary director, in the adventure of the Roots of Heaven meetings, born in 2009, led by Mychèle Leca and now part of Ajaccian life at the Palais Fesch-Musée des beaux-arts.
In 2018, Ysabelle Lacamp returned to the novel with the superb Shadow among the shadows (Bruno Doucey, 2018), which evokes the meeting at the Terezin camp, at the time of the liberation of the deportees, of the poet Robert Desnos, on the point to die, and a young Czech Jew, Leo Radek. But it is on her Asian vein that Ysabelle Lacamp’s journey ends.
Driven by a generosity that leads her to ceaselessly celebrate, with contagious ardor, the work of others, she highlights “eleven Korean poets of our time” (C’est l’heure ou le monde s’engrand, Bruno Doucey 2021). Prefacing shortly before the anthology of haikus and tankas evoking Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Fukushima established by Dominique Chipot (I can’t believe it, Bruno Doucey, 2018), Ysabelle Lacamp invites us again, with poetry and sensuality: “Let us guided by the intensity and brilliance of these haikus. Sometimes, in the night of our blindness, streaks of light…”