Anguille sous roche

Schedule

Tuesday 7 July

19:30 - 21:00

Wednesday 8 July

19:30 - 21:00

Thursday 9 July

19:30 - 21:00

Cie coup de poker (France)

Theatre

It is September 2016. He was 27, Comorian, a virtual unknown - and he just got published. Three years earlier, he had written a stirring novel. A movement, a single sentence that filled 300 pages - it, had the power to leave any reader shell shocked. They were the words of a 17-year-old teen lost in the middle of the ocean off the coast of Mayotte. Before drowning, she lookeds back at her life and everything that brought her to that very moment… This first novel is so unique, so vital, so whimsical and powerful and poetic all in one, that it created an entire movement. Hundreds of articles were written in only two months after its publication.

Anguille is 17 years old. She is a fiery, punchy young woman. She is present yet absent-minded, unattached, elusive, and possesses a freedom so beautiful it is almost frightening. Drifting in the Indian Ocean, aware that she is doomed and will soon drown, she realises there is no other way for her to exist other than her words—so she starts talking. Yes, she will talk until she takes her last breath. Anguille becomes a language, voluntarily drifting away. A language that catches up with you, then leaves you behind before picking you up again when you least expect it.

Ali Zamir’s mother is illiterate. He says that writing literally saved him. He now wishes to give a voice to victims, to those who are nothing but numbers in the ocean. Of course, his novel relates the story of the shipwrecked, caught between the impossible crossing of the islands of Anjouan and Mayotte. But it is also a story on the reclamation of freedom—the story between a young woman and her first love, her first pregnancy, her sister, her uncle who became her father, her mother who disappeared, her family whom she questions. Yet, at the core of all these tensions lies her thirst for another life. This is a story of someone who dares to speak up, frankly and without shame – something along the lines of poetry, scatology, emergency, hope and pain. It is someone speaking up in front of an audience, pushed by a current from which no one can emerge unscathed.

Déborah Lukumuena, César Best Supporting Actress winner for her performance in Divines, will play Anguille. Two musicians will join her on stage.