InterviewI would not have arrived there if… Every Sunday, “Le Monde” asks a personality about a decisive moment in his life. The director looks back on the events that marked her youth in Algeria, the unspoken and the shadows from which she draws her inspiration.
Theater actress turned film actress and director, Nicole Garcia, 75, will be on stage for the first time alone this summer at the Festival d’Avignon in Royan, written for her by Marie NDiaye. His ninth feature film, Lovers, hits theaters on November 17.
I wouldn’t have made it here if …
… If I could have spoken. I came out of a gagged adolescence. The child that I was was not in the place where a child should be. Around me was a rather dark, austere, unspeakable world, of which I did not have the keys. A world of silences, an omerta in which I participated since I did not ask questions.
We do not know what makes a desire for an actress, it is compelling and mysterious, a tangle of reasons that change over time. But I was able at least to identify a need to make my voice heard and, failing to speak in my name, to speak of the texts, to speak in words other than mine.
It is strong to say: “I came out of a gagged childhood. How should we understand it? Was it related to fear?
Perhaps. I was on the alert, in a kind of permanent watch for what could happen. I didn’t feel very protected, I had a melancholy mother, who spoke very little to me, and a lonely father. I had dinner alone in the kitchen. My mother used to serve soup to my father in bed, and she, I don’t know where or when she ate. They spoke Spanish among themselves when they didn’t want me to understand.
I discovered that my father had two brothers and a sister. Their ties had been severed before I was born because of money matters, I believe, which should not be talked about. I never asked a question.
Like him, my father’s brothers ran a drugstore and hardware store under the arcades in Oran. Every day, I passed by without knowing that these were my uncles’ shops. One day, I stopped in a store to make a phone call. My mother asked me where I had called and when I told her she turned pale. This woman who helped me out was my aunt and I didn’t know it. As I entered the store, I saw that she was stiffening, that she was looking at me as if I were a little mafia messenger, like in a Sergio Leone film. After the independence of Algeria, my father and my uncle each closed the iron curtains of their store, then lived and died in France without ever seeing each other again.
Before I found them a saving place in my imagination, these silent things, these silences gave birth to something devious, pernicious, of which we carry a lasting trace, it is shame. I remember this sentence from Nietzsche: “The seal of realized freedom is to no longer be ashamed of yourself. ” It seems to me that I am still there.
You have 80.01% of this article to read. The rest is for subscribers only.