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Guillaume Poix |
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PRIX WEPLER-FONDATION LA POSTE 2017
« Quand les enfants crèvent les écrans, quand ils arrachent le plastique et fractionnent les écorces de cette forêt véreuse, quand ils posent les doigts sur les fils conducteurs, les dénudant de leur enveloppe isolante pour atteindre l’âme dont ils jaugent la souplesse, le courant pourrait surgir, s’accrocher à leurs phalanges, les mordre — et puis les avaler. »
Près du port d’Accra, au Ghana, dans une immense décharge de produits électroniques, Isaac et Moïse initient Jacob à la « fouille ». Trois jeunes garçons plongés dans les déchets de l’obsolescence industrielle auxquels Guillaume Poix donne une grâce singulière. Ce premier roman captive tant par son style lyrique et son ambition documentaire que par l’humour impitoyable qui interroge les zones troubles du regard occidental.
Thomas, a photographer of about thirty from Geneva, attends an exhibition of funerary art from Ghana, a country he is preparing to visit on an assignment sponsored by the Total company. One of the prints, of four hands resting on a coffin – those of the wife and son of the deceased – attracts his attention. He
cannot take his eyes off the image, and the compulsion of his
stare is enough to make the scene suddenly appear in situ, as
the reader finds himself next to the grieving family, Jacob, the
eleven-year-old son, and his widowed mother, Ama. Arriving in Accra, the capital of Ghana, Jacob and his mother end up in a shanty next to the huge open-air rubbish dump of Agbogbloshie, where the electronic scrap of the northern hemisphere piles up. Driven by the will to survive, Ama sells little sacs of drinking water to the workers at the toxic waste collection site. Abandoning school, Jacob signs up with the other young “rummagers” and becomes friends with Isaac and Moïse, two teenagers expert in the art of recuperating cables. Once stripped, these precious “conducting wires” are sold to Daddy Jubilee, a dodgy trader. Set in the immense electronic product dump of the port of Accra, Les fils conducteurs is compelling in its lyric style and its documentary intent, always in the service of its characters and their allegorical destiny. Despite the fascinating darkness of this universe, Guillaume Poix injects merciless humour, challenging the cloudy areas of Western perception.
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