Translator: Andrew Zink Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
The Mediterranean is a pair of chapped lips,
whose top lip speaks in Latin,
and whose bottom lip speaks in Arabic.
And when it tries to swallow,
when it closes its lips,
it hurts and it stings.
It suffers because there are all these borders,
barbed wire, sentries and checkpoints
around the Mediterranean,
which prevent it from speaking.
In 2011, I was in Marseille at the time of the Arab Springs,
and it felt like there were free individuals there
who were speaking out again,
who were refusing to be taken away in these barbed wire sacks,
and were taking back their right to exist and to say what they wanted to say.
In that moment, I thought that the right thing to do
was to go and listen to them.
Meaning,
to no longer view the Mediterranean as a group of Nation States
that do not talk to each other,
but as a community of inhabitants that don't know each other very well,
and to go listen to them and create a giant library,
a communal database, copyright free,
a library of true stories from the inhabitants of the Mediterranean,
in every Mediterranean language.
In 2013, I proposed this in Marseille,
which was then Cultural Capital.
So, from December 2011,
I embarked on my little speaking tour.
I started in Barcelona,
I wasn't too sure how to do it at first,
so I went to see people on benches,
and little by little,
we came up with a number of options to collect these stories.
You can collect true stories,
just by being face-to-face with someone you've met.
It's possible to do this together here.
You'll all come up and tell a true story.
We can have candlelight vigils,
we can make discussion tables, etc.
There are so many ways to collect them.
There are so many ways to reproduce these stories, too.
All of the arts obviously can retell these stories.
So I began like this in Spain.
Next I was in Morocco in January of 2012.
Then in Algeria, and there, the project took off
because there was a huge amount of Algerian stories that came in
both in text-form on the website, which gathered them,
and then I met tons of people.
So there, the collection really got going in February 2012.
Then I was in Tunisia,
and there as well, there were really amazing meetings.
Following that, I wasn't able to go to Libya with what was going on,
and so I went to Egypt.
I arrived in Lebanon and continued to collect stories.
I was in Beirut a lot.
At one point, I was invited to Hammana,
which is a little town on the uplands of Mount Lebanon,
a little town with a Christian majority, about 45 minutes from Beirut.
I arrived there and the people were waiting for me.
Everyone was in the library,
it was like a candlelight vigil, but in the middle of all these books.
And there, we all took turns speaking.
I told a story,
and the people, the eldest, the youngest,
in French, in Arabic, told their stories to each other.
They chose - and this is what I asked the people each time -
from the story of their lives, from birth up until now,
"What would be the story that you want to share
with the rest of the world?
What would be the incredible anecdote you have in your heart, that's dear to you
and that you want to pool in a large library?"
And with that, I had tons of stories,
and then we met for drinks at the end.
There was a woman named Samira Fakhoury who was the library head,
who said to me, "There is one story that I haven't told."
It takes place in 1976.
It was the first year of the Lebanese civil war,
it was also the year when the Syrian army came to occupy Lebanon.
Especially in Hammana, they set up channels
to bombard Beirut, and waited for the counterattack.
When Samira and her husband saw this,
they decided to get the children to safety
in the Beqaa Valley, next to Zahlé,
while they stayed in Hammana
to take care of the family houses so that they wouldn't be pillaged.
So there were three homes,
and they stayed,
they had a grandmother in one of the other houses,
and the other was requisitioned by Syrian officers,
so they lived in one of their houses.
They were neighbors,
and in the Spring, like every year, Samira and her husband argue.
And they always argue over the same thing:
the poplars.
They have four poplars that are next to the garden,
and I don't know if you've seen,
but the poplars make little cotton balls, buds,
and those balls get all over the gardens,
and every Spring, it's the same thing,
Samira's husband tells her, "This is the last year,
'khalass', those poplars, I'm going to get rid of them,
I'm going to chop down the poplars."
And Samira tells him, "But you don't want to do that!
We've got to live with the trees, they give us shade in the summer."
And at that moment, there's a Syrian officer who's passing by
and hears this and it's the first time he's heard them argue.
He says, "Is there a problem, Mrs.Fakhouri?"
She is so upset after her husband,
and maybe it's the tension linked to the occupation and the war as well.
She looks at the officer like this
and says, "It's my husband, he's going to divorce me.
that's it. He wants to divorce me."
The Syrian officer there and hears this,
and we don't know what he has, but it just so happens that he's moved,
maybe it's been months since he's seen his wife too,
and there he says,
"But why? He can't do that...
He can't make this decision. He has to reflect on it longer!
Mariage is sacred!
He can't divorce you like that, Mrs.Fakhouri.
You are a very good wife, etc."
Samira says to him, "He wants to divorce me,
and Mister Syrian Officer, I'll tell you why."
The Syrian officer says, "No, I don't want to know anything.
Listen, it's your personal history.
It's your private life, I don't want to know anything."
She says to him, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I want to tell you why.
You see these poplars, Mister Syrian Officer,
you see these four poplars,
well they make those little cotton balls.
They fall and get all over his garden.
He was to cut down the poplars,
and I don't want him to, so he's going to divorce me."
The Syrian officer looks at her like this, and says,
"That's your problem, Mrs.Fakhouri?"
That's your problem?"
So he goes back and calls his soldiers.
He calls them like animals,
he says, " 'Hayawan'! Come my soldiers.
Gather around Mrs.Fakhouri's garden."
All the soldiers gather.
The officer says, "You see these four poplars?"
The soldiers, "Yes, we see the four poplars."
"Well soldiers,
you're going to pick all the buds from the poplars."
And then Samira says to me,
"I saw the Syrian army, climbing three-by-three up into my poplars -
I wanted to take a photo, but I didn't dare -
and delicately pick the buds from these poplars,
then climb down and put them in bags.
And I thought, "Now, this Syrian officer has a heart!
He was scared for my marriage."
She tells me this, and with that, the evening was over.
And then I continue my trek.
I went to Turkey next, a lot of time in Izmir.
In Greece, in Athens.
In Sicily, I only did Sicily in Italy.
I finished with Israel,
where I spent bit of time in Tel-Aviv, in the Kibbutz,
in Haifa, in Nazareth.
And then in Palestine,
where I started in Hebron, which was a real shock,
then Ramallah, then Nablus, then Bethlehem.
And then I spent some time writing
from all these stories that had been collected,
in two different forms:
the stories, to redistribute them, to retell them to the people.
In book form, "The Moon in the Well"
which is the collection of true stories,
where I give the example,
and that's what I would like us all to try together,
each time we tell each other a true story,
I don't know if you've done it
when I told you this story about the poplars in bloom,
but we'll end by reflecting on ourselves in the mirror,
on our own true stories.
And so in this book, "The Moon in the Well",
I am also telling my own true stories,
from birth up until now.
I did it,
I made sound creations for ARTE Radio,
and then a few months ago,
with a group of people who all have different competences,
we created an association that is called The Mediterranean's True Story,
and I initiated that,
so far, there are 1,500 true stories
that are in this library, in this database,
and the idea is to have thousands and thousands of them, and to move forward,
and so we will send authors, artists of all kinds,
researchers to the four corners of the Mediterranean,
so that they can get closer to the inhabitants in their homes,
to listen to people,
because this is what is really necessary today.
It starts from the individual.
I think the Mediterranean is a good scale,
from the moment we don't consider it
on the Nation-State level,
or consider it apart from, or beyond its borders.
And it's on the individual level
where it seems like we can rebuild something,
that's why it's very important to me to make this gesture,
to go and listen to people, whoever they may be,
to initiate this conversation, these narratives, these true stories together,
and then perhaps, the Mediterranean can finally be made.
(Applause)