In her interview with France Culture, Faïza Guène presents ‘Salam manifesto’ as an account born of her anger at injustice and the repetition of history. The book is presented as an account born of this urgency, rather than as a new work of fiction. This shift sheds light on its central purpose: to speak out again about experiences that other narratives can reduce to statistics, categories or news items.
The author explains this in an interview on France Culture’s ‘Book Club’: she does not want to write by relying on statistics, but to make the lives behind the figures heard. The point is not to set testimony against data. Rather, it calls into question what is lost when a human experience appears only through a measurement or a label.
From novel to angry account
Ex-Empire’s presentation text describes ‘Salam manifesto’ as the publishing house’s first title, published in the Kermos series in collaboration with Cris écrits. Faïza Guène describes it as a book born of her anger at a history which, in her view, keeps repeating itself. She explains that she had to ‘free herself from fiction’ to write this account.
This phrase marks a change in approach, not a rejection of fiction. The author links the book to her experience of recurring injustices and places it in the trajectory of her work, twenty-two years after her first novel. The publisher’s presentation speaks of a new page in her story: a way of addressing readers who have followed her since the beginning, too.
The word ‘manifesto’ in the title offers a clue to the book’s stance, without being enough to sum up its form. In the interview, writing emerges both as an act of personal expression and as a way of looking at collective mechanisms. The account starts from the intimate to question the place given to memories and experiences in a wider history.
‘We’ and ‘you’ as a boundary
The programme’s account highlights a divide between ‘we’ and ‘you’. These pronouns do not simply denote groups: they can also create distance, assign someone to a category and erase what makes individual journeys distinct. This is where the choice of the first person takes on political significance. To tell a story from the perspective of a ‘we’ is to reclaim the ability to name an experience rather than let it be defined from the outside.
In the interview, Faïza Guène links this question to colonial legacies and family histories between France and Algeria. She mentions that her parents were born in colonial Algeria and that, in her view, this history continues to shape the present. This continuity is her perspective on the subject: the book is therefore not simply a story of memories, but asks how collective history bears on ways of belonging and imagining the future.
The argument retains an important tension: writing in a language can mean both making it one’s own and carrying the traces of its history. In the programme, the author is explicitly asked about French, the language she writes in and a language associated with the domination she discusses. This opens up a way of reading language as a space for creativity, but also as a legacy marked by contradictions.
Preserving traces without closing off the story
Family memory is another thread mentioned in the interview: inherited gestures, parents’ words, memories and ties between generations. Writing can then serve to hold on to fragments at risk of disappearing. This attention to details passed down gives the anger another direction: it is not only about what has been endured, but also about what must be preserved and passed on.
The publisher presents the book as the account that helped Faïza Guène get through the last few months and the injustices she says she saw repeating themselves. This description sheds light on the text’s stated origins; on its own, it is not enough to judge its form or its effects on readers. Perhaps the most fruitful way into the book is through the link between a situated voice and a shared history: who is telling the story, from what position, and what becomes of an experience when it escapes the words others impose on it?
‘Salam manifesto’ thus offers a way in through the reclaiming of the story: an author who sets out the need to write outside fiction, while making memory and language spaces of transmission. The book invites us to look not only at what is told, but also at who is granted the right to tell it.
References
Faïza Guène in August 2024. Archive photo.
