Holders of exile |
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Collection title
Mediterraneo
First broadcast date
03/22/1997
Abstract
In his third novel, ‘The lost sailors’, Jean Claude Izzo abandons the detective story to evoke his passion for the Mediterranean, which he considers a formative entity of his culture.
An interesting excerpt from his book is read, revealing different Greek names of the Mediterranean Sea, named according to different points of view (Pelagos, Pontus, Thalassa etc…).
Production companies
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RAI - Coproduction
- France 3 Marseille - Coproduction
Audiovisual form
Magazine
Secondary themes
- Art, Culture and Knowledge / Languages and literatures
Credits / Cast
- Jeammet Danièle - Speaker
- Peleran Marie Agnès - Journalist
- Akel Akian - Participant
Map locations
- France - South East - Marseille
Context
Carriers of Exile
Céline Regnard
Jean-Claude Izzo was born in Marseille in June 1945. Like many in that town he was the son of immigrants. His father, born in Italy at Castel San Giorgio near Salerno, arrived in France in 1929. His mother, daughter of a Spanish docker, lived in a district called Le Panier. It was here, overlooking the port, the beating heart of the working-class old town, that his father had a bar on the Place de Lenche. And here that most of Izzo's novels are set. He began to write poems and stories at school, but despite doing well there Jean-Claude Izzo, like the children of many immigrants, was pushed towards a short training: he obtained a certificate of competence as a machine operator. If his talent for writing came early, so did his love of ideas: as from 1963 he was an active member of the Catholic peace movement Pax Christi. In 1964 he was called up for military service and began a month's hunger strike – earning himself military disciplinary action in Djibouti. When he returned to France, in 1966, he joined the Parti Socialiste Unifié, further on the left than the French Section of the Workers International. Having stood in Marseille's municipal elections in 1968, he joined the French Communist Party. As an active member he became a journalist then senior editor on the Communist daily La Marseillaise. Having never stopped writing, he published his first collection of poems in 1970, Poèmes à haute voix (Poems Out Loud), which was followed by many others.In 1978 he broke with the French Communist Party, like many intellectuals when they heard about the camps in the Soviet Union. In 1995 he published his first detective novel Total Kheops, which brought him success, fame and several prizes. It was the first of a trilogy: Chourno (1996) and Soléa (1998). His final novel Le Soleil des mourants (The Sun of the Dying) was published in September 1999, a few months before his own premature death in January 2000.
All Izzo's work is realist and intensely poetic, an elegy to his home-town Marseille. Through his portrait of Marseille's mixed, working class society, with its many ethnic origins, its lapses into violence, Izzo expressed his strong, left-wing convictions. As he wrote in his novel Les marins perdus, about a sailor, Diamantis, washed up in Marseille: “Marseille was the only town in the world where he didn't feel a foreigner”. Jean-Claude Izzo was one of several artists and intellectuals who, in the 1990's, gave back to the town its pedigree, even as racism and the extreme right were becoming more and more prevalent. His description of a cosmopolitan society, where all the peoples of the Mediterranean could be brothers, united around a common sea, seems of a piece with the town's history.
That is indeed partly the case. Marseille's founding legend tells of the meeting and union of a Greek sailor, Protis, with Gyptis, the young daughter of the Ligurian chieftain whose tribe were occupying the area. True or not, throughout its history Marseille has welcomed sailors and merchants from the whole world. Todays' migratory waves have only strengthened that vocation. From a Provençal and Alpine immigration, essentially regional, there came an immigration from Italy, then Spain, North Africa, Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa and even Asia. If the wretchedness of where the people come from is a constant motive for these migrations, another being the attraction of a job – political asylum is another of Marseilles' key roles, particularly in the 1930's. But the presence of the foreigners has not also been achieved without difficulties or rejections. Even if these are somewhat softened by the well-known placatory qualities of Marseille's cosmopolitanism, they nevertheless weigh heavily in the image of a town where welcoming a foreigner is often more a theory or a political ideal expressed by artists and intellectuals than a reality.
Bibliographie
Émile Temime (dir.), Migrance. Histoire des migrations à Marseille, 4 tomes, Marseille, Jeanne Laffitte, 2007
Philippe Joutard, « Marseille cosmopolite : mythe et réalité », Hommes et Migrations, n°1092, 1986, p. 20-24.
Yvan Gastaut, « Marseille cosmopolite après les décolonisations : un enjeu identitaire », Cahiers de la Méditerranée, n° 67, 2003
