The writer Yasmina Liassine, in Paris, in 2024. FRANCESCA MANTOVANI
L’Oiseau des Français is a first novel that Yasmina Liassine had been carrying for a long time, she who was born in the early 1960s to a French mother and an Algerian father, just after Algeria’s independence. She lived there throughout her youth, before settling in France in the 1980s to become a mathematics teacher, a discipline that she still teaches today, in Paris. “I’m often told that I don’t look Algerian,” she exclaims with a laugh when we meet her for “Le Monde des livres”. That’s the whole question: what does it mean to be French? be Algerian? be Franco-Algerian?
The novel does not answer these questions categorically, but it poses them as the essential questions of a life, through various characters and varied periods of a beloved country, captured in all its nuances, from Antiquity to today, as if to respond first to easy caricatures or misleading historical shortcuts. “The feeling that I had for a long time,” explains Yasmina Liassine, “is that the Algeria we were talking about was not the one I had known: there were many stories that I never heard told, so much so that I said to myself that there was something to write…” Why, then, did you wait? “I had a taste for writing and reading very early on. Literature has always been a very important thing for me, but it was not obvious to risk it. And it turns out that I did mathematics, simply because I liked it: I don’t know if there is a link between the taste for mathematics and that for literature…”
Yasmina Liassine has in any case written a book for adolescents and designed an anthology on her favorite discipline (Mathematics, in the whole, Gallimard, 2000; Le Goût des Mathematics, Mercure de France, 2013). She also read a lot of Jacques Roubaud, poet and mathematician: “I wonder with him if mathematics is not also an art of language… A somewhat particular art of language, certainly, but which I have always liked: when we invent a mathematical object, for example, we always wonder what we are going to call it, and, strangely, it often happens that the word chosen is not a scholarly word, but rather belongs to everyday language. »
A thread between two neighboring worlds
L’Oiseau des Français gives an illustration of this, when the notion of border is mentioned, so important in a story which constantly draws a thread between two neighboring worlds, sometimes entangled, often paired like the figures of “mixed couples” which are there. mentioned: “Mathematicians give this definition of what a boundary is: “A point belongs to the boundary of a set if every neighborhood of this point contains at least one point from the set and one point outside the set .” If I apply this definition, in my own Algiers, I am almost always on the border and I myself am entirely a kind of border, because my personal, intimate, family, loving neighborhood is always made up of Algeria. and from France…”
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