Xavier Le Clerc > Quotes

“Mothers as brave as lionesses, poor Belcourt children, little Kabyles starving to death in 1939 – those people also earned the applause.”
― Xavier Le Clerc, Un homme sans titre

“They are staring at the photographer in perplexity. A few even wear naive smiles, as if forgetting the extreme poverty of the arid plains.”
― Xavier Le Clerc, Un homme sans titre

“In the intoxication of being twenty and swept up by my reading, I hoped to live in the light of day, in joy, refusing submission, shackles and conformity.”
― Xavier Le Clerc, Un homme sans titre

“I observed my father’s face out of the corner of my eye. I wanted to squash the adoption rumour, find some irrefutable proof in our resemblance, some connections laid down by nature. When I got tired of excavating the mine of his face, I imagined other fathers for myself. After all, if a father could adopt a son, couldn’t a son also adopt a father?”
― Xavier Le Clerc

“Exploitation is a meaningless word for many people, but it was branded with a hot iron on my father’s battered forehead, which bore a crater that the light from the bulb could never quite fill. Every evening, it reminded me of the very relative value of a man.”
― Xavier Le Clerc

“In the woods near the château, it wasn’t unusual to see hedgehogs, especially early in the morning. They would curl up in a ball when I got too close. This reminded me of my father. He could get violently angry, sometimes even in public, but I could feel him curling up, out of fear.”
― Xavier Le Clerc

“His treasure, among others, was the Kabylian language he had inherited. It had crossed centuries, bearing so many words with the sparkle of emeralds and rubies, which contempt for immigrants had reduced to a pile of stones.”
― Xavier Le Clerc

“Zohra, ton crâne n'a pour sépulture que cette boîte rangée sur une étagère. Selon la tradition de nos montagnes, ton corps de petite fille défunte aurait été lavé et parfumé à l'eau de rose, recouvert ensuite d'un drap blanc brodé d'or. Un taleb aurait récité toute la beauté du Coran avec ses rivières de vin, de miel et de lait. Par ces mots que je t'adresse comme une oraison funèbre, j'ai l'impression d'entendre l'appel du paradis qui coule dans mes veines, de retrouver mon nom ancestral, Aït-Taleb. Zohra, tu n'auras pas d'ablutions, ni de bouquets de narcisse ou de myrte, pas même de branches d'olivier. Parce que la religion du Progrès préfère les cartons numérotés aux reliquaires, les mesures au mystère, l'observation au souvenir.”
― Xavier Le Clerc, Le pain des Français

“And he dreaded prison more than anything, not because survival in the gourbis was any
better, but because nothing would be more humiliating than being labeled a criminal. He had inherited a sense of honour that gave him – he, the poorest of the poor – the pride of a blind man and the humility of a prince.”
― Xavier Le Clerc, Un homme sans titre

“Like all exploited people, he had learned to stay quiet and keep his head down.”
― Xavier Le Clerc