Poétique des réécritures dans l’œuvre d’Andrée Chedid: de la perfection des récidives par Nicole Grépat (review)

Andrée Chedid’s diverse literary production consists of short stories, novels, poems, but also of plays and songs, in which a cluster of literary themes and motifs together with a trilogy of characters are constantly being rewritten, expanded, and transformed. Through a fine, detailed analysis, Nicole Grépat shows that Chedid’s poetic art of rewriting is a constant re-interrogation of the world that takes place at three different levels: the form, the characters, and the creative act of writing itself. Part One of the book, in particular, focuses on the writer’s transposition, amplification, and transformation of two ancient Egyptian legends (dating back more than three thousand years) into a children’s short story and a novel. The political force of Chedid’s work, however, emerges particularly in Part Two, where Grépat explores the recurrent figures of the clown, the grandmother, and the child. The clown, as the author makes clear, embodies the figure of the artist with its complexity and multiplicity but also with its irreverent spirit and nomadism, while the grandmother exemplifies the vulnerability of the human condition but also the courage and determination that characterize humanity at large. In Chedid’s audacious rewriting of old age, the body of the grandmother is always sexualized: it is still desirable and filled with desire. Little girls in Chedid, too, tend to reject the traditional passive roles that men have imposed on them; they wander in total freedom and are open to encounters of all sorts. Chedid’s own literary meetings and elective affinities with a variety of artists are addressed in Part Three, artists as diverse as Woody Allen, Van Gogh, Badr Châker Al-Sayyâb, Rainer Maria Rilke, Abû Nuwâs, Al-Maʿarri, Al-Khansâ, Jacques Prévert, Victor Segalen, Kahlil Gibran, Gustave Flaubert, and many others. As Grépat convincingly demonstrates, this plethora of artists, spanning many countries and historical periods, speaks of Chedid’s fascination with porous borders and cultural mixtures. In her attempt to move beyond national, ethnic, and religious, but also linguistic and disciplinary divisions, Chedid ‘croise les références d’Orient et d’Occident, d’un bout à l’autre de la Méditerranée’ (p. 246). Although there are numerous points of intersection between Chedid’s own life and her writing, Grépat avoids the trap of reading her œuvre as a transparent rendition of her personal experience of growing up in Cairo and later in Paris as a Lebanese Christian Maronite, preferring instead to focus on the complexity of Chedid’s textual embroidery. The book’s aim is to pay tribute to Chedid’s tireless attempt to represent with delicacy the universal human condition in all its tragedy, dignity, and resistance, but also to promote human understanding and peaceful intercultural co-existence through the power of the written word. As Chedid’s herself explains: ‘Lorsque Nefertiti voit sa cité détruite, elle la recompose par les mots en dictant à un scribe’ (quoted p. 305).