In a world with vague contours – which could just as well be the Congo as Syria, Ukraine or Palestine – a group of individuals survives, undermined by a war that does not speak its name. Since time immemorial, backed against a wall that only lets a glimpse of the sky, men have been digging pits from morning to night, in the hope of overcoming fear, of forgetting the latent but invisible danger that asks only to crush them, to open the bellies of their wives, to capture the innocence of their children.
A kid, taking refuge on his grandfather’s lap, sees the souls of men darken, harden, destroy themselves in the pits, aware that he will soon have to follow in their footsteps. A resigned father persists in uprooting his son from childhood. A grandfather struggles to preserve innocence. A mother seeks, in this harsh man, the traces of the man she loved. A man without hands dreams of stroking, eating, working. A blind healer laments the ineptitude and violence of men.
As in his previous novel, Twilights (Le Tripode, 2018), Joël Casséus gives in half sky the floor to a rich gallery of characters who testify, alternately, to their daily lives, to their experience of the world. This narrative crossover, which is reminiscent of the stream of consciousness used in particular by William Faulkner, requires constant vigilance from the reader, but helps to highlight the great emotional complexity of the human experience.
“I’m a pathetic Faulkner groupie. It’s simple, before starting a book, I always send him a prayer, laughs the Montreal writer. My goal is to force the empathy of the readers by pulling them out of a unique perspective to better immerse them in the reality of each of the characters. Captives of half the sky, the latter therefore seek to challenge those who are on the other side, i.e. “readers, Westerners whose excessive consumption and luxury are to the detriment of people stuck in a situation of extreme vulnerability. I hope to get people thinking about social relations, collective responsibility and interdependence,” he continues.
Blur space-time
It is in this committed and humanist perspective that Joël Casséus chooses to sketch a universe where cultural and temporal referents are completely hidden. “It’s a bit cliché to say that, but it’s my way of trying to achieve a form of universalism. I am a Marxist and anarchist. I believe that there are elements within what humanity is going through that we all have in common and that will allow us to access the solidarity necessary to extricate ourselves from current conditions. »
This spatiotemporal ambiguity, combined with the suffocating camera in which the narrators find themselves, contributes to creating, in a way, an aesthetic of suffering and destitution, exacerbating emotions. “I try to approach my reader’s fears and anxieties in order to start a dialogue with him. I want him to feel it deep in his gut, how wrong things are in the world. »
The bare, allegorical, almost surrealist writing is largely tinged with the author’s training in sociology. To better understand the whole and find what unites him, he approaches his narration and his characters from the point of view of abstraction. “I see novels as theses where I affirm sociological ideas that scientific language does not allow me to explore. So I use the language of emotion. To succeed in asserting anything, the contribution of the decor is minimal. Everything goes through dialogue and action. »
It is therefore through the characters, their experiences, their words — and not their perceptions — that Joël Casséus tries to find meaning in the barbarism of the world.
The Childhood Barometer
Among his narrators, a little boy, one foot in innocence, the other in suffering, is particularly striking. It is by reading about the child soldiers that Joël Casséus found the inspiration behind this character. “We have rarely had access to this point of view in literature. What leads these kids into such a state of vulnerability, and that do they become, if they survive, after the war? »
Her first novel, Twilights, featured a refugee woman about to give birth to a baby condemned to fight for its survival. In half skythe child, older, must work with men, be brutalized in the pits to allow one more lucky to have access to luxury, diamonds, microchips. “I would very much like to make a trilogy of it and continue to make it grow, to bring my thinking to fruition. »
Because children, in literature as in society, are a vehicle powerful to measure the degree of inhumanity, distress and suffering. “What makes children so beautiful is this mixture of fragility and awkwardness. They are clumsy, in the eyes of adults, because they have not yet understood the limits imposed by society. They are pure and sensitive beings, condemned to become old men like me, completely neurotic. They are barometers of the state of the world. When they, like my character, are forced to toughen up too soon, it’s proof of the state of distress and brutality in which society finds itself. »