One could believe that it does not hold in place. Go, come back, go again. For 30 years, Florence Aubenas has been immersed in a kind of perpetual motion.
“It’s certainly a defect,” suggests the journalist, caught during the Carleton-sur-Mer International Journalism Festival, in Gaspésie, where this early admirer of the group Beau Dommage – who had never come to Quebec — was invited for the first edition. “But it’s a defect that is useful in my job, in any case. We must go quickly, we must leave quickly. »
Twenty years in French daily life Releasebefore entering the New Observer in 2006, then to join the World in 2012 as a “grand reporter”. Since his first steps as a war reporter in the midst of the genocide in Rwanda, countless missions have followed one another: Kosovo, Afghanistan, Syria. And for a year, unsurprisingly, she has multiplied the round trips to Ukraine.
Born in 1961 in Belgium, a country she left at the age of 18 for France, the journalist became infamous in 2005 after being hostage for 157 days in Iraq – in abominable conditions.
An ordeal that never seems to have shaken, in this high-flying journalist, the desire to “report on the living”, in France and abroad.
It is also testified to, in addition to his reports, by books that have made an impression, such as Ouistreham wharf (L’Olivier, 2010, adapted for the cinema by Emmanuel Carrère in 2021), for which for six months she infiltrated the world of precarious workers in Caen incognito – investigative journalism like Nellie Bly and George Orwell.
Florence Aubenas has just published Here and elsewherea selection of his reports published in the daily The world between 2015 and 2022. We thus find her crossing Paris on the evening of the November 2015 attacks, squatting in a camp of yellow vests set up near a roundabout in Marmande, in 2018, at the start of the crisis. Taking the pulse of small caïds of the Parisian suburbs on the goguette on the island of Phuket, in Thailand. Two weeks after the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, notebook open and pen in hand, she is on board a bus full of men and women returning to their country to join the war effort .
Method: to be forgotten
One sometimes wonders, when reading Florence Aubenas, if she would not have an invisibility cloak, like some superheroes have, so striking is her ability to make people forget her presence, both by the subjects she observes and by its readers. To capture without disturbing the essential and the detail that gives life.
She laughs, begins to dream, rather compares her point of view to that of an earthworm, as the American writer and war reporter Ernie Pyle (1900-1945) once said. “That’s exactly what I’m trying to do: make myself forgotten. His method? “We spend time. If we stay an hour, we are seen a lot more than if we stay a week. In reporting, I rarely spend a single day somewhere. The longer we stay, the better it works. »
“I rarely take less than a week to write a paper. That’s how she spent 10 days in a seniors’ facility in the early hours of the fight against COVID-19. “After a while, you carry the trays. You see the girls overwhelmed, one sick, another not there, you can’t sit idly by. Anyway, I think that in reporting, you also have to give a little of yourself. And sometimes agree to answer the questions yourself.
“The questions that I ask, in general, are those that I would agree to answer, confides Florence Aubenas. When people ask me how much I earn or how I live, I answer. I don’t have a problem with that. »
In the same way, it is sometimes necessary to agree to cross the mirror of the sacrosanct and cold objectivity. Especially when, like her, you are looking for the human. “Otherwise, you have to stay at home interviewing ministers. If you go to troubled areas, in quotes, areas of violence, to me, that’s part of the story. »
Topics at the bottom of the stack
Whether in France or abroad, in her tireless quest to capture reality, Florence Aubenas admits to having a predilection for what she calls “bottom-of-the-pile subjects”. For the humble, the left behind. Because these subjects are the least treated, she admits, and also because she is easily turned to that.
The journalist also exercises her discretion on the page, in her sentences. “The more time went on, the more complicated I found it to make citations in the papers. It’s never exactly what people say because you go from oral to written, and after long interviews, you also had to truncate. For me, by opening the quotation marks, we enter the dangerous zone. »
A huge responsibility for the journalist, who was uncomfortable with this way of doing things. And that’s why she chose to use more and more indirect words in her reports.
That’s exactly what I’m trying to do: make myself forget
From The stranger of the post office (L’Olivier, 2021), a fascinating immersion story devoted to the murder of a woman in the small village of Montreal-la-Cluse, a case that is still not closed, Florence Aubenas even explains that she took the habit, when possible, of having the people she quotes reread the passages in quotation marks.
For this great reader of Simenon — as well as American-style narrative journalists such as Joan Didion and Tom Wolfe — the discomfort is of the same nature when it comes to writing in the first person. For herself, the “I” is difficult, undesirable, often cumbersome. “It takes the reader by the hand, it forces him to see with your eyes. Already that you are doing it from your point of view, doing it to the “I” would seem to me downright too much… »
Having just returned from Ukraine, where she has just spent five weeks – her sixth long stay there intended to report on the conflict since March 2022 – Florence Aubenas was able to observe on the ground the evolution of the conflict, from the amazement from the first days to a kind of deadly routine. “The most terrible thing is that war has set in. It’s frightening. To call his daughter Javelina, to extricate himself from everything that is Russian. Ukraine has become terribly radicalized. We are at this moment of the war where it is no longer possible to see the other. »
But here or elsewhere, he must follow the movement, track life in all its complexity, show us the areas of chiaroscuro. If necessary, turn into a current of air. “Whatever the subject, what I enjoy is writing something whose end you don’t know. In Ukraine, who will win? I do not know. How will the war end? I don’t know. It is my great pleasure. To confront myself with what is still moving. I like reports that remain open. »