Mélikah Abdelmoumen remembers very well, too well, the day when the columnist of a major Montreal daily responded with a scathing blog post to a tweet in which she expressed her regret that immigration was brandished like a “rattle” in every election campaign.
In all his mailboxes, like in the mailbox of Quebec lettersthe magazine she runs: a torrent of hate. Death threats, because she has received some, she confides, that is not forgotten.
PHOTO CHARLES WILLIAM PELLETIER, SPECIAL COLLABORATION
Mélikah Abdelmoumen in interview
“And you see, there was someone on Facebook to whom I had responded by explaining what I meant by my tweet. I dismantled his anger and he ended up apologizing,” she says, making big gestures with her hands, as she usually does when a subject interests her or challenges her, which is not uncommon.
“But how many readers does this columnist have? Twenty thousand? I can’t knock 20,000 readers one at a time! The forces are not equal between me, a little writer, and him, a columnist who benefits from a whole system.”
A symptom
In Small Towna new novel from the woman whose first book, Assault Chairalready dates back to 1999, the crazies are unfortunately not as talkative as the one that Mélikah Abdelmoumen managed to get down from the curtains he had climbed into.
Simon James, a combat journalist, is found dead, in circumstances that are necessarily nebulous, but which seem to be linked to his media quarrel with Renaud Michel, an omnicommentator, the kind to boast and interrupt everyone.
The author, born in Chicoutimi in 1979, had long dreamed of a thriller, in all that the genre can have of social, like those of James Ellroy, James Lee Burke or James Sallis. “The thriller is a way of speaking about the world, of criticizing it, of naming its ugliness and its beauties,” she observes, happy to reconnect with fiction after a detour through the essay, with Ordinary commitments (2023) and Baldwin, Styron and Me (2021), his rich celebration of the bridge that literature can become for people who should be enemies.
Despite its nods to our here and now, Small Town However, it is not a roman à clef in which the game consists of identifying the real columnist hiding behind the features of Renaud Michel.
“This polemicist character was born from what I saw in France, on the continuous news channels,” explains the woman who lived in Lyon from 2005 to 2017, but who chose to set this story in the heart of an imaginary place in which both the French suburbs and the projects Chicago than Montreal North with its overcrowded apartments and Louisiana crawling with crocodiles. “It’s not new, these outrageous, spectacular remarks, without concern for truth or moderation.”
“But my Renaud Michel is only a symptom of a system,” she insists, “where politics bends to the media, which itself bends to the financial expectations of its owners, which themselves are increasingly dictated by GAFAM. It’s a sprawling thing that, in real life, ends up having serious effects.”
Get out of his sight
As she works hard not to reproduce what she reproaches others for, and she has vowed to no longer fight on social networks with her adversaries, Mélikah Abdelmoumen has therefore imagined a Renaud Michel certainly intoxicated by the sound of his own voice, but who, faced with tragedy, will be brought back to what is most noble in his humanity. Sadness, empathy, introspection.
Instead of answering them on Facebook, now I write books.
Melikah Abdelmoumen
“Books in which I try not to make caricatures of these people,” she explains. “And it would have been easy to make a caricature of him, Renaud Michel. But that would have been very intellectually dishonest. I had to get out of the gaze of my clan.”
Her Simon James, whose cheekiness was inspired by the American comedian Jon Stewart, is also not someone who could be described as perfect, a way for the author to remind us “that the right sometimes claims the monopoly on reason and the left sometimes claims the monopoly on virtue and that in both cases, it is a shortcut.”
Beyond its strong socio-political subtext, Small Town is also the novel of the dialogue with our dead, the one that its narrator Mia will continue to have with Simon James, they who, as children, were both rescued from great poverty by the same mother Courage. In her story Twelve years in France (2018), Mélikah Abdelmoumen recounted her friendship with a Roma family with whom she remained close.
“I know that the help I offer them is only a sticking plaster,” she says, “but it’s what I do in concrete terms, while in a more abstract way, I put in my books all the questions you ask yourself when you’re in extreme poverty and you see that everyone around you doesn’t care.”
Small Town
Inkwell Memory
305 pages