(Dieulefit) “I am their sister”: the French-Canadian author Nancy Huston talks to AFP about her commitment to prisoners, “destinies as battered as those of artists” and her encounters in French prisons, “among the worst” in developed countries.
Finding oneself in prison “is a huge lesson for any artist or writer,” says this 70-year-old committed author, invited at the end of June to meetings on the subject of confinement organized in Dieulefit, in the Drôme, by the NGO Prison Insider.
“When you’re on the margins, you see the page better,” that is to say the rest of society, assures the woman who has visited around twenty prisons in France, where she has lived since the 1970s.
“I feel more comfortable and more in sync, happier and less at odds with them than in universities,” assures, willingly provocatively, this former student of the philosopher Roland Barthes.
“If I hadn’t had some strokes of luck, I could have spent time in prison too,” she said, believing she had “a lot in common” with its occupants.
“In this, I am their sister,” says Nancy Huston, who sees “a great many similarities between biographies of prisoners, criminals, delinquents, and biographies of authors and artists.”
“If you have a comfortable, happy, easy childhood, you become neither an artist nor a delinquent.”
Meetings behind bars
The prolific author of Song of the Plains (1993), along with around twenty other novels and as many essays, she is a regular at the reading club at the Fleury-Mérogis men’s remand center.
In this penitentiary establishment south of Paris, one of the largest in Europe, “meaningful moments, outside of solitude”, take place in “extraordinary listening”, she says.
“We don’t talk about the facts” committed at all, she explains, but the prisoners “can talk about themselves by talking about the characters.”
It was there that she met Mamar Douani, an Algerian born in France who was serving a long sentence.
“I interviewed him for a whole day […] and I completely understood how one could end up in this position,” the novelist recalls.
When the prisoner was released on parole in 2002, Nancy Huston called on President Sarkozy to prevent his expulsion from the country.
It was again “in Fleury” that she crossed paths with Hélène Castel, sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment after an armed robbery in the 1980s and then arrested in 2004 in Mexico, after having lived there for more than 20 years under a false identity.
“She wrote a book about it, which I wrote the preface to. Over the years we became very close,” says the author, who was called as a character witness at her trial.
“You can’t forget when you’ve met people like that,” she assures us, “it’s life at its most complex, most exciting, most contradictory.”
These prison encounters can “feed my characters – everything that feeds me, feeds my characters – but that’s not the goal,” says the novelist, renewing her commitment to more dignified prison conditions.
Prisons are “one of France’s greatest shames”, the conditions of confinement there are “among the worst in developed countries”, she believes.
France has been condemned several times in recent years by the European Court of Human Rights concerning its places of deprivation of liberty.
In April, the country was criticised by the Court for degrading treatment at the Condé-sur-Sarthe prison in Orne.