The journey won’t teach you anything if you don’t also give it the right to destroy you. It’s a rule as old as the world. A voyage is like a shipwreck, and those whose boat has not sunk will never know anything about the sea. The rest is skating or sightseeing. »
These words of the Swiss travel writer Nicolas Bouvier (1929-1998), unparalleled landscape designer and master of the snapshot, François-Henri Désérable could no doubt make them his own if he could.
At the end of 2022 in Iran, for forty days, at the height of the uprising against the Islamic regime, the French novelist, neither tourist nor skater, wanted to follow in the footsteps of this “wizard of the road”. The one whose reading at the age of 25, he confides, was a real “explosion”.
In 1963, in The use of the world, Nicolas Bouvier, for his part, told the story of his almost mythical journey between Geneva and Afghanistan. An eighteen-month trip accomplished in the early 1950s aboard a tiny Fiat Topolino, in the company of his painter friend Thierry Vernet.
“I had sworn to myself, as one often does when reading a travelogue, to follow in his footsteps one day, explains François-Henri Désérable, contacted at his home in Paris. And a few years later, I found myself at his grave in Geneva. There, there was a pebble on which someone had written: “Now Nicolas, teach us the use of the sky.” »
Initially, the idea was to travel to Iran in the footsteps of Bouvier. But quickly, in the light of a political context very different from that experienced by the Swiss, the project changed form to echo the aspirations for freedom of the Iranian people.
Because by chance it was a few months after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old young woman from Iranian Kurdistan, beaten to death by vice police officers for “wearing inappropriate clothing”. An event that is at the origin of a series of uprisings that have inflamed the country for months.
Witness it now The wear and tear of a world. A crossing of Irana crazy diagonal drawn by hitchhiking or by bus by François-Henri Désérable between Zahedan, on the Pakistani border, and Saqqez, in Iranian Kurdistan, via Tehran, Shiraz or Isfahan.
An antidote against received ideas
If the French writer carried with him in his luggage a number of received ideas about Iran and Iranians, at least one of them has come true. “Iranians are very hospitable. I have never met people so curious, so welcoming towards foreigners. »
On the other hand, many others were quickly invalidated. Starting with the fact that Iran would be a very religious country. “I happened to travel through a number of Muslim countries where, when the muezzin makes the call to prayer, life stops. In Iran, not at all. I met a people who don’t care much about religion and who aspire to have a secular country or one that is not governed entirely by religion. »
The traveler was also surprised not to find any trace of anti-Americanism in Iran. “Iranians learned English by watching The Simpsons, downloaded Hollywood movies, wore Air Jordans and Yankees logo caps, dreamed of seeing New York and experiencing the taste of the Big Mac. »
“Just open your eyes, almost everyone in Iran is against the regime,” he said. He saw a world worn out, doomed in the medium term. “I think the Republic will eventually fall. I find that the population’s distrust of this regime is far too great. Sooner or later, it will end up collapsing. »
As proof, these cries heard at any time of day or night, launched from the high window of a building or a car passing by honking in the street. “Death to the dictator!” Cries each time taken up by others, amplified, spreading through the streets of the city. “It was the marvelous echo of Tehran. It was night, traversed by lightning. »
For years, the first thing I did when I got up in the morning was watch the NHL scores. Frankly, I would trade just about anything I have today to play in the NHL.
From hockey to literature
Author of four novels, including My master and my conqueror (Gallimard, 2021, Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française), François-Henri Désérable was born in Amiens in 1987. He attended the same private Catholic high school there as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in this northern city, before being a professional hockey player in France for ten years.
“For years, he recalls, the first thing I did when I got up in the morning was to watch the NHL results. His very first hockey jersey, at age five, was that of the… Montreal Canadiens. A flame that remains alive, if we are to believe it. “Honestly, I would trade just about everything I have today to play in the NHL. The experience of high level sport has taught him that all success is the fruit of discipline. “This is the reason why, when I stopped my hockey career, I wanted to do only literature, to devote myself entirely to reading and writing. »
A fervor partly replaced in his life by that for travel, which now occupies a central place in this writer. “I only travel with the idea of writing”, assures the author of You will show my head to the people (Gallimard, 2013). A bulimia traveler that comes to him from his reading of Bouvier, which gave him “the furious desire to hit the road”.
“If I hadn’t written about this trip, sooner or later it would have been doomed to oblivion and it’s as if it didn’t exist. This journey, in a way, is linked to writing. It seems to me that it only exists because it was written. »
Just as hockey players are well aware of the importance of having their blades sharpened, so too, he believes, is the sensitivity of the writer. “Every day spent in the same place ends up dulling your gaze. I believe that only travel can allow you to sharpen it again. » To maintain a look more accustomed to what Faulkner called « the thickness of the shadow ».
“If you travel, it’s not so much to marvel at other places: it’s to come back with different eyes,” writes François-Henri Désérable. What well testifies The wear of a worldshot through with subtle observations and striking encounters, portraits of young girls on fire, defying fear and the forbidden.
In this sense, The wear of a world is also an ode to the courage of Iranian youth, who knew how to upset the traveler, the man and the writer.
In light of the circumstances surrounding the end of this trip – in Iranian Kurdistan, in the country of Mahsa Amini, after having politely arrested him, the Revolutionary Guards gave him three days to leave the country – the French writer knows that he will not be able to return to Iran anytime soon.
“This trip was also crossed by a great melancholy, because I knew that the landscapes I saw, the people I met, the cities I passed through, it was perhaps for the first and the last time. »