Black is social. What other shade to symbolize the angry verb? The key to the heart that opens the first Black and Social Novel Festival. Thirty-one authors have come together on the banks of the Seine, in Vitry-sur-Seine (city near Paris). A stone’s throw from a cinematographic souvenir. Film memory of 1936 with La Belle team by Julien Duvivier. See you at the Maison de la vie associatif from December 6 to 8, 2019.
Novels, social writings, magnificent losers. Poets with chiselled worms. This is the language of the forgotten, of those who are angry at the end of the pen. The black novel endorses existential crises just like those of the thousand and one silent violences which undermine time without future. If the police flirt with invisibility, the average citizen, crushed by the inevitability of social destruction, struggles in the hope of (over) living. The hero bows to his human certainties, saving appearances before they are destroyed. Social black. Painfulness of the « toothless ». The noir novel is in the hope of man. That of revolt. That of the Sociale, the sprig of lily of the valley picked from the Bois de Chaville while humming Le Temps des cerises. It is beautiful this world which traverses, in its diversity, the pages of the guest novels. Vitry beats to the rhythm of brotherhood and it does not matter that the carriers of guns are limited to living their adventures, without other heroic ulterior motives than to follow their authors.
The crowds were there. The exchanges between writers and readers were experienced in conviviality. Not to mention the conferences where we had to bring back chairs so that all the listeners can find a place. Smile volunteers (more than fifty for the good running of the organization) present and efficient in discretion. The organizers, including Books in Struggle (we will come back to this), the bookstore The words found and the Cultural Center of Vitry have promised to provide cover next year. Any good leaf deserves the greatest of patience!