«Tout devient rose, là-bas, au crépuscule» originates in certain passages of Maupassant's travelogue La vie errante and more particularly in these very last lines:
"There, in the twilight, everything becomes pink" finds its origin in certain passages of Maupassant's travel book La vie errante (The Wandering Life) and more particularly in its final lines: "On this calm and soporific soil, so captivating that the legend of the lotus-eaters was born there in the island of Djerba, the atmosphere is sweeter than anywhere else, the sun warmer, daylight clearer, but the heart does not know true love. The women are beautiful and ardent, and yet are ignorant of our tender caresses. Their simple souls have remained strangers to our sentimental emotions, and their kisses, it is said, do not inspire the dreams of true love."
The author begins by expressing his weariness of Paris and his dislike of the Eiffel Tower, which has just been built. He decides to travel to Kairouan via Italy, Sicily, Algeria and then Tunisia, which he crosses from north to south.
La vie errante tells the story of this journey, like the passage from one world to another, a modern and gloomy world, antagonistic to a primitive and luminous world. Maupassant seeks exoticism there and his story is tinged with it. If he detects something true, a genuine emotion, when he speaks of the light of twilight, of all the shades of pink in the sky or of the nature of the landscape, his observations on individuals, on the contrary are imbued with racist prejudices, typical of its time. In the end, these landscapes so wonderfully described, leave the impression of a poisonous paradise.
A contrast is made between a landscape that seems to satisfy his expectations of exoticism, and women who turn out to be far removed from what he had in his mind. From this feeling of disappointment, I imagined that another account could be born.
If the kisses of these women didn’t give birth to the dream, perhaps they knew how to give birth to something else?
Through the drawings, bits of images, snippets of objects and sentences, a story takes shape. That of women linked to the sun, to the light, and to the twilight sky by a supernatural power. Infused by the rays of the setting sun, they travel through time, crossing eras and undergo metamorphosis until they become kinds of divinities, at the same time protective, threatening and unpredictable. Seemingly harmless, they would secretly influence the movement of the world.
In the continuity of the New Flesh project, I approached Maupassant's story by probing the images relating to the culture from which I came, to highlight the transformations that shake it, the ghosts that haunt its representations .
Yesmine Ben Khelil
