ARCHIVES 2014 / "La Nuit spirituelle" by Lydie Dattas, concert reading

“One day I found Jean Genet sitting in my armchair. Having run into him on the street and wanting to please me, Alexandre, using his Gypsy science, had led him to my door. The poet soon settled into the one-room apartment upstairs. That very evening, I entered his room to converse with him, joyously expressing my disagreements with this man whose writings I venerated. The next day Genet banished me: 'I don't want to see her anymore, she contradicts me all the time. Moreover, Lydie is a woman and I hate women.' These words rejecting me into the night of my sexual gender despaired me. Finding my salvation in pride, I decided to write a poem that would be so beautiful that he would be forced to come back to me. For weeks, I sought an angle of attack for my words. Overcoming my despair, I wrote La Nuit spirituelle in order to wound him as radically as he had wounded me, returning one death for another. When I had put down the final period, the massive night of my poem stood there gleaming, facing his hatred of women. By siding with him, the poem proved that he was wrong. The next day someone knocked on the door: it was Genet.”

Dominique Féret, avril 2014

Lydie Dattas is twenty when her poems are discovered by the poet Jean Grosjean, who works as a reader for Gallimard. The letters they start exchanging eventually lead to the publication in 1970 by Mercure de France of a first book, Noone. It is only in 1999 that Lydie Dattas relates her first meeting with poetry and light when, only three years old, having fallen sick, she was entrusted to the care of a nun whose kindness saved her (The Experience of Kindness). The daughter of a virtuoso organist, she starts wondering very early about the absence of women in the history of art. She does, however, have a very clear vision of what a great actress is, as her mother is a tragedian. In La Foudre (Lightning), published in 2011, she paints the portrait of her first family, that of her childhood, and of the adoptive gipsy family she chose for herself, the family of the lion tamer Alexandre Romanès, with whom she founded the Lyida Romanès circus. After their break-up, she published Les Amants lumineux (The Luminous Lovers) and Le Livre des anges (The Book of Angels), before starting work on La Chaste vie de Jean Genet. Published in 2006, this isn't the first book the famous author prompted her to write. At the very start of their long friendship, in 1977, his taunts led to her writing a cutting and deep poem, La Nuit spirituelle (The Spiritual Night), a powerful response which started as a letter to Genet and ended up being its own book.

Marion Canelas, April 2014