Mathieu Belezi on the Violence of Empire

The French Institute is delighted to welcome Mathieu Belezi for the English-language launch of Attacking Earth and Sun, the first of his novels to appear in English. He will be in conversation with the British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh.

Set in the early years of French-colonised Algeria, the novel follows a settler family and a French soldier through the brutality of conquest, and returns to a chapter of French and Algerian history that was silenced for generations.

Séraphine arrives in Algeria in the 1840s with her husband, her children, her sister and her brother-in-law. She sets out to build a French village and cultivate the land, until a cholera epidemic ruins everything she tries to raise. The other voice of the novel belongs to a soldier charged with the “pacification” of the country, sickened by the violence he himself inflicts. Both come to know the barbarity of what has become their ordinary life.

Told in these two voices, the book lays bare the illusions of the colonial project in a language that critics have compared to Faulkner. Belezi wrote it in a few months, paring back the punctuation so that the prose runs almost without a break. In France it sold more than 90,000 copies and is being translated into at least nine languages.

Belezi has written more than a dozen novels about France’s colonial past, several under pen names, and Attacking Earth and Sun is the first to reach a wide readership. Attaquer la terre et le soleil (Le Tripode, 2022) won the Prix Le Monde and the Prix du Livre Inter. Lara Vergnaud’s translation, Attacking Earth and Sun, is published by HopeRoad.

Copies of the book will be available to buy on the night in both French and English, courtesy of our partner bookshop Librairie La Page.