Meeting with Samira EL Ayachi

Madame Bovary, my mother and I "We never talked about it. But I think I wasn't planned in the program. I am surely the child of a return of cycles. Is that why I always have the impression of disturbing. Is that why I often apologize." When the doctor asks her: "Do you have any family history?", Salwa remains silent. She realizes that she knows almost nothing – neither about the illnesses of the women in her lineage, nor their history, nor what, in their bodies, was transmitted to hers. Yet, nameless pains resonate within her, a crazy desire to live, the silence of a mother... and the echo of Emma Bovary, studied in high school. From this silence is born a quest. Between a mother and her daughter unfold secrets, exiles, the unspoken, but also a path to find each other, finally." In this fifth luminous novel, with a hybrid form, Samira El Ayachi signs a work of filiation and emancipation, at once a hymn to love and to literature. She revisits the bond between mothers and daughters and explores with finesse a blind spot of our history: the mental health of women who arrived in France with "family reunification" at the turn of the 1980s. About the author Samira El Ayachi, born in Lens in 1979 and settled in Lille, is a novelist and author for live performance. Devoted to writing, she shares her time between literary creation and meetings with her readers in France and Morocco. She has published several noted novels, among which Quarante jours après ma mort, Les femmes sont occupées and Le ventre des hommes, all published by the same publisher. Her work Madame Bovary, ma mère et moi is part of the cycle "What connects us: History(ies) of shared reparations", a literary approach initiated by the author around questions of memory, transmission and reparation, of which Le ventre des hommes (éditions de l’Aube, 2021) constitutes one of the major components.