Sophie Caratini is a writer and anthropologist. A specialist in Mauritania and the Western Sahara, she is a research director at the CNRS and a member of the Arab World and Mediterranean research team.
La fille du chasseur (The Hunter's Daughter)
Éditions Thierry Marchaisse, February 2011
"Was it me? Did I really live that? Or is it someone else, or is it a dream? My childhood in the desert, the great crossings with the Nomad Group, my fattening, my marriages to... Did it exist? It is so far from me. And then, if it really was me, who am I now?"
Mariem's voice rises from the land of a million poets, from that Mauritanian desert where the sand wind erases every trace and consigns the lives of men to oblivion.
Carried by her words, masterfully staged by Sophie Caratini, we pass through the mirror of myth to reach the truth of a woman and discover a Saharan, Bedouin world that the colonial shock would utterly overturn. With Mariem, lost knowledge and other ways of being regain their meaning. Through her, we reach the way of life and the inner metamorphoses of an entire people.
"Besides her experience, the grandmother has the immense advantage of being free to show her feelings. The young mother cannot. It is forbidden. She must not show that she loves her children in front of her mother or her mother-in-law; she must not cuddle or kiss them. It would be a lapse of decorum; it is not well accepted. That does not mean she has no love for her children, that she has less or that she should have none — only that she is not free to show it."
(page 51)
"In Mauritania they say that children, babies, when they die before the age of sin, call their parents to paradise. It is a thought that helps to bear the pain. Among Muslims, one accepts. You are told that everything that has life on earth must disappear one day or another, sooner or later; that this is how it is. So you are convinced of it. And you accept it... willingly or not. In Europe, people also know that everything must disappear, but they accept it less well. We do not rebel. We do not have the right. When we lose someone, we weep for them of course, we grieve like everyone, but we must thank God for not having called us all back at the same time. You see this philosophy. It is deeply felt. One must pray, one must thank the Lord who did not make us all die — He could have... Thank Him for having given us this being for a certain time and for taking them back afterwards. They say that life, in the end, is a loan that is made to you."
(page 115)