AIR 2012

The sixth edition of the Assises Internationales du Roman, created and organized by Le Monde newspaper and the Villa Gillet, will take place from May 28 to June 3!


Founded in 1987, La Villa Gillet is a cultural institution, interested in literature, humanities, and social sciences, history, contemporary art, etc.. They invite artists, writers, novelists and researchers worldwide to meet the public in conferences, debates and meetings. Les Assises Internationales du roman - an international literary meeting - is also the opportunity to work on projects with students from secondary schools and universities in Lyon.

Helen Oyeyemi participera à

la table-ronde "Habiter"

Avec Paul Andreu et Marie Depussé 

le samedi 2 juin à 14h

RENCONTRES

La rencontre du 1er juin était super !

Nous sommes impatients d'aller aux Assises aujourd'hui!

BLOG

Conversations avec Helen Oyeyemi :

First Mail

Anais/H.Oyeyemi

Caroline/H.Oyeyemi
Louis/H.Oyeyemi       
           L / Helen Oyeyemi                                  

  

Impressions :

  Madame Bowley

    Madame Michaux

Travaux des élèves : 

Nigthmares L
Nightmares S
Nigthmare Lara (L)

Biographies : 

BiOyeyemi S

BiOyeyemi L

Deux classes du lycée Chabrières participent aux AIR dans le cadre de la littérature en langues étrangères, ici l'anglais.
Nous étudions White is For Witching de Helen Oyeyemi dont voici une présentation vidéo ...

Qui suis-je ?

Je suis née au Nigéria le 10 décembre 1984 mais j’ai grandis à Londres. On me connait surtout pour mon premier roman, The Icarus Girl que j’ai écrit à l’âge de 18 ans alors que j’étais encore à l’université. En 2007, la maison d’édition Bloomsbury publie mon second roman, The Opposite House, inspiré de la mythologie cubaine. En 2009, j’ai le plaisir de faire partie du top 25 des femmes les plus célèbres du magazine Venus Zine. Mon troisième roman, White is for Witching, souvent comparés à Edgar Allan Poe et Tim Burton est publié en mai 2009 par la maison d’édition Picador. J’ai reçu le prix Somerset Maugham. On me considère à présent comme une des dix artistes les plus influents du le Royaume Uni. Mon quatrième roman, Mr. Fox, est publié par Picador en juin 2011.

ıɯǝʎǝʎO uǝןǝH sıns ǝſ

First Impressions on White is for Witching . . .

Mrs Bowley :

 Right, what were my first impressions on White is for Witching?

I was at a loss to start with! Although the words themselves did not bring any difficulty, the story itself was weird and I often wondered whose voice I was hearing.

Then I became attached to the characters and I particularly liked the part where Miranda was a student in Cambridge.

Once I had finished reading the whole novel, I felt the need to re-read the first few pages which had seemed somewhat obscure initially.

I wish you all some exciting reading! And a wonderful meeting with Helen Oyeyemi for the Assises Internationales du Roman which should be an exceptional occasion for us all. 

Comme premier contact avec Helen Oyeyemi, l'auteur de White is For Witching, roman que nous étudions, nous avons choisis de lui envoyer un e-mail. Les groupes participants ont écris des parties du messages, voici le résultat posté :

Dear Helen Oyeyemi,

We are French students and we belong to an English class in which we study English literature with our English teacher, Mrs Bowley. Our school is  Parc Chabrières high school, in Oullins, near Lyon.

All of us have been learning English for several years but not the same number of years (4 to 6 years approximately).

We have started to read your book White Is For Witching but it is quite difficult because, for many of us, it is the first time we have read a book in English.  We also created a blog called “ChabriAIR” where we write articles and commentaries. If you want to look at it, its address is: http://chabriair.blogspot.com

Thank you for communicating with us before the Assises Internationales du Roman and taking a bit of your time for us.

We look forward to meeting you soon.

As for our group, we all belong to the European and Scientific section, in our second year of high school, and we will be working with our English teacher, Mrs Michaux.
After having read your novel entitled White Is For Witching, we will be honored to assist to its presentation and the following discussion with the audience.

We are looking forward to meeting you thanks to the "Assises Internationales du roman 2012", and until then, we’d be delighted to communicate with you and exchange thoughts around your novel. We are working on the same blog as the other class.
Thank you for devoting some of your time to us.
 

MIRI'S NIGHTMARE

 

Midnight. I’m asleep on my feet when suddenly the sun wakes me up. It’s a dazzling sun. I’ve just left my girlfriend, Ore is like the sun, dazzling. Eliot eats an apple under the big tree in the garden. I enter the house and, as usual, I take the lift. I’m in a hurry to lie on my bed. I’m in the lift, I’m lost in contemplation and I don’t notice that the lift doesn’t stop. When I finally notice it, the world has turned over. I go up towards the sky which became the earth. I can see blurred things :they are two shadows over me. I think that it’s two people. I can’t see who they are. The lift goes faster and faster and the more I go up, the more I see distinctly the two shadows. It’s two bodies ! It’s Ore ! And ELIOT !What ? Why is Ore here ? Why is MY girlfriend in MY garden with MY brother ? What… ? What are they doing ? It makes me crazy ! Eliot is making love to Ore. Suddenly the lift stops, my eyes convulse and when they stop, the lift starts again but the world has changed again. Ore is under the lift and screams ! She will fall if I do nothing ! I don’t know how to open the hatch under my feet. Unbelievable ! This is a chalk hatch ! I begin to gnaw the hatch, it’s so delicious ! I’ve finished ! I catch Ore’s hand but she pulls me down and we fall from the sky ! She bites me, she scratches me, her eyes are red and I can read in her mind ! She’s thinking of Eliot, she remembers his lips ! Ore continues to kill me, she rips my arm off and when I scream, she munches in my flesh and laughs so sarcasticly…..

Lara Mondelin   (1L)

Voici certains messages envoyés à Helen Oyeyemi par les élèves de la classe de 1ère S. Les réponses de l'auteur suivent.

Answer :

Answer

CHABRIAIR :Does Eliot symbolise the "normal" side of the family while his sister might represent the 'weird" side of it? Or, as they are twins, are they just one person in two bodies showing a complex personality? 

HELEN OYEYEMI:

Eliot's perspective is stable and rational, yes, no matter how much he sometimes wishes he wasn't - he's unable to see anything that's not objectively there. He plays the extremely male role where Miranda plays the extremely female one. Part of what interested me about the two of them being twins is how different their experiences of the house are, just because of one of them is a boy and the other is a girl. 

Why do only the girls/women of the family disappear and not the boys/men?Is Eliott the rational part of Miranda? 

It's the story of a female inheritance, a story of the home, which is traditionally considered the kingdom of women. The men just live there, but the women's identities are tied up in their struggles to control their appetites and their desire to leave home behind. Eliot and Luc try to understand, but the situation is as much a mystery to them as it would be to a stranger. It's as if there are two family histories, and one of them is a secret one.

Does this house exist or is it just the fruit of your imagination? We do not really understand the lay out of the house and especially its different floors. Can you help? Thanks! 

The house doesn't really exist. But this is how I imagine it: its physical structure is normal - it has a basement, an attic and a lift - probably the only strange thing would be how hollow the walls are, and how much space there is between the floor of one room and the ceiling of the room below it. The house needs all that extra hidden space for unfolding.

Here is the work of  pupils following Helen Oyeyemi's message saying she would like to know about their nightmares while reading White Is For Witching. 

I dreamt that the house was calling my name .
I dreamt that it was eating me up.
I dreamt that I became addicted to chalk like Miranda .
I dreamt that I was stuck in the lift of the house.
I dreamt that the House was making a strange noise ,it was crying .
I dreamt that I got  drowned in a pool of apples .
I dreamt that my body was made of chalk and Miranda was chewing me .

1L

“When reading White is for Witching, I had a nightmare which was:

    - to be taken over by a spirit that made me kill my family.

    - about Lily’s coming back from the dead, and haunting me and my family, and driving us crazy.

    - to be eaten by the House.

    - to be locked out from the House which was smiling and laughing as if it wanted to scare me.

     -to be in a strange house where the walls came closer and closer to me while apples, like a flood, filled the room and prevented me from breathing,; the only window was locked by spirits who smiled at me, like devils.

    - about Lily throwing red rotten apples at me and the rest of our class.”

1S

First Impressions on White is for Witching

Mrs Michaux :

My first impressions after reading White is for Witching ? “Ok! Let’s reread the first pages to see if what I had missed then, now makes sense!” And although it does come together in the end, a blurry and foggy sensation still pervades, which is precisely where, to me, Helen Oyeyemi’s success lies: managing to go back and forth between a quite anecdotical and down-to-earth reality, and something of a more ungraspable, ephemereal and bewitching nature.

Besides, we move from one character’s point of view to the other, as if we were moving from one room of the House to the other...I sometimes felt “lost”—like most of our students!—but the journey into that novel is definitely worth it!

There are many “entries” to the story and I sure hope our students will let one of them reach out to them: “White is for witching, a colour to be worn so that all other colours can enter you, so that you may use them.” (WW, p117)

Qui est Helen Oyeyemi ?

Helen Oyeyemi n'est pas une femme ordinaire. Éprise d'une passion envoûtante pour la littérature, elle est une romancière anglaise considérée comme l'une des 10 artistes les plus importantes au Royaume-Uni, même si elle vit actuellement à Budapest.

*

J'ai vu le jour le 10 décembre 1984 au Nigeria mais Londres m'a accueillie au cours de ma quatrième année d'existence. Étant très catholique, j'ai travaillé en tant que bénévole pour une association catholique visant à venir en aide aux plus démunis et à réduire la souffrance dans les pays en voie de développement.

*

D'une certaine façon, le trouble alimentaire du « pica » l'a touchée aux prémices de sa vie car elle s'est nourrie d'une multitude d’œuvres littéraires qui ont conduit à la rédaction de son premier roman alors qu'elle n'avait que 19 ans : the icarus girls.

Juniper's whitning et victimese sont des pièces de théâtre jouées à Cambridge et rapidement publiées lorsqu'elle étudiait les sciences politiques et sociales.

*

Entre la publication de mes deux romans the opposite house en 2007 et Mr. Fox en 2011, j'ai écrit un roman des plus originaux White is for Witching

*

est le titre du roman qui conte mon histoire. J’héberge des personnages morts qui se réincarnent ainsi que des vivants qui disparaissent. L'atmosphère inquiétante et ma présence ambiguë et dominante déconcertent inévitablement le lecteur. Une fois entré dans mon univers, vous n'en sortirez pas indemne…

Vous sentez-vous assez courageux pour me découvrir ?

1S