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Culture – Leisure | Black lives also count in the Mississippi Delta

In the United States, black men are two and a half times more likely to be killed by the police than white men, notes a study by the American National Academy of Sciences published last year. The study also estimates that one in a thousand African Americans may fear dying at the hands of the police in the United States.

A dramatic situation, verified on May 25 with the death of Georges Floyd during his arrest by white police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The murder, filmed live by witnesses, was a reminder of systemic racism in the United States, not just the police.

The protest movements that erupted after the tragedy spread to Europe, especially in Great Britain, France and Belgium where the memory of colonization was questioned and statues were destroyed.

Less than two months before the death of Georges Floyd, a novel by Chanelle Benz came to testify that deep America never got rid of its racist history. Besides, the book opens with a sentence by William Faulkner: “The past is never dead, it never even passed”.

The quest for a luminous heroine

Billie James returns to the Mississippi Delta thirty years after the death of his father, a major poet of American literature. Then four years old, she disappeared for several days. Except that today, she doesn’t remember anything. Her memory has erased everything and the young woman is trying to understand.

Accompanied by her dog and a slightly out of date literature teacher, she questions witnesses to her father’s last moments and discovers that everyone, even relatives, pushes her to leave Mississippi to return to Chicago where she built her life…

She persists, despite the doors closing, and she will eventually discover another truth, rooted in the history of slavery and American segregation.

One inevitably thinks of William Faulkner when reading Chanelle Benz’s first novel in his description of this deep, sticky South, haunted by the ghosts of a bloody past. The breathtaking, tight writing, the bright, obstinate heroine, but also the release of the book at a time when the world may finally be aware of the horrible horror that was slavery, make it a major novel of the decade .

“Nothing in the night but ghosts”, by Chanelle Benz. The threshold. € 21

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