To me, books have always been alive like people. I hold an open book in my hands, like a beloved face that I decipher- but also aggress, cover, erase. Often, I fall asleep. I wake up with a book in my hands. Maybe my room has paper walls. 

My link to books is double. There are the books that I write, dwelling with delight inside my maternal language where every word is heavy  with memory, with culture, with multiple and stellar connections. 

And there are the books that I have been making since I arrived in the United States and lost the immediate link with the French language. Their materials are immediately ‘readable’ and palpable, beyond a language that I do not share with the outside world anymore. Open books of a double exile- from Egypt and from France: the first was The Book of Sand, inspired by Edmond Jabès’ using them as a propaganda and education tool, s poetry. Some, like the Book of Music, the Book of Moss, the Book of Exile, the logbook, the Book of Books, appropriate and divert printed pages. 

Others, such as the book of ashes or the book of ink, which pages seem charred, allude to Heine’s premonitory sentence, written before the Holocaust: ”When they burn books, it’s just before they start burning people.” Others yet reflect my vision of nature as a “temple with living pillars” ,close to Baudelaire and von Hofmannsthal, and pages then become feathers or bark, clay or bread dough, sea salt or snakeskin.

Books of exile, books without beginning and without end, whose joined pages appeal to the touch as much as the sight: I have always dreamed of a text that could communicate with all our senses.