From an art-historical perspective, depicting war is easier than depicting peace, explains Félix Jousserand, a poet, slam poet, and singer

Félix Jousserand is a poet, slam poet, singer, and one of the most distinctive voices on the contemporary French poetry scene. With The Siege of Mosul, he has created a work that blends war reportage, an epic poem in alexandrine verse, and musical performance. Accompanied on stage by cellist Bruno Ducret, he presented this creation yesterday in the gardens of the French Embassy in Andorra. Some works are born of shock. Others emerge from obsession. This one seems to arise from both: the shock of war and an older, almost medieval fascination with words capable of transcending time. At first glance, the project might appear to be a musical reading of a wartime narrative. But it soon becomes clear that the work is something far more unusual, more singular, and more ambitious. It is not simply an attempt to recount a historical event. Rather, it seeks to recover a lost function of poetry: to inform, to transmit, to move, and to edify. Poetry that is not merely beautiful, but that reclaims its ancient role in society. The performance recounts one of the defining urban battles of the 21st century: the siege of Mosul, fought between Iraqi and coalition forces and ISIS from 2016 to 2017. Through powerful language and music that evokes the sounds of bombs, gunfire, heartbeats, clashing metal, and the many other sonic textures of war, Félix Jousserand transforms a historical event into a poetic, musical, and profoundly human experience. Interview : Irina Rybalchenko Is it difficult to explain war? What’s difficult is continuing to tell the story when emotions inevitably run high. But at the same time, I’d almost say it isn’t. From an art-historical perspective, it’s easier to depict war than peace. It’s easier to write about a villain than someone who embodies only generosity, kindness, and grace. You can simply describe things as they are. After all, war is always the same. The earliest accounts, the first war chronicles, I’m referring to the tales of the troubadours, are built, in part, on repetition. That’s why they can sometimes feel repetitive: one battle, then another, then another… Ultimately, it’s always the same battle. There is very little to distinguish one from another. Do you see yourself as an heir to the troubadours? Yes, absolutely. For the past 150 years, ever since Rimbaud, poetry has largely abandoned narrative. Yet popular poetry has always had a distinct function: to inform, to entertain, and to transmit values. That’s what it was for before the age of radio or the internet. Historically, the troubadours invented the war narrative – the epic genre. They also sang of love, of courtly love. Traditionally, the poet has sung of the two great human experiences: war and love. Why did you choose Mosul? I’m an orientalist. For anyone familiar with the region, it was obvious this would become a nightmare. It was a trap. ISIS wasn’t trying to break out or escape. For anyone who understood the context, given ISIS’s mentality and, above all, the size of the city, nearly two million inhabitants, roughly the size of Marseille, it was clear that the battle of Mosul would be unlike any other. It sounds as though you experienced these events firsthand… I was almost obsessed. My goal, in any case, was to understand what was happening and establish the facts as accurately as possible. Today, you can cross-reference all the available sources. The detailed reporting in Le Figaro and Le Monde, because they are among the last newspapers still maintaining correspondents on the ground, provided the foundation. Then I read everything else I could find online. And above all, this was the first time I had witnessed something like this. Perhaps it had already happened… I don’t know. But it was extraordinary. As you searched social media, you would come across fighters wearing GoPro cameras on their helmets. They had Twitter accounts and were live-streaming. Images from the front line appeared almost in real time, with only a minute or two separating the events themselves from what you saw. I also worked extensively with photographs. Everything that gives the narrative its texture—the smaller details that have nothing to do with troop movements or major military operations—comes from photographs. When Laurent Van der Stockt, Patrick Chauvel, or other photographers were in the field, I often saw their images before they were ever published. They were already circulating online. The articles generally presented an optimistic narrative: eliminate ISIS and move on. The photographs, however, often told a far more complex story, revealing just how difficult it was to achieve those objectives. What is the goal or feeling you are trying to evoke? At first, when I wrote the book, I thought of it as a message in a bottle. It wasn’t conceived as a stage performance at all; it was simply meant to be a book. Then, two years ago, the Avignon Festival invited me to create whatever I wanted. To be honest, I felt my publisher hadn’t done enough to promote the book and that it hadn’t reached enough readers. So I decided I had to keep going, because I felt this text still hadn’t had the chance to truly come alive. I started again in a different form, with Bruno composing the music. We premiered it in Avignon. What’s interesting is that we’re now touring with this reading. I hesitate to call it a performance. What’s equally interesting is that, as time passes, my relationship to the story keeps evolving. The political dimension, which was already present when I began writing, has become more pronounced. I think that the voices we’ve heard least are those of the people of Mosul themselves. Apart from a few fragments, they’ve remained largely unheard. We’ve never truly listened to those who lived beneath the relentless bombardment of the Western coalition.The post From an art-historical perspective, depicting war is easier than depicting peace, explains Félix Jousserand, a poet, slam poet, and singer first appeared on All PYRENEES.