“The Colonel arrives on a frosty morning, and on that day it starts to rain. This is the time of year when the whole landscape becomes monochrome. Gray low sky, gray people, gray Asta and ruins, gray great river with its slow flow. The colonel comes one morning and seems to come out of the darkness, he himself is so gray that you can say that he is a pile of faded particles, ash, born of this sunless world. OUR Emil Malfattoauthor of the novelThe colonel does not sleep“, at the age of 34 she has achieved a lot. A graduate of the school of journalism in Paris, she is a freelance journalist and press photographer.

Her work mainly covers the Middle East and Latin America. Previously, she worked for Agence France Press in France, in the regional office in the Middle East and in Iraqi Kurdistan as a special envoy. In 2015, he settled in Iraq as a freelance journalist and has also undertaken missions in eastern Turkey, the Balkans, the Caucasus and recently Venezuela.

photo they have been featured in exhibitions and published in, among others, the Washington Post and the New York Times. However, we tracked her down for an interview about her second novel, which was recently published in Greece by Dioptra, who had already won the Prix Goncourt as first author to her credit for Que sur toi, not translated into Greek. se lamente le Tigre.”

We spoke two days before he left Paris for another mission in Iraq. “I don’t know how long I will be missed, but I will definitely not have access to the phone for several weeks,” she said, and indeed later the connection with her was cut off. Malfato has been on the battlefield many times. The experience of war ignites her artistic works. Having lived for a long time in northern Iraq, military conflicts have become something very personal and ordinary for her. “I was often close to people who were fighting.

I know the sounds of war: a terrible noise suddenly heard during the day, the silence of the night, ”he says. “I don’t talk much about what I saw and experienced, except perhaps with my family. War is usually not a topic that people want to hear about, not the topic of a pleasant dinner party. Of course, there are those who find this terrible pleasure. I avoid them. The only people I can really talk to are those who fought.” In her first book, inspired by the complex reality of Iraq, she subtly introduces us to a closed society ruled by male power and a code of honor: In today’s rural Iraq, on the banks of the Tigris, a young girl violates an absolute taboo. and starts a love affair outside of marriage. A boy is killed by bombs, a young girl is pregnant.

An inexorable mechanism is set in motion, family members turn into a circle of silent shadows under the “look” of the epic of Gilgamesh, the bearer of the memory of the country and people. In her second book, the tormentor colonel is doomed to a lifetime of sleepless nightmares.

The narrative develops by alternating third-person narration and first-person poetic writing, the protagonist’s internal monologues: “I have the impression / that I don’t have long to wait / that one of these nights I will sleep / finally / this is relief / years of insomnia, which you can imagine / and yet sometimes I am afraid that / you will refuse me / and this / that even when I die, I will not find again neither sleep / nor oblivion, “says the protagonist, an acquaintance – a stranger living in a ghost country.

– “The Colonel” is a work more fabulous, more distant from reality than the previous one. I “allowed” myself more freedom, almost insanity, in writing. Even more poetry. But I think writing is fueled by everything we experience, everything we see, everything we read, and this particular book is no exception. This also applies to warfare, a subject with which I was associated through my profession.

– I imagine that in my work there is an internal purification. This is a way to get rid of some “injuries” and turn the pages. Fiction also allows you to talk about certain things in a different way than in journalism. Maybe I’m naive, but I believe that people are not born monsters. So I’m interested in understanding how they get where they are, where they come from, where they go, and what they do when they get home.

– It can be anywhere and anytime. Including Greece in the late 1960s.

I know the sound of war. I don’t talk much about what I saw and experienced. Usually people don’t want to hear about the war.

“When it comes to fiction, writing is more of a necessity than a desire. There is something redeeming about this flow of words that I have no control over anyway. These are texts that were born without my expectation and expectation. It’s just that at some point I had to put on paper what was already written in my head. As if ready-made, the text passed through me, I was only his recorder.

Whether I’m shooting in France or somewhere else, returning from a job can always be difficult. It depends a lot on the area and topic that I have to cover. Sometimes you need to give yourself a sort of decompression. When the text is a long report rather than fiction, as in the Colombian book Serpents Will Come for You, I am writing from notes I have taken in the field. Then you really need to plan your time, but this is part of the journalistic work. Writing fiction comes to me unexpectedly and impulsively, and always very quickly. So I write obsessively for a while, and then I stop.

– Light is a decisive element in all photographic work: in photography we “write” with light. Personally, I find it difficult to work if I am uncomfortable with the light. When I work in Iraq, I am one of those photographers who gets up at four in the morning to get “the right light”.

“Unfortunately, Western societies are also dominated by men. Of course, there are differences, but a woman in Europe is almost always subject to the dictates of the patriarchy. These are more subtle commands, but they exist, they shape us, limit us. Realizing this and trying to free yourself from it is constant, difficult, effortful work.