We Still Have Words by Georges Salines & Azdyne Amimour

Author:Georges Salines & Azdyne Amimour
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner UK
Published: 2020-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

The Mediterranean: the Mother Sea17

AA: Up until that time, had you always lived in the south of France?

GS: Yes, ever since my birth in Sète, on 11 May 1957, under the Fourth Republic… That seems so far away now! I was born in the rue Paul-Valéry, just next to the lycée which also bears this famous poet’s name. There’s a wonderfully hopeful symbolism in being born under the auspices of this great thinker who was so inspired by the Mediterranean, the sea which flows through my veins as it does through yours, Azdyne. How could anyone forget Sète, with its rocky spur jutting defiantly out towards the horizon.

AA: It’s a magnificent town, that’s for sure. No one who was born on its shores can ever forget the Mediterranean. It lives in us and soothes us. Did you live in Sète for long?

GS: Until I was eleven, in the very working-class ‘upper district’ (quartier haut). The town was built by immigrants, mainly from southern Italy. A lot of fishing families came to live there in the nineteenth century. Although it was founded by Louis XIV, and has always been French – despite briefly falling into British hands in 1710 – this ‘peculiar island’, as Paul Valéry called the town, still has an Italian soul to this day. You can see this in the colours, as well as in the personality and family names of its inhabitants. When I was born, my parents were still finishing their studies. They were penniless and could only rent a small apartment. We lived frugally but we were happy, I think.

AA: Who were your parents?

GS: My father, Serge, was born in 1932 and came from a very modest background. His parents had met at the Établissements Fouga, a company founded in Béziers just after the First World War. At the time, this great French engineering firm, which produced equipment for the railway industry before moving into the aeronautical sector, was the pride of the region. My grandmother was a secretary and typist and my grandfather worked on the factory floor. His father, my great-grandfather, had walked into France from Andorra at the beginning of the twentieth century.

My grandmother on my mother’s side had been a schoolmistress in Sète, and had married the son of farmers from the Pyrenees, who was in the army. They had my mother, Mireille, quite late, fifteen years after her brothers and sisters. My grandfather, who died before my mother could really get to know him, had bought a little house in the village of his birth, which I’ve already told you about, and which has always meant a lot to me. We would spend whole summers up in this village perched a thousand metres above the Aude valley; that’s where my passion for the mountains and hiking was forged.

After having to spend ten years living apart most of the time because of their postings as teachers, my parents were at last able to be together with me under one roof in Béziers in 1970.

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