Along the alleys of this « ideal place »

From showers to rainbows, the sun finally broke through on Sunday: the city of canvas emerged from the fog and, along the vast alleys, the mud gave way to beaten earth. But in the alchemy of the Festival, the weather counts for little: light or greyness, there was the same joy in meeting up, debating or dancing, the same pleasure in being together and giving voice, the same tranquility , and this invaluable and rare attention to each other.

On Base 217, in its new districts of Essonne, far from La Courneuve, the biggest political party in Europe has become more rural: its public has followed; the youngest, the novices discover with pleasure a way of being together, a crossroads of meetings which they did not expect. Victor, 21, projectionist in Paris, comes for the first time; he says to himself » pleasantly surprised « . “What I really like is the eclecticism. If you just come to attend concerts, listen to musicians, you can find what you’re looking for, but if you’re more interested in politics, between the stands and the big debates, you’re spoiled for choice, he smiled. It is the ideal place to party, debate, exchange. The people are extremely friendly, all generations are represented, I didn’t expect that. »

This that generation has little taste for politics as it is too often practiced, small phrases, sterile disputes or useless outbursts. Throughout the Festival, from one space to another, the debates filled the room, all imbued with the thirst to learn and to compare ideas, to form a common front in the social fight and to identify alternatives. emancipatory in respect of the singularity of each, of each political current. The demand for unity is indeed the trademark of this motley, combative, upright people of the left: it irrigated this meeting from start to finish; it carries this political momentum which is looking for itself, after the spring elections marked by the inglorious renewal of a power determined to dismantle all collective rights and the flight of an extreme right driven by ideas of hatred, regression , dividing.

“Act in your place, think with the world”

These people play with borders… In this fully redeployed party, after the Covid pandemic and the 2021 edition in reduced format, a face was plastered everywhere, in the absence: that of the Franco-Palestinian lawyer Salah Hamouri , human rights defender, arbitrarily detained for five months in Israeli jails. In the spans of the Village of the world that he usually walks every year, many people gave voice to demand his release, to assert the rights of the Palestinian people oppressed by an apartheid system: posters, petitions, wandering. There again, the stand of the France-Kurdistan association dedicated three days of concert to the young Kurdish singer Nûdem Durak, unjustly sentenced to nineteen years in prison by the regime of Receip Tayyip Erdogan. Under the flags of the Republic of the Rif, Saïd Kaddouri narrowly escaped the same fate: opponent of the Moroccan monarchy, a figure of social protest in Nador, he is today in France, awaiting the processing of his request. of asylum. “I am more useful here than behind bars, even if I miss mine, he breathes. This holiday is an incredible opportunity to share our struggles, the faces and stories of our comrades imprisoned for asking for a dignified life for all. »

In the debates area of ​​the Village du monde, a female tribune settles her account with far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, on the eve of a crucial election. An activist from the Landless Movement lists all the social setbacks he has endorsed: “Violence, family, homeland, that is his slogan! » accuses his comrade from the Workers’ Party by evoking his responsibility in the liberation of racist speech, in the resurgence of police violence and violence against women and, in his voice, it is all the din of the feminist wave breaking on the Latin America, from Mexico to Argentina, that we hear.

In this rhizome party rich in an effervescent collective intelligence, we think back to these words of Édouard Glissant: “Act in your place, think with the world. » A political partition, when it is a matter of emancipation, plays with borders and feeds on fights from elsewhere and from yesteryear. The Angela Davis Stage resonated, on September 11, with Canto general, this cantata by the Greek musician Mikis Theodorakis, who died last year, is the eponym of the collection by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda from which it borrows the verses, premiered in 1974 at La Courneuve. Like a call to never put your knees down, even in battles lost for a while. And to take, always, the path of union.