Nina Bouraoui

In Paris, Nina lives alone. She is eighteen years old. It's the 1980s. Four nights a week she walks across Paris to a legendary women-only nightclub, the Katmandou. She sits alone at the bar, afraid of her own desires, of her sudden and intoxicating freedom. There she meets the glamorous, deeply troubled Ely, her volatile friends Lizz and Laurence, and the beautiful Julia, with whom she falls desperately in love. And, most importantly, she starts to write.

All Men Want to Know

Beatrix

In Algiers, my family seems to me to be one living being, whole and unique. We have no need of others, we are enough as we are, my sister in her bedroom, my mother on the balcony, the cat at her feet, my father filing his papers. Everything is in its place: furniture, objects, the people who use them.

I feel the happiness in my body, waves of happiness, a sensation I can pinpoint; it comes when we are all together.

I'm not breaking any laws but I'm flirting with decadence; I must be, I spend so much time at the Kat. 

Only writing is innocent. I write in complete freedom: I have no timetable, no obligations; words, phrases well up, abrupt, sudden, intrusive, only to disappear as soon as I go back out into the night. 

In our apartment, my sister and l create a space from library to living room by leaving open the foding doors that divide the rooms; we spend our time there, playing ghosts. Real life frightens us more than the supernatural.

Ely can’t cope with reality; that’s why she drinks

At the till, she says: ´I’ve learned how to ignore things for which there are no words. Without a name, nothing can exist. Do you understand?´

aah the flow, the juxtaposition of belonging-ness!

Rue Saint-Charles doesn't feel to mne like exile. I need to become French again, as if I'd neglected my Frenchness in Algeria; there, nature was my world, nature was where I grew up, sleeping in poppy fields, feasting on flowers. I put all my faith in treetops, in the light glancing off the Mediterranean.

 France is an outfit I wear; Algeria is my skin, exposed to sun and storms.

My mother says of Algeria, ‘I’m finished with this country,’ as if she were talking about the end of an affair, the fading of desire.

She clutches her novels to her breast, she mustn't be disturbed. She closes her eyes, and I have the feeling she and her books go to sleep together, skin to skin, as if the books were alive. 

She reads Yves Navarre, Jean-Louis Bory, Wilhelm Reich She folds down the corners of the pages, underlines passages, breaks the spines of her books, opens them out as if they were bodies, spreading their limbs. She takes possession of them, rereads them, quotes them from memory, collects them. 

They devour every inch of space in the apartment, in the library, the bedroom, sometimes the kitchen. She thinks about them all the time. She doesn't lend them, she gives them away, handling them as if thev were her own skin and bone.

I have a special place in my family: I am the one who must not be deflected from the path I've chosen, I am the artist, I'm entitled to wear disguises, to dress as a boy, to cast aside my frocks, to skip meals, to dive into the waves when the sea is rough, to threaten to jump off the balcony when I feel I've been wronged -mostly by my father's stern demands.

My Algerian grandmother doesn't speak French, I don't speak Arabic, our only link is her tenderness, her hands in mine, in my hair, on my shoulders, her kisses on my forehead, her smiles; but this gentleness is beyond me, I dont know what it means, I don't know if it's an expression of love or a way of apologizing for being so unlike us, for not wanting to be like us. We are so very different.

If I am to live, I must leave my childhood behind.

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