Pardon pour l'Amérique

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Her name is Dengé. In a leopard-print sports bra and Hello Kitty trainers, she picks pesticide-laden tomatoes for a pittance in the scorching fields of Florida, where she will lose her life. His name is Tony Jay. Accused of a double murder that he didn’t commit, he spent thirty years behind bars before being proven innocent and trying to readjust to life on the outside.

As for Engeli, he paces the halls of a psychiatric ward unendingly, haunted by the phosphorous bombs dropped on Falluja, a permanent prisoner of the war in Iraq.

Philippe Rahmy died on October 1, 2017. At a writer’s residence at the Jan Michalski Foundation, he worked tirelessly on his last book, Pardon pour l’Amérique. Born of a several-month-long journey stay in the American South, it opens with Donald Trump’s election and ends with Hurricane Irma. Prisoner of the disease that condemned him to a wheelchair, Philippe Rahmy chose to a confront other forms of detention: illegal employment, incarceration, madness.

Through the power of language – which acted as skeleton for him – he depicts both the tangible and the impalpable: the vastness of the Everglades, a beetle on a windowsill. His feverish, violent and tender road trip abolishes the distinctions between travel log, novel, poetry and political essay. Pardon pour l’Amérique overflows its outline, bursting with digressions, enhanced by the unexpected. Whether met or imagined, the characters speak with raw emotion in a style as harshe and hard-hitting as one-to-one combat.

Born in Geneva in 1965, Philippe Rahmy, who trained as an Egyptologist, had two books of poetry published by Cheyne Éditeur: Mouvement par la fin, with an afterword by Jacques Dupin (2005), and Demeure le corps (2007). In 2013, La Table Ronde published a personal account, Béton armé that won several literary prizes and was elected LIRE magazine’s travel book of the year. His first novel, Allegra, which received the Eugène Rambert Prize and the Swiss Literature Prize, was published by la Table Ronde in 2016, followed by Monarques, in 2017. Philippe Rahmy died in Lausanne on October 1, 2017.

“A lyrical story that pulses with anger and empathy.” Le Temps

“Philippe Rhamy has written an incisive text that resounds with the voice of America as well as his own.” Le Courrier suisse

“Rahmy is a good writer. Lyrical but never loquacious, he drinks deeply of adversity for the humility it brings, and these days that is a great luxury.” Les Inrockuptibles