Ici, ici, ici

In ‘Ici, ici, ici’, Lancelot Hamelin probes the depths of a tormented conscience, interweaving the wounds of history with personal anguish with remarkable literary mastery. The play gives a voice to a former police officer, who was repatriated from Oran to mainland France during the Algerian conflict and became complicit in torture, allowing the author to examine the aftermath of colonialism and the burden of guilt that gnaws at an individual trapped by his past actions.

Accompanied by a foreword by Chris Campbell, Lancelot Hamelin’s text unfolds like a shattered mirror, pitting the narrator’s fragments of memory – now the manager of a mountain hotel – against the deliberate oblivion of the institutions. Oscillating between lyricism and brutality, Lancelot Hamelin’s writing lays bare a quest for forgiveness doomed to failure, whilst simultaneously questioning the grey areas of the French colonial epic in Algeria.