Un qui veut traverser

“A Man Who Wants to Cross” is a hero without a specific identity. He is defined simply by his desire to leave home. He alone represents the masses of illegal immigrants, no matter where they come from. His nationality is irrelevant; it is never specified. He comes from a country where leaving is forbidden. He could just as easily be a factory worker, a geographer, or a journalist. As the story unfolds, it is as if he were multiplying along different paths, as if he could die and be reborn. This text is a choral narrative in which the storytelling is woven into the dialogues, making it impossible to untangle it all by clearly distinguishing action from speech. It defines itself above all as the description of a “gesture” (in a somewhat epic sense) depicting the acts and circumstances in which these battles—unarmed yet deadly—take place. Literarily speaking, one can see a distant connection to the archaic form of Greek tragedy, the dithyramb—an alternation of strophes sung by the coryphaeus and antistrophes sung by the chorus.