Mémoire et filiation dans La Nuit d’obsidienne et Retour à Satyah de François Emmanuel

François Emmanuel, renown Belgian contemporary writer and practicing psychotherapist, has so far published more than fifteen novels which are all focused on recurring and obsessive questions about memory, heritage and unknown past. The first two of his publications, Retour à Satyah (1989) and La Nuit d’obsidienne (1992) had been written during and little after his stay in Poland at the Jerzy Grotowski’s Teatr Laboratorium in Wrocław. It was also the end-stage phase of the belgitude tendance, the period of intense reflexion about Belgian identity, language, literature and attitude towards the individual and national past. In the same time, an increasing interest in ancestors’ lives in relation in one’s identity issues started in the field of autobiographical writing (récits de filiation, hétérographie, autofiction). Although the writer never openly positioned himself about the belgitude nor has he ever written novels of autobiographical nature, his fictional works reflect the big reflexions of his time’s literature. As well the thematic as the form of Emmanuel’s novels echo contemporary anxieties and illustrate the functioning of memory and transmission.