Nîmes / Uzès: Joël Alessandra offers Marijah Bac Cam a roadmap to the country of origins

For the cartoonist Joël Alessandra, the book “Tai Dam: Crossing the Mekong” is a “present” for Marijah Bac Cam, his companion. For Marijah, it is “a gift for his ancestors”. Arriving in France in 1976 with her parents, after the Vietnam War, the painter had never returned to her roots. It is this return that recounts with delicacy the graphic novel published by Steinkis editions.

Based in Arpaillargues near Uzès, the couple is used to travel. “Strangely, I was attracted by something more distant from me, which I was looking for in Africa, the cradle of humanity”, says Marijah. Joël has also worked a lot on the black continent, he too has gone in the footsteps of his family history with “Grandson of Algeria” and pushed Marijah to do the same.

“I was afraid for many reasons and first of all not being able to express myself in my language. I thought I had forgotten it, Marijah explains. I had an apprehension, being a foreigner in my own country”. Finally, even before arriving in Vietnam, during a stopover in Thailand, she meets the Taï Dam, the black Taï, this ethnic group from northern Vietnam to which her family belongs. The contact is immediate, direct, easy. She can go and meet her family in the northern mountains!

“Being a foreigner in my own country”

In the middle of these landscapes of rice terraces, Marijah becomes aware of what has always crossed her art. “I had fantasized a lot about my lands of origin. I saw photos that made me dream. I had always identified with a mountain people”. With the black of Indian ink, she was already referring to her origins. But with the landscapes she discovers, it’s something else, “as if we were applying a layer” on the organic lines that run through his painting. For Joël, the shock is also aesthetic. Accustomed to brown and ocher tones, he lets himself be invaded by tropical green.

Through this autofiction, the aim is also to explain “the great History through the small family history, continues Joel. When I spoke with his father or his mother, Tonkin or Annam were exotic but abstract names”. “For you, as for me”, smiles Marijah. Over the course of the encounters and the journey, the book briefly evokes this former colony, French domination, the war in Indochina and then the American intervention. Marijah’s family is intimately linked to this story, the Taï Dam are frowned upon by part of the population for the contacts they had with the colonial power and the princely ancestry of the Marijah family does not match the communist ideology.

The book also recounts a country in the present, the wonder at Halong Bay, the proliferation of Hanoi’s alleys, the daily and modest life of Marijah’s family. Both spectator and actor, Joël Alessandra was particularly touched by the mystical scenes, the worship of ancestors, “a spiritual energy never felt.”