While the Romanian language is increasingly less mastered in vulnerable environments with high dropout rates, and on the other hand, Gen Z youth feel they can express themselves better in English than in Romanian, Sylvain Audet-Găinar’s story is the exact opposite, one of fascination for the Romanian language.

The Frenchman Sylvain Audet loved his wife and her family from Romania so much that, completely of his own free will, he thought it only natural to take the name Găinar, knowing full well the meaning of the word.

A teacher of French as a foreign language, Sylvain lived in Romania for a few years and fell in love with our language. He started writing about Romanian expressions and proverbs and recording clips for social media. He quickly and unexpectedly gained popularity among both Romanians and the French.

“My goal was that when we had a child, I would be able to understand my wife’s language when she spoke to our kid. It was incredibly important to me that there wouldn’t be a disconnect, an imbalance, or even a cultural hierarchy,” the author explains.

Today, their son speaks both French and Romanian equally, and Sylvain Audet-Găinar is working on a Romanian language textbook for French speakers. We met him in Paris, and he told us his story, with the entire conversation taking place exclusively in Romanian.

***

Sylvain was born in a rural area near Lyon. He went to high school in the city, which would change his personal life and map out his path toward a career in linguistics.

“My high school was partnered with a school in Târgu Mureș. So, when I was in the tenth grade, they suggested I become pen pals with someone from Târgu Mureș. For a few years already, I had been very drawn to this country because when I was 9, I watched the 1989 Revolution on TV and it shocked me. Those images really stuck with me, everything seemed so cruel, so strange. I didn’t understand, like, is this what a real revolution looks like? It wasn’t idealized like what we learned about revolutions in school.

So, when I was in the 10th grade and they offered me the chance to write to someone there, I gladly accepted. I received the address of a girl named Maria Găinar. Today, she is my wife.”

“We started writing letters to each other in French, because I didn’t know a single word of Romanian back then. I didn’t even know how to pronounce the name of the city. After two years of corresponding, we were supposed to actually meet, the Romanian students were going to visit us, and we were going to go there. But the exchange fell through because we were the only two still writing to each other. The others weren’t.

So I waited a year, started university, and saved up money to pay for a plane ticket to finally see her.

Did you send photos to each other? Did you know what she looked like?

Yes, but back then, photos were very rare and sometimes older. It took time to get a picture taken, or it would get lost. I think in the photo she sent me, she was a few years younger than she was when we actually met.

It wasn’t like the days of WhatsApp, where you send a picture in a second. And when I went, I stayed for a month.

At her place?

Yes, her parents agreed to it. She invited me to come over because of the Solar Eclipse. And that’s pretty much how I entered the Romanian world.

And you fell in love with Maria, basically.

Exactly. I genuinely fell in love with her, but also with her language—the way it sounds, the way it’s hard to quite catch. It feels like such a playful language that it makes you want to learn it, just to reach a level where you can have fun with it too,” Sylvain tells us with a smile on his face at a café in Paris.

Back then, he was a Literature student studying French and comparative literature. To be closer to Maria, he signed up for an Erasmus year at the Faculty of Letters in Bucharest. Later, she got a scholarship in Strasbourg, and they both moved to France.

“I finished my studies there, and she did her PhD there. And we started moving back and forth between the two countries. I worked for the French Embassy in Romania, then in Sibiu, and in Cluj. At some point, I got a position in Bucharest, and our child was born in Bucharest.

I became a French teacher for foreigners. That’s what I did for many years. I was a French lecturer at the ‘Lucian Blaga’ University in Sibiu, but I also taught at the kindergarten of the French High School in Bucharest. I really loved it; I worked there for four years and it was a lot of fun. I liked this job because I worked with very different profiles, with very young children who couldn’t read yet, so I had to come up with very creative games and activities.

And I also worked with adults, sometimes with very little education, even illiterate—that was in Brussels.”

Was Maria your Romanian teacher, or were you self-taught?

“I was partly self-taught, but she also helped me a lot. Maria used to read to me when I was a beginner. I would ask her to read to me in Romanian. She read me the entire Harry Potter series, for example. I learned a ton of words. Though, mind you, not all of them are very easy to use in everyday speech. ‘Cauldron’ (ceaun), for instance, I haven’t really used since then, hahaha. Or ‘owl’ (bufniță).”

When we met Sylvain in Paris, he and his family had just returned from a funeral in Romania. Half-joking, half-serious, he knows exactly what an “alms” means.

He is incredibly attached to our country and his family here, and his interest in the Romanian language naturally evolved toward writing and translation.

“I started translating from Romanian into French, but I got a bit tired of translating other people’s books and figured I’d be better off writing my own books exactly the way I wanted. That’s how I started writing. I was living in Bucharest at the time, and my wife was pregnant. We had just found out we were having a boy. I was at an antique bookstore and stumbled upon a small, anonymous photo.

It moved me deeply to see a picture of a 4 or 5 year old boy whom I knew nothing about, whose life story no one was telling. I was thinking about our own boy and decided I wanted to tell him the history of Romania, and try to give that child in the photo a story of his own.

That’s how I started writing a detective novel. It felt like the most suitable format, given the mystery of it all. And I wanted it to be funny too, because that’s just my personality.

I started reading those chapters out loud, but it was actually a family novel. I would read a chapter every time we went for an ultrasound checkup. Then I started making such good progress that I realized it was becoming a real book, and I actually ended up writing a trilogy.”

The three novels written by Sylvain Audet-Găinar, inspired by the photo found in the antique bookstore, have been translated into Romanian: Tămbălău la București (Ruckus in Bucharest), Țap ispășitor (Scapegoat), and Balamuc la București (Madhouse in Bucharest).

His most recent book, launched right at the Romanian booth at the Paris Book Fair, is a volume about 80 Romanian words, explained in Sylvain’s signature style – “80 mots de Roumanie.”

“The format of this book is very strict. It is a series of 10 volumes, and Romania is the 10th one. You have to choose 80 words from a language, and each word gets a text of 2,500 characters maximum. So it’s a huge stylistic constraint. The publisher told me to make it more about myself. And I had a lot of stories to tell.

For example, I talk about it in the first chapter: when I was 19, I went to Bucharest, transitioning from being a teenager to a man. And I used to go get a shave because I liked being surrounded by Romanian men, to understand culturally how the Romanian way of being a man works.

And from there, I start explaining from my point of view what it means to be a man in Romania. So each word is actually just a pretext.”

Sylvain’s connection to Romania spans over 25 years now. It began in a communist-era apartment in Târgu Mureș and now encompasses a rich linguistic universe, a Romanian-French son, and a community of over 20,000 people who follow the funny clips the author posts on Instagram.

“What were the first things that amazed you about Romania?

The carpets, for example. I found it amazing.

The ones on the walls or on the floor?

Hahaha. On the floor. Then the sheer curtains. The smell in the building’s stairwell. The sound of cars when they put it in reverse. How could I, a country boy from France, look at a communist apartment block in Romania? I talk about this in the book. And actually, the book isn’t just about me. That’s what I found very interesting as a writer, that I was like a vector for an analysis. I try to bring a fair, honest look at Romanians, at Romania, something balanced.”

“How did your family and close friends react to you falling in love with Romania back when you were 19 or 20?

My folks worried when I left for Bucharest for a whole year. It was one thing to go for a month to see your pen pal, and another to be gone for a year. I couldn’t afford to come home often back then, and phone calls were expensive. I would call once every two weeks, and other than that, we wrote letters, I actually kept them.

I have really great parents; they didn’t project their fear onto me. They only told me after I got back: ‘Wow, we’re so glad you’re back, because we were actually scared for a year.’ Either way, I had parents who let me grow up pretty free. They didn’t restrict me too much. That’s the advantage of living in the countryside. You have space, go figure it out. That was pretty much their philosophy on life. And I’m grateful they didn’t box me into a specific way of looking at things. That was my luck. I was also lucky that I met my wife at 19 and that we were actually able to grow up together. We became adults together.”

“Did Romanian literature help you get closer to the Romanian language?

Yes, I read Romanian literature too. At the beginning, I was actually quite ambitious. My first book was Enigma Otiliei (Otilia’s Enigma). I don’t know why, but I found the title very catchy. I regretted my choice after 20 pages, but I pushed through to the end and ended up loving it. I think I didn’t understand 50% of the book, but I loved the atmosphere.

Then I started reading contemporary literature. Lately, I really like Lavinia Braniște. She is super, super talented, and I had the honor of translating her book Camping into French, it’s coming out in September.

And right now, I read a lot of children’s books for our son. We laugh out loud together.

When I look back at the beginning, I know I started writing literature so that my son would have reference books and learn about his culture and history for pleasure. Now he is very proud that he was born in Bucharest, and all my fiction books have the word ‘Bucharest’ on them. It was incredibly important, symbolically, for me, so that it would be something symbolic for him too.”

“But slowly, surely, I realized that what I was saying was also very useful for others. I started making the videos just to entertain myself. Then I realized a whole movement had started. People actually began sharing them with friends and colleagues. Some French people would tell me that, for example, on Monday mornings over coffee, they watch Sylvain’s video to teach their colleagues about the Romanian language. French people in mixed couples.

Or that the videos are important for some Romanian children living in France who hadn’t learned Romanian because they felt it was just an extra, useless language.

Now, every time I meet Romanians in the diaspora, I find out that these videos have, for instance, made kids actually want to speak, to learn strange and funny expressions. And now I feel a sense of responsibility; every time I post a video, I know people will watch closely and feel encouraged. People leave very long comments giving me all kinds of ideas or expressions I’ve never heard of in my life. I read them eagerly, linguistically and humanly speaking, it really feeds me intellectually.”

Sylvain confesses that he does, however, have one regret regarding the Romanian language. From one year to the next, he notices that people’s vocabulary is becoming increasingly limited, whether due to social media consumption or because they don’t read as much as before. In fact, the decline in reading interest is felt even in France, the heart of European culture.

“I’ve been able to observe the way people’s lexicon, their vocabulary, has shrunk. At one point I thought, okay, maybe it’s because I master the language well enough now and I’m just getting bored. Or people have become boring because they don’t use more interesting words anymore.

When I hear someone with a rich vocabulary, I feel so happy, so nourished to hear those rarer words; I feel like they’re giving me a gift. It’s obvious that people don’t read anymore.

I belong to a writers’ union created by Balzac in the 19th century to protect authors’ rights against publishers. And every year we receive a report on the status of writers or readers. Right now, 90% of French readers are women. And there are sociological explanations for this. Reading is not encouraged among men at all. It doesn’t look good to be a man who reads. If you read, you’re already considered too feminine or something like that. And this has long-term consequences for boys. If a boy doesn’t see his father reading, he tends to distance himself from books too.”

Sylvain Audet-Găinar now teaches at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris, where 100 languages are studied, including Romanian. He works with first-year students, teaching them courses in general linguistics and anthropology. In parallel, he has written the first chapters of his Romanian textbook for French speakers and is working on a new fiction book.

He was recently in Bucharest for the launch of his book about Romanian words. In the long run, he doesn’t know if his family will stay settled in France or in Romania, but he is determined to keep developing other people’s interest in the Romanian language.

“Romania is a part of me. I don’t know, I feel at home. When I go there, I’m just like the Romanians, very critical of what’s happening there, I follow the news from there, I just don’t have citizenship to be able to vote. Maybe I’ll get it, who knows. I’ve never really thought about it. I feel like it would be a beautiful symbol. I don’t know how much I actually feel Romanian. In a way, I think I became one without meaning to. It happened naturally, to the point where it’s just a part of me.”

This article is part of the”French week” series, a project by Cultura la Dubă, supported by BNP Paribas

The post The story of Sylvain Audet-Găinar, the Frenchman in love with the Romanian language: “It’s such a playful language that it makes you want to learn it just so you can have fun with it too.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

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Tatiana Țîbuleac was born in Moldova, she’s a Romanian, the wife of a British-Swiss citizen and she lives in Paris for 13 years. Through her books she has shown more than any passport could, that she is a complex writer, who can bring to live characters from different parts of Europe.

In 2019, her writing career, completely unplanned, took a surprising turn, even for herself. She won the European Union Literature Award for her novel The glass garden, her second book, and next to her name, they put “Romania.”

“I’m Romanian. I introduce myself as a Romanian writer. I’m from Moldova, but everywhere I went with my books, I introduced myself as a Romanian writer. I find it normal. I don’t believe in this separation. Writers from Moldova have always wanted to be a part of Romanian literature.”

And Tatiana Țîbuleac has managed that without even trying. She has never lived in Romania, but she writes in Romanian and is trying to teach the language to her children, born and raised in the French capital.

“My children speak 4 languages – English, French, Romanian and Russian. I like that they discovered reading in Romanian and I think that already is a good way.

I set my ambition not to get any other citizenship, I could have gotten a British or a Swiss citizenship, my husband being British-Swiss. But in the end, I’m still a Romanian in Paris.

Many Romanians try to cut all their ties. To me it wasn’t the case. Probably my desire to go to Romania from Moldova was so strong, that I say proudly that I’m a Romanian.

It’s my small love declaration, I think.”

Tatiana was born in 1978 in Chișinău. Both her parents worked in press, her father as a journalist, her mother as a corrector at a newspaper. And their daughter walked in their footsteps, even though her n’t father would have wanted a more secure path for her, such as medical school or law school.

“I used to love what my father was doing, but back then, journalism was harder to do that what I did. He used to tell me that I will freeze in the cold, that I will be sleeping in attics. In those days, you would sleep in someone’s attic, and do the story at the farm, the school, the kindergarten.

And I chose journalism, eventually. Those were some good years, I liked it a lot. The only issue I had was when I transferred to TV and I had to be a news anchor, I didn’t like that.”

She worked in written press for three years, then she joined Pro TV Chișinău, the first commercial and independent station in Moldova. There she was a reporter, an editor, but also a news anchor.

“I did the first stories of migrants from Moldova in Italy. I remember meeting people who had slept for a half of year tied up in trees, because they couldn’t sleep on the ground, so the police wouldn’t catch them.

There were touching moments for me and I think that is where I learned to listen to people.”

“I learned a lot from journalism and I have never regretted those years. I think that I would still be practicing it, if I hadn’t come to another country.”

After working in press, she collaborated with UNICEF and discovered people from different countries, who have broadened her horizons. She met her husband and moved with him to Paris.

“I’ve always felt like an outsider in Paris. It’s a difficult relationship with Paris and I don’t know why, because it’s a lovely city.

But there are places where you can’t or you won’t fit in. On the other hand, this is what made me feel good in Paris. I’ve never had an issue whether the French will see me as their own or not.”

“Today I’m here, tomorrow I won’t be, I take the best from today. Right now I fell very good in France.”

She didn’t know that her walks on the small Paris roads would open her path to literature.

“I had never felt the need to write literature. You can’t feel the need to write when you’re already writing all day long. My work day used to start at 6 a.m. and would end at 11 o’clock in the evening. All day long I would write or edit, I don’t see how I could have started to write a book at home, when I came home to sleep, or watch a movie, rest, do anything but write.

Writing began on this street.”

On Rue Montorgueil, right in the heart of Paris, the first arrondissement, her first writings that were different that her experience in press were being born.

It was in a vivid area, full of cafe’s and boutiques specific to Paris, a few steps from the out-of-the-box Centre Pompidou and Brâncuși Workshop.

“I stardet speaking to a florist at a flower shop here and she had a great story. And I thought of doing something with her story.

And I started writing some short things on Facebook. I wrote about 10 lines there and called it a modern-day fable. It was like child’s play.

And so many people read that thing, that I continued writing these modern-day fables. Then a website created a permanent column with “modern-day fables”, and somebody from that website said that we should put them in a book. And that is how I actually started writing.

That is when this shift occurred, from journalism to literature, although it was not literature yet. I called them fables because they had a moral in the end.

I wrote about a lot of people in this neighborhood. Things have changed now.”

The flower shop closed down, and Tatiana became an internationally appreciated author.

“With “Modern-day Fables” I started to get thousands of messages, more than I’m getting now, with two published books. People identified with the theme and would send me stories, they wanted to be in Modern-day Fables.

I felt somewhat like an impostor, because everyone would say to me “you’re such a kind, gentle, good woman”, and I’m neither kind, nor gentle, nor good. It was the wrong picture.

There was too much kindness around me and I couldn’t handle it. I felt like telling them that I’m not like that, stop writing to me, you’re pissing me off.

And I believe that that is exactly how “Summer”, my first book, came to be. Because “Summer” is exactly the opposite. I think I wanted to show that I am different, in fact. The writing in “Summer” represents me. I am “The Summer”. I am the woman in there. I am the boy, that is how I am.

“Summer” came to be after a summer I spent with my parents. They came to France, the children were small, and we showed them the country.

We went to the exact places that I’ve described in that book. And I, having a complicated relation ship with my father, I felt for the first time that I have somehow forgotten him, seeing him playing with my daughter. My father seemed a beautiful man, interesting, something I had never noticed, because we would always argue.

I had started writing these stories on my blog around that time and I got home and wrote a story that was the basis for the character of the mother in the book. It was a Jewish mother whom I had met at a hotel and she was dying. We spent a few days together, we chatted. We spent some time at the hotel, where she had came with her children, her head was shaved.

When I got home, I started writing her story. But I noticed that there wasn’t an ending to what I was writing, it wasn’t just a post or a story anymore.

I started writing every day, this masculine voice was in my head and I didn’t know what to do with it and I carried on. I wrote it in less than two months. The editor from Moldova Gheorghe Erizanu was visiting then and asked me if I’m writing anything.

And I said “I’m writing a thing, but it’s bizarre, I don’t know who might read it. Nothing llike this has ever been written in Moldova, a story where the child doesn’t love his mother, there’s a lot of hatred there.” And he told me to send it to him. I sent it on a Thursday and on Monday he told me that he was getting it ready for print.”

“The Summer When my Mother’s Eyes Were Green” received in 2018 “The Observatorul Cultural” award for prose and the FILIT award. She then became known throughout Europe after the first translation, in Spanish.

“I had a complicated relation ship with this book. I hated it. I thought that nobody wanted to see it. But we made our peace and now I somewhat miss a little kindness.

Everything is too cynical now. Everybody’s asking me about crisis, evil, death, depression. Now I’m on the other end of things.

In “Summer” I was Tatiana from Paris, in a way. In “Summer” I denied all that Moldova meant. In “Summer” I’m the cosmopolitan woman, living in Paris, connected to England, who knows galleries, paintings, because that is who I am.

I was often asked why I had chosen to write about two Polish and not two Romanians or Moldavians. I also asked myself those questions. And I think that’s how “The Garden” came to be. That’s where I had my revenge, I went back to Chișinău, in the Botanical, in my neighbourhood.”

The novel “The Glass Garden” confirmed and cemented Tatiana Țîbuleac’s success in Romania, as well as the rest of Europe and South America.

It was written, as was “Summer”, in Romanian, language being a character in it’s own, both in the book, and in the life of Tatiana from Chișinău.

“I think that “The Garden” had been in my head forever, it was inside me. With “The Garden” I had this dilemma, whether to write it in Russian or not. Because there were a lot of things coming in my head in Russian, it being the language of my childhood in a way, the language of the city and it was a book about the city, about Chișinău.

But I chose to write it in Romanian and I’m happy that I chose so, because it’s a story about the Romanian language, not the Russian language.

When I wrote this book, I felt that it was a moment of reconciliation between these two languages. Now I would have to re-read it, see how I position myself, because things have changed.

My father was more Rusophobic than I was. That was one of our reasons for arguing. He distanced himself completely from Russian language when we started using the Latin alphabet.

He felt Romanian and dreamt of the unification with Romania. After we started using the Latin alphabet, he didn’t touch Russian literature. He did what many are doing now, during the war.

In my case, it was difficult to separate myself from the Russian language, because I grew up speaking Russian, and he couldn’t understand why I didn’t have this burning hatred towards everything Russian. It sounds bizarre to argue because of language, but there were many cases, we weren’t the only family.”

Meanwhile, her father passed away, and Tatiana left Chișinău a long time ago.

Her family’s history and the region she was born in still follows her, because the war in Ukraine has profound emotional ramifications.

“Our name is Ukrainian, we had relatives in Ukraine. My mother lives in Chișinău. I never thought that I would ever see Russia killing children in Ukraine, given the historical bonds, but it is happening.

In the first month of the war, we were paralised.

For people in Moldova, the war feels different. People are hearing the loud explosions, they have children left for studying, they have vacation homes, they have friends staying with them in Chișinău, because they seek shelter.

To us, this war is much worse. It is the worst. And it is still not over. And it hurts me to see people thinking that it is over or that it’s better now.

I can understand going back to our lives, because you cannot constantly live with someone else’s misfortune, but last week Kiev was bombed again, and the events aren’t even the first ones on the news anymore.

People are vacationing, Europe is in vacation. But the war continues.

I fear tanks going into Chișinău, where my mother lives, but not only that. I fear that we are witnessing a war online and we’re not doing enough. I cannot understand how, in these days, such a war is permitted. Nobody is stopping it.”

When the war began, Tatiana took in her home in Paris some refugees from Ukraine and, for the first time, understood her family’s own past.

“It meant reconnecting to my grandparents past, who were deported, and, more than any trip to Siberia, these months I realized what it actually means to leave your home with a bag, a barefoot child and run. These stories started to take shape for me. My mother was born in a gulag, in Siberia.”

She hasn’t written in this period and she doesn’t believe that art should respond to current themes, but should be an intimate act, which you feel or not.

In fact, she does not necessarily plan on continuing her writing career, but expects things to go on in a natural way, such at it was until now.

“If I’ll write another book, it’s ok, if not, it’s still ok. I don’t want to be tied up by just writing. I want to believe that I can do other things as well.”

She does not live in the center of Paris anymore, but is living a quiet life on the outskirts of the city, where she is gardening and dedicates her time to her children.

“Home is where your family is, I believe. But I feel that I will change many places.”

She is part of an international community, more than a French one, and has a realistic perspective on the country in which she lives.

“Not all French people live like the wealthy in Paris. There are very poor regions in France.

This myth that everyone eats croissants for breakfast in France is not true.

There are families that make as much as middle class families in Romania.

I have not felt the French adversity towards immigrants, but it exists. This is a more open area, where you barely feel it, but the far-right has been on everyone’s lips during these elections. This scares me. I am an immigrant and am part of a community of immigrants.

Having this British side in the family, we saw what was happening with Brexit, when nobody thought that it will happen. When you talked to people, nobody was voting pro-Brexit, but eventually, Brexit happened.”

When she is not dedicating her time to her family, the Romanian writer travels a lot to promote her books. She closely follows Romanian contemporary literature, but says that “I’m not doing so well at the chapter of relation ships with other writers, it’s like a wall there.”

She would want for Romanians to appreciate more their fellow’s performances, and stop self-sabotaging.

She has a skeptical view of the world in which we live, through the prism of the terrible war, but manages to see glimpses of hope in common people.

“I’m not an optimistic person, rather the opposite. But I believe that optimism can be helped through some gestures of solidarity, a warm loaf of bread, a warm coat.”

“I don’t believe that we can live outside of community

I still see the kindness in people. I have seen some good people even in these times. I really don’t like it when someone’s good gestures are being doubted. As long as the gesture es made, for PR or otherwise, it’s a good thing.

I believe that people’s kindness comes out once in a while.”

***This story is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la Dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Tatiana Țîbuleac, writer: “The world thinks that if someone leaves, they must have a place to call home. In my mind it wasn’t like that.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.

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“I felt a strong aggression from the outside, I needed to respond and didn’t know how.”

Alexandra Badea’s story has it’s roots in a Romania that forever marked the generations raised under Nicolae Ceaușescu’s didctatorship and their children.

Born in Bucharest in 1980, Alexandra’s path seemed to be similar to that of the entire youth of those times.

“In the 90’s there was a tendency to assure a child’s future. There were a few ways: Medicine School, Law School, Economics Academy, Polytechnic.” Her parents insisted that she chose one of those paths.

But their daughter had discovered the fascinating universe of theater and felt the need to express through art feelings that she couldn’t express through mathematics.

“Going to school in the Central School in Bucharest, I would see through the window what was happening in the back yard of the Bulandra Theater – Icoanei Garden. I would watch them unload the sets, actors rehearsing.

At one point I skipped school with a friend and actually went inside the theater, during rehearsals, we made friends with the dressers, who gave us the tour of the theater, went inside the actors’ cabins, the costume workshops and I was fascinated with the theater outside of the hall, the one back stage.”

That was the first contact with the theater for a teenager who had never seen a show.

“The first show that I went to was “Procust’s Bed”, directed by Cătălina Buzoianu. I liked the novel and it was in my graduation exam’s curriculum.

That was a very powerful encounter for me, an aesthetical shock and a show that I ended up seeing at least ten times during two years of high school.

That is how I startet going to many of Cătălina Buzoianu’s shows. At one point, I said something stupid to myself: if she can do this, so can I.”

She was always told that she wasn’t talented in writing or any other artistic field and she started to believe it. Directing seemed, nevertheless, a way of bringing together talented people who could express in a show, what she couldn’t otherwise.

“Since tenth grade I felt the need to speak about some things that I felt, like anger, sadness, strong emotions that hurt me. They were a type of response to the aggressive environment in which I was living, both in school and in society.

I thought that I could express through images and words what I felt, to let out all the anger I had inside.

When I said that I wanted to go to journalism, I was discouraged. I could do journalism with anything, but I should graduate from somewhere serious before that. Then I said photography. “What are you going to do at Plastic Arts? you don’t have any talent at drawing.”

This notion of talent kept coming back, that I now reject, I don’t know what talent is.

In France, they don’t talk about talent. I often do workshops with students from theater schools and if I were to mention talent, to say that one is more talented than the other, I think they’d kick me out. The notion does not exist.

They talk about skills, authenticity, singularity and work, not about talent. Theater schools in France are trying to form artists, not just actors that execute something. Artists that express a personality, that have the courage to express a point of view – I think that this should be more stressed in Romanian theater schools.

Us, in the East, tie talent to something very religious, something given, with which you are born. I disagree. If we were to talk about talent, I think it is something you can educate.

I see it as a muscle you keep training through everything that you see, through discussions, films, life experiences.”

As per the deal she made with her father, Alexandra had to get into the Academy of Economic Studies first, in order to get permission to try getting into theater direction, at UNATC. That’s how she got both an economics diploma, and a director’s diploma.

20 years later, Alexandra is today one of the most appreciated emerging theater directors in France, but also Romania. The true way of expression that led her into the French cultural elite was playwriting.

After the two universities graduated in Romania, she mastered in “Theater aesthetics and theory” in Sorbonne and settled, without intention, in Paris.

She directed her first shows on small stages in Paris, with little budget and friends rehearsing without pay.

“I did a show – Family Stories – we played it several times. I didn’t understand the system. It was very hard.

In France there are no ensembles, the director has a company, it applies to state subventions and searches for co-producers in institutionalized theatres, where there are only technicians and administrative staff working. The artistic staff is project-based”

“In France, a director does one show per year, if not one in 2-3 years. 70% of his activity is administrative.”

In total, there have been 10 years of efforts until now, in which she has not made a living out of theater. She did stories for RFI, worked with children in schools, taught theater or earned scholarships.

In the meantime, she was invited by several Romanian theaters to do shows based on plays already written. But she felt that something was missing.

“I felt like an outsider in Romania. In France, people would ask me about my accent.

My wish was to write about what I felt and I couldn’t find a play that expressed what I wanted.”

“And it happened during a visit in Romania, in that strange time between Christmas and New Year’s. It was a highly autobiographical text, a collage of scenes, monologues, lists of instructions.

It was speaking on the impossibility to adapt to a society or the other. The impossibility to assimilate the rules of society, imposed in the family.”

The text became her first play, Mode D’Emploi, (Instructions Manual), that she later sent, by mail, to a famous publishing house in France – Arche Editeur.

Only a year later she heard back.

“They called to say that they wanted to meet me and to ask if I had any other texts. They said that they wanted to publish me.

When I left the meeting, I was doubtful, I thought that they would change their minds, much like many were saying that they would come to see my shows and never showed up.”

In 2009, her first three plays – Mode D’Emploi, Controle d’identité, about the refugees that came in France in 2005, during Nicolas Sarkozy’s time, and Burnout, about working conditions in companies – were published in a single volume by Arche Editeur, made into shows by various directors all over France.

“It was a relief. My life totally changed. Theaters started opening their doors.”

And this was only the beginning. The young woman who was constantly told in school that she didn’t have talent in writing, received in 2013 The Grand Prize for Dramatic Writing, offered by the French Ministry of Culture, for the play Comminution, published at Arche Editeur.

“Nobody expected me winning this award. That includes me. I was in Mexico, I didn’t even attend the awards ceremony. “

Comminution is an X-ray of French society and was the result of a year’s work of research, during which Alexandra interviewed numerous immigrants from a small town on the outskirts of Lyon.

“Research is an essential step. I am interested in the way the wounds of history still have repercussions on today’s generations.

I met the first Algerian workers that settled here, they are living in precarious conditions, working for very little, sacrificing their lives to support those back home.

I met the wives of the workers that came here in the ’70’s, all they did was raise children, and now, at 60 years old, they were taking these language lessons, trying to learn French.”

“I understood globalization and how a decision taken here can affect the lives of people all over the world.”

The play was translated to English, German, Romanian, Portuguese and has become her most performed play.

She then wrote two novels (Zone d’amour prioritaire, 2014; Tu marches au bord du monde, 2020) and film scripts, also directing her first short films.

“I realized that my writing rhythm is faster then the rhythm of doing a show. I feel the best when I’m writing, I feel free, without administrative obstacles.”

Her own uncertain status in a foreign country, the tense relationship with her home country, but also her interest for history’s untold stories, birthed a courageous writer, noticed as a political theater author in France, on themes of corporations, globalization, colonization and surveillance.

And Alexandra Badea’s desire to tell these kind of stories grew even more since 2013, when she became a French citizen.

“It was a naturalization ceremony in which we were told that from then on, we must commit to this country’s history, with it’s glory moments and her shady zones.”

“And that perhaps, at some point, in case of war, you will have to take arms against your own country.”

That was the time she decided to read more about colonization and post-colonization. And through her art, she has brought to light scenes that were less known from France’s history.

Wajdi Mouawad, a well-known director who did George Enescu’s Oedipus opera in 2021, gave her the immense chance to do a show at one of the 5 national theaters in France – The La Colline Theatre in Paris, which he also manages.

And Alexandra Badea chose to stage a trilogy inspired by France’s history. While working on this project, she took many walks through The Père Lachaise Cemetery, right next to The La Colline Theatre.

“The first part is about a massacre of Senegalese soldiers, who came to France in World War 2, and actually liberated some territories. At the end of the war, France owed them their war payment, they were given a part and promised the rest when they returned to their home countries.

When they got back home and asked for their rights, they were shot, it was a massacre. Their numbers and even their names remain unknown, they were buried in a commune grave.

Everyone was astounded, the story had been unknown.”

The second part had it’s premiere at the prestigious Avignon Theater Festival, bringing to light an instance of several Algerians that were thrown into the Senne after asking for their rights, and in the third one she spoke about children of immigrants, brought to repopulate several rural areas of France.

The trilogy has been played even in integral shows and had great success, being played in numerous shows.

We found Alexandra, the high school student who snook into the Bulandra Theater, backstage of one of the most important theaters in France, this time as a French director, with Romanian origins.

A few steps from the theater, in the window of a bookshop, there are some of her awarded books.

But, beyond awards, Alexandra Badea’s shows and plays mean much more than prestige. They are the voice of society’s invisible people.

In Romania she wrote about the Pogrom in Iasi, in the play Perfect Composed, played at The Radu Stanca National Theater in Sibiu.

She is also equally interested in trans-generational psychology, how information is transmitted from one generation to the next and how we manage to let it go. That is what she will address in her future show – Exile – that will have it’s premiere this autumn at the Bucharest National Theater.

“We were taught to survive by not speaking our minds, by adapting, sneaking, sacrificing some things.

I don’t know if it’s a Romanian problem, maybe it’s universal, but in Romania it hurt more.”

I have wanted to write something on this theme for a while now. I want to talk about exile and the relation-ship with Romania, about anger and love, which we all feel, the desire to leave, the desire to come back, the impossibility to adapt here. But also about inheritance – education, obstacles from our families and from school.”

Alexandra Badea is settled in Paris for almost 20 years and, at least for the moment, she can not imagine living somewhere else.

I don’t see myself as an immigrant. It was an experience on which I stopped. But I’m moving, I’m not in one place.”

“I feed off cultural influences, I live in a neighborhood close to Gare de l’Est, there are African barber shops, there is a place called Little Turkey, then there is the Asian area. When I’m in Bucharest, I miss this mixture, especially in the artistic plane.

Paris is one of the few places in the world where you can almost anything being made in the world – in matters of film, theater, art shows – like an independent film from Guatemala or Cameroon.

I feed off this as a human being, not even as an artist. I need this energy. Paris is a source of energy.

She is a Knight of Arts and Letters in France, the country that has opened the doors to a universal culture for her, but she constantly comes back to her home country, with which she is trying to reconcile through theater.

“I want to speak to the Romanian audience as well. It is important, even vital to me.”

“I can’t explain why. I don’t know if I am needed, but I have this need to make something in Romania.

I said to myself that if I told untold stories from France’s history, I have to talk about the untold stories from Romania’s history.”

***This story is part of the “France Week” series, a Cultura la Dubă project supported by BNP Paribas.

The post Alexandra Badea, writer and director: “I am interested in the way the wounds of history still have repercussions on today’s generations.” appeared first on Cultura la dubă.