In 2017, Algerian author Kamel Daoud spent one night in Picasso Museum in Paris, an occasion to meditate - and write about it - about the representation of women and the fantasmas of the ´other world´ using women as a pawn of imagination - or counter-imagination.
He is himself using the register of imagination in explaining the experiences he gathered while facing Picasso´s erotisme - ´monstreux, grossier, incomprehensible´: he is accompanied by an imaginary Abdelah, his islamist double who may be eager to destroy any visual representation of the body. Just think about Palmyra and Mosul and the Buddha statues in Afghanistan.
Through the different perceptions, Daoud is retracing a partial overview of colonial history (think about the encounter between Robinson Crusoe and Friday). It is not a critique and he keeps being a writer with interests in the history of arts, without reducing his condition to being an anthropologist.
While reading this book - a bit over 200 pages - I realized how blessed we may be those days to have access to such a vaste array of knowledge, allowing us to see so many nuances and cultural habits. But it is also displays the downside of it, the aberration of trying to prevent this knowledge to be shared and expand.
Rating: 4.5 stars
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