Fleuve Immobile - Pierre Graziani

For forty years he has been traveling the African continent, its legends and landscapes have never ceased to populate the imagination of Pierre Graziani, painter and writer. His travels are the subject of these new notebooks with sensual writing where the words draw a voluptuous continent. Sketches taken from the author's personal album.
"The still river is the door of the journey, the elsewhere that we have just rediscovered, as Babylon was the door of God. In its wake, no more flags. Who would recognize himself in the dust, except for the zebu cow of India, the Tutsis of Rwanda, the herds of the Peuls of the Niger River, the snakes of the Yezidis or the mysterious crocodile that would be in Mecca? We listen to their confidences whispered by the course of the water or the thirst of its absence. Sometimes their voices wear interchangeable masks. They take us to unknown sites - perhaps the Jordan where Jesus was baptized - while Moses, always hidden in a cloud, passes by on his cloud. For was not the cloud the first river? From Gao the blessed to Niafounké the sedentary, from the island of Djanet to the tomb of Sidi Aïssa, from the cliffs of Bandiagara to the plateaus of Tassili, Pierre Graziani travels the still rivers of Africa, this "continent of water". The initiatory journey continues with the descent of the oued R'hir, a fossil river of the Maghreb, or on the banks of the Euphrates, at the gates of Baghdad. As the pages turn, his notebooks draw the contours of a personal Atlantis, the scene of an opera that stretches from the Dogon country to the swamps of Mesopotamia.