Synopsis
Retired from the world and residing in the foothills of the Vauclin mountain in Martinique, Monchoachi writes every afternoon after his morning walk through the island’s forests. A poet (he insists one should pronounce this word trembling), philosopher and essayist, he endeavours to construct a thought he describes as untamed—a thought detached from the Occident, and therefore inherently free. Many have drawn from his work a strength of resistance, creation and survival in the face of the violence of contemporary society. To follow Monchoachi is to find a new way to answer our questions about our place in the world, a place close to Nature, Language and the Sacred.
A word from Tënk
Trees that walk with their feet in front of the eyes of onlookers.
Orange trees, cheese trees and banyan trees are the time transmitters in Monchoachi, An Untamed Wor(l)d. More than once, the casuarina trees, representing death, are relaying the poetry of Monchoachi, which, at times, resembles a long funeral vigil. As for the cheese tree, it's Xavier Orville who brings it to the surface, and then the eruption of Mount Pelée (the resilience of the great cheese tree of St. Pierre, praised by Aimé Césaire in a secret poem), and the powers it conceals, ceiba from its kapok name.
In the Y-shaped banyan tree, two bodies merge, the cursed fig tree is an envelope that slowly suffocates the tree under the epiphyte. It falls from the sky, anchors the seas, speaks at least two languages that are forgotten in the knots of the bark, suffocating, and being born. Double and unique, lapo and liana, the tree is the word of places in deportation, of swell and surf. "Trees have a memory and seek revenge," asserts Simone Schwarz-Bart. "They can send their roots to the deepest part of the human heart." But as death is not the opposite of life, and the path also serves to lose oneself, the director notes: "to say the thing is also to give it life, and maybe we are not ready to give life to that thing."
Nathanaël
Poet, essayist and translator
To be published in 2024
Andidan–cinémas intimes d'Arlette Pacquit.
Conversations entre Arlette Pacquit et Nathanaël
