Publication: “Hope will come from the South”

Dhe 256 pages (medium format), the work which breaks down into 30 letters exchanged at the time of Covid-19 between the two mental health professionals, one practicing in Marseille and the other in Rabat, extends from southern Europe to Africa, between the two shores of the strait of the “mare nostrum”, through a discussion tainted with passion where practical reflections, theoretical filiations as well as their evolutions are exchanged there.


This epistolary exchange celebrates a meeting that has transformed over the years into a faithful friendship between the two practitioners. “The decision to continue our conversations through writing is an act that involves us and at the same time escapes us in that it is part of an unconscious dialogue.wrote the two authors in the introduction to the book.


“We have chosen conversation to give us the freedom to discuss a wide variety of subjects, responsiveness to events, sharing between us and beyond us, a news thread woven into our stories“, they added.


The two friends and authors have opted to share their correspondence in the context of a health crisis, “unexpected but foreseeable event for many reasons», which inevitably took an important place in these exchanges and led them to look into the fragility of existence, psychological vulnerabilities, the harmful effects of unbridled liberalism, the deregulation of the planet and the failure of health structures.


“The time of Covid will have been favorable to meditation and the reinvention of epistolary art“, indicated in the preface of the book, the philosopher, professor at Columbia University in New York and director of the Institute of African Studies, Souleymane Bachir Diagne. According to him, “Hope will come from the South” is a “perfect illustration of this new genre for Covid times, an epistolary meditation where two voices intersect, two friends, two psychoanalysts, two men, therefore accustomed to dreaming, as well as listening, work to decipher in a exchange of letters-emails, what the pandemic reveals about the world, about the crisis that was already raging there before the Corona virus came around“.


“This book by Jalil Bennani and Roland Gori is a book on hospitality“, he noted, specifying that hospitality in “Hope will come from the South” is also that of language which, for Paul Ricœur, very present in this dialogue, defines the translation.


For the professor at Columbia University in New York, “the world after will not be the return of the one before. Because he will not be able to ignore that against the backdrop of the climate crisis, the next pandemic is already threatening. Nor will he be able to ignore, it is to be hoped, the lessons of that which is still present. ‘Hope will come from the South’, precisely, says to us: Momento!“.