Why poetry now?!
We live in an age of betrayals, conspiracies, and assassinations. We pant through twenty-four crowded, deadly hours in a frame of extended, neglected time that does not give any importance to our entire lives. We live in vortexes, labyrinths, and alienation. We live in oppression, fear, and hunger. So why poetry now?!
Who has time for poetry? Who has time to write poetry?! Who has time to receive poetry?!
Poetry riots against betrayal, conspiracy, and murder, or it riots against triviality, superficiality, and sorcery. If poetry does not say: “No” in a blatant, loud, and hurtful way, then it does not accept to say: “Yes,” even by cutting off its head.
It's that great positive thing. It is what confirms to us that we cry because we are not yet accustomed to humiliation and have not accepted it, that we bleed because we have not died, and that we are angry because we have not adapted to injustice. It alerts us to what we have almost forgotten, and reminds us that we are human, and that we are bigger and greater than our daily lives.
we are human beings. We must always remember this, and poetry must always remind us of this.
We are greater than profit and loss, greater than acceptance and surrender, or malice and evasion.
So poetry is necessary.
Therefore, a poet is necessary.
In the late seventeenth century, Poncet, a French herbalist, travels; To live in Cairo, one of the centers of an unusual alliance between the Ottoman Sultanate and one of the European kingdoms: France.
Although he works in secret, Because he does not have a legal certificate, his fame reaches the French consul, in whom he finds the ideal person to lead a secret embassy from the French king to the Negus, King of Abyssinia, whose declared mission is to treat the Negus, while it seeks to restore French-Catholic control over Abyssinia, in a time of religious and expansionist conflicts. Which the European kingdoms are fighting among themselves.
Poncet soon discovers that the exceptional circumstances of his journey to achieve the goals of the King of France and the Pope are - alone - the solution to the exceptional obstacles that separate him from the one he loves.
In his work, which won the Goncourt Prize for First Novel and the Mediterranean Prize, Ruffin does not content himself with presenting historical facts, but rather takes us with him on a journey full of life between the neighborhoods of Cairo, the mountains of Abyssinia, and the palaces of France. To tell an exciting adventure about love, friendship, and sacrifice in an era full of conflicts, conspiracies, and betrayals.
