Marouane Bakhti

Marouane Bakhti's "Comment sortir du monde" (2023) tells the story of a young man with a migrant background who attempts to liberate himself from familial violence, cultural alienation, and inner fragmentation through memory, language, and spirituality—not to abandon the world, but to create his own vulnerable yet resilient place of existence within it. This is a text of self-empowerment that, in poetically dense chapters, depicts the childhood, adolescence, and early self-discovery of a queer first-person narrator with a French-Arab background. In doing so, he develops a poetics of childhood in which memory is not retrospectively ordered, but reconstructed as a sensual and fragile experience. The narrator writes from the perspective of the wounded, wonder-filled child, whose perception of nature, language, and physicality is simultaneously magical and threatened. The fragmentary form, interspersed with images, smells, sounds, and poetic associations, reflects the fragmented and open nature of the child's consciousness. Childhood appears not as lost innocence, but as the origin of difference, of shame, desire, and speechlessness—but also as a source of resilience that defies oblivion. The novel makes it palpable that writing here is not merely remembering, but a careful re-creation of that inner world which had fallen "out of the world."