Le Quatrième Degré [2021]
for soprano, violin, and piano
Premiere: November 11, 2021 at Studio Annette, Tel-Aviv
Keren Motseri (soprano), Matan Dagan (violin), Amit Dolberg (piano)
Duration: ~ 5 minutes
About the piece (trigger warning: sexual violence):
Je ne sais plus si je suis jeune fille…
Je m’étais évanouie,
Et j’ai eu du sang ;
Quand ils m’ont redescendue dans la cellule…
[…On m’administra le supplice de la bouteille, c’est la plus atroce des souffrances. Après m’avoir attaché dans une position spéciale, on m’enfonça dans le vagin le goulot d’une bouteille. Je hurlai et perdis connaissance pendant, je crois, deux jours.]
Qu’est-ce que tu penses ?… Dis-moi franchement… Qu’est-ce que tu crois, toi ? Que je ne suis plus jeune fille ? 1
In Djamila Boupacha’s testimony documented by Gisele Halimi and Simone de Beauvoir, she depicts the series of torments she had gone through by French troops during the Algerian War. These torments were referred to by her torturers as “the third degree treatment”. Scholar Dr. Heidi Brown argues in an article about Boupacha that each of the afflictions that Boupacha was forced to experience was meant to destroy a different part of her identity: as the daughter of her father, as a muslim, as a woman, as a human being. The text chosen for this piece is taken from Boupacha’s testimony, in which she wonders if she is still the young woman she used to be before being tortured and raped. The vocal part reflects the attempt to efface Boupacha’s identity, which I consider to be “the fourth degree” of the torture. Thus, the words lose at times their semantic meaning, the vocal timbre is deformed to the extent of becoming unrecognizable, and the vocal line is at times submerged within the sound of the piano and violin, to the extent that they are not distinguishable anymore. The voice identity of the soprano part is obscured and distorted, metaphorically conveying the same procedures afflicted on the identity of Boupacha, as is testified by her.
- Text adapted from: Simone de Beauvoir and Gisèle Halimi, Djamila Boupacha (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 24, 218. ↩︎
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