Poétique de la guerre dans Le Retour imaginaire d’Atiq Rahim
The poetics of war in the Imaginary Return by Atiq Rahimi

Summary/Abstract: The Imaginary Return goes far beyond mere testimony. Atiq Rahimi makes this story the image of his inner suffering and his attachment to his founding origins. Returning to his native country after a painful experience of exile, he discovers another Afghanistan, where the neighborhoods and the house walls still display the marks of war. Beyond the narration of certain historical events, he reinvents the past in order to reconstruct his sought identity, symbolically embodied by the metaphor of the scar. War is a major theme in his work and it is represented by a perpetual search for origins through which he addresses issues such as: exile, memory, recollection, death and nostalgia. The Imaginary Return is, in fact, an autobiographical story inspired by war seen as a real, lived experience meant to stage the wandering of a wounded, uprooted and nostalgic subject.

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