The writers who let you watch them write
Werber’s cathedral of strings, Auster’s blue notebook, Tesson’s cabin on the Baikal. On the books that put the writing desk inside the frame, and on what it would take to sit down at one.
By Malak Yacoubi
Goyard bags, insurgencies & cute lunches in unintended war zones
“I saw this quote about war being this thing you see on your phone, getting closer and closer until you’re the one filming it”
By The Rania Post
Paris · 26 October 2026
Two protesters kiss in front of a burning barricade, Paris, 17 October 2026. Photo: Céline Escolano (@celine_escolano)
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This piece is best read while listening to
This song was top five in France in 1968, the time of the riots.
On the evening of the 25th of September, 2025, Miora had a flight to Paris from Antananarivo. Her hair was freshly blow-dried and her nails done, she was ecstatic at the next day’s lunch with friends in the 1er arrondissement. She wore a white silk shirt. She had her Goyard bag in hand, and on her way to the airport.
Miora is French Malagasi. Her parents live between Paris and Antananarivo; she splits her life between Montreal and Nairobi, where she works in international development for the FAO and keeps up with the news almost exclusively on social media.
That day of September, Gen Z Madagascar had called the city out over water and power cuts that had run for years. “It really was just about having water and electricity,” Miora says. Her family forbade her to join after she expressed wanting to be a part of the change. The police, they warned her, beat people and gas them. Nobody mentioned guns to her…
Her uncle drove her to the airport through barricades and fires. “It was the apocalypse,” she says. Near Ivato the road was blocked. She was on the phone with a friend, chatting about a wedding in Malta, when the soldiers started shooting to clear the crowd. She ran out of the car, her Goyard and lipstick in hand.
“I laugh about it now, but it isn’t funny. It was really dangerous.”
At that exact moment, the airport closed, the internet went down and she and her uncle were stranded on the streets. Miora was able to get to safety and stayed another five days. By then the UN had counted at least 22 dead. Needless to say the lunch in Paris was canceled. Within three weeks an army unit had switched sides and a colonel was sworn in as president, on 17 October. Has it changed much? “Drastically? No,” Miora says. “Everything still has to be rebuilt.”
That month the same One Piece inspired flag went up everywhere: the Straw Hat Jolly Roger, in Kathmandu, in Morocco, in Lima, Jakarta and Manila.
This autumn it reached France. Since 18 September lycée students have been blockading their schools over missing teachers and crumbling buildings. By 6 October about 1,800 lycées had been shut and 5,060 people arrested, nearly nine in ten of them minors. In Lens, on 5 October, a 15-year-old lost his hand when a police grenade went off near his school.
On Saturday 17 October, a year to the day after the colonel took power in Madagascar, 550,000 people marched across France. By nightfall the city hall in Limoges was on fire, and at about half past eight its campanile came down. By Sunday there were nearly 2,400 arrests.
Both Malagasi and French movements started with students, and in both, students were shot at. “It doesn’t only happen in the countries of the south,” she says. “It happens in the country of human rights too.”
“I saw this quote about war being this thing you see on your phone, getting closer and closer until you’re the one filming it,” she says. “That is what I felt that day.” ■
