The singer of Children of all countries comes to do a triumph on the stage of the Olympia, but dreaming, still and always, is to sing in Algeria, where he was born 80 years ago already, on December 11, 1938. In an interview with the Point a few days before the two concerts on 9 and 10 February in Paris, Enrico Macias is back on the roots of his passion inextinguishable fraternity between the peoples, without evading the political atmosphere present that may undermine, according to him, the foundations of humanism.
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“I left my country, I left my home”… These are the first verses of the song Farewell, my country which was his first success. But since 1961, Enrico Macias, the child of Constantine, is not welcome in his Algeria, the country that gave birth to it. For Eastern, who immortalized the generosity of the northerners , the wound is not closed. “I feel first of all French. But I’m algerian by my roots, and israeli by conviction, by solidarity with the jewish people of which I am a part of. I do not have the right to let them down”, he confided to Marc Fourny, our confrere of the Point.
“We did not care about the religion of the other before playing together…”
Cantor indefatigable of the fraternity, Enrico Macias says that his humanism was born in the suburbs of Constantine, a hub of cultural and religious which were created friendships the most spontaneous and the most solid. “I had friends christians, muslims, jews… For me, everyone was equal. We did not care about the religion of the other before playing together… there was all the diversity in my neighborhood, all the religious cultures… It is maybe for that that I understood very early that it was possible to all get along”, he points out.
today, the political situation could make it pessimistic. But no, the Beggar of love wants to continue to preach for the reconciliation between peoples. Against winds and tides, he dreamed of reconciling jews and muslims. “Some of the countries I have boycotted, but I can go to Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Morocco. I have brought the West in the East and the East in the West somewhere… But in Algeria, all remains blocked. Return to sing there, in Constantine… This is a dream that I often do”, he explains in his advocacy of humanism.
● northerners , the album that tells the legend of Enrico Macias
