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From fiery rap to "inner peace": the elusive story of Diam's

2022-05-27T10:19:42.069Z


The artist, who ended his career, co-directed, with Houda Benyamina and Anne Cissé, the documentary Salam, presented in a special session at the Cannes Film Festival 2022. A look back at the extraordinary destiny of an icon of French rap.


"Sometimes I wonder: how many of us were pretending?"

In the trailer for her documentary

Salam

(“peace” in Arabic), presented on Thursday May 26 at the Cannes Film Festival, Mélanie Georgiades, 41, “plunges back into her memories”.

No one has forgotten the one we nicknamed Diam's: her short haircut, her XXL earrings and her boundless energy.

To discover

  • "06400 Cannes", the postcard from the Festival, episode 3: Leïla Bekhti's room service, Tahar Rahim's challenges and the laughter of Alain Chabat and Laurent Lafitte

After conquering the general public in 2003, thanks to her

DJ

title , the young woman experienced a meteoric rise.

To his credit, "fifty Zenith", concerts with hundreds of thousands of spectators, and millions of albums sold.

In the middle of the 2000s, the whole of France sang its title

La Boulette

.

Sixteen years later, the essential

Confessions Nocturnes

never fails to resonate at karaoke nights.

On video,

Salam

, the trailer

“The music stifled the cry of my soul”

However, in 2010, Diam's disappeared.

Two years later, the artist announced the end of her career as a rapper, in an interview with "Sept à Huit".

In question: intimate cracks, long invisible to the general public.

Injuries that the ex-singer could well evoke in her surprise documentary

,

the release of which was announced at the end of April.

“The more the days passed, the more I sank (…), she declares in the trailer, unveiled this Wednesday, May 25.

The music was so loud, it drowned out the cry of my soul.”

The former artist had so far refused any biopic proposal.

She feared her life would become "a spectacle", as she explained to her 300,000 Instagram followers.

Diam's nevertheless decided to "take up the pen again".

She co-directed

Salam

with Houda Benyamina and Anne Cissé.

Since then, the mystery hangs over this film, which will be released in cinemas only on July 1 and 2.

Will she talk about her childhood as an only daughter, born at the dawn of the 1980s in Cyprus?

His arrival in France, at the age of 3, after the separation of his parents?

Her tormented adolescence in the Parisian suburbs, between attempted suicide at 15 and domestic violence inflicted by her ex-companion, at 17?

The secret remains well kept.

Perhaps Mélanie Georgiades will also come back to her first steps in the world of music, at the beginning of the 1990s.

Success at 17

In 1994, Mélanie Georgiades, then in third grade, joined a friend's group, who introduced her to composition.

Three years later, she joined the Mafia Trece collective.

In the twilight of the 1990s, his first album,

Premier mandat

, was released .

Diam's is not 18, and she has already interrupted her studies to devote herself to music.

At 22, the singer is propelled rap icon.

Her second album,

Brut de femme

, was crowned gold.

The tour that follows wins in a whirlwind of glory, which culminates in his coronation in 2004, at the Victoires de la Musique.

She received the prize for the best rap album of the year.

In 2006, his album

In my bubble

was a great success.

The same year, Mélanie Georgiades recounts the abuse she suffered at the age of 17, as part of a campaign to combat violence against women.

“In addition to physical violence, I suffered destructive psychological harassment.

However, I never filed a complaint.

Because I was afraid.

Because it was shame.

Because, when you're young, it's part of the codes: you don't file a complaint with the police.

In video, "06400-Cannes": the postcard from the Cannes Film Festival 2022, episode 3

"Why me ?"

On the public life side, Diam's stirs up the crowds.

On the private side, the singer sinks into an abyss of loneliness and anguish.

“I was unhappy, alone in my bed, she remembers in “Seven to Eight”.

Sometimes I cried like a baby, not knowing what I was doing on Earth.

Why me ?

That was always the question I asked myself.

Why this success, this money, this glory?

Three weeks before the Victoires de la Musique 2008, the artist was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

During the show, the rapper cannot hold back her tears in front of the ovation of the public.

"I wanted to tell people: 'Stop, you don't know,' she continues. There, you see an envelope but inside, it's dead, there's nothing left. I'm empty, sad, unhappy.”» The singer, diagnosed with bipolar, saw a veritable descent into hell, between visits to the clinic, depression, and attempted suicide.

"People somewhere preferred that I grill myself in my glory as an Amy Winehouse," she wrote in her autobiography, published in 2013.

Chain reaction

His salvation will come to him from a prayer.

One evening, she is having dinner with two friends.

One of them, a Muslim, bows down.

Diam's asks her if she can join in his prayer.

A real revelation for the artist.

"It's as if whole mountains had fallen from my shoulders", she relates in "Seven to Eight".

After reading the Koran, the young woman decided to convert to Islam in 2008. A personal transformation, which was however exposed by the tabloid press.

She appears fully dressed in a veil in pictures released by a tabloid.

The article causes a chain reaction.

"It was theft, I was robbed of an intimate part of my life," said Mélanie Georgiades.

My mother had never seen me dressed like that.

(…) Everyone has lost their footing.

I lost a large part of my team because no one had confidence anymore.

At the same time, the most critical call it a “danger for a generation”.

"It was as if I had no autonomy," she laments.

Even today, being veiled, I can fight for women and against inequalities and injustices.

Soothed

After its fourth album,

SOS

, released in 2009, Diam's bowed out.

She just reappeared in the context of charity events, as in October 2009, when she sang at the Zénith for the 60th anniversary of Emmaüs.

At the same time, she chairs the Big Up Project, an organization that acts "for the protection of underprivileged children in Africa".

The same year, she married her companion Aziz, and gave birth to her daughter Maryam, in 2012. She divorced a few months later.

Ten years later, the forty-year-old finally seems to have calmed down.

In particular, she launched her agency Hégire Voyages, in February 2020, to offer people “the possibility of coming to do Umrah (

a form of pilgrimage to Mecca, editor’s note

) in the best conditions”.

In 2015, she married ex-rapper Faouzi Tarkhani, and gave birth to a boy named Abraham.

"I am a miracle," she confided in her first interview in seven years, granted to Brut and unveiled on Thursday, May 26.

She declared that she had found "inner peace".

It was in 1995, two decades earlier, that Mélanie Georgiades had chosen the pseudonym Diam's.

She learned then that a diamond “can only be broken by another diamond, and that it is made only of natural elements”.

Source: lefigaro

All life articles on 2022-05-27

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