When you listen to rap, you are hearing the words of the nation’s youth. This is your experience when listening to the debut album by Geneva rapper Mairo: “LA FIEV”. The title is inspired by “Fièvre à Columbus University”, the French title of the 1995 film “Higher Learning”, in which black and white students tackle issues involving money, safety and sexuality. Mairo himself sees the term “fiev” as synonymous with awareness. Romai Tesfaldet (“Mairo” in French verlan slang) was born in Neuchâtel on 5 July 1995 and is of Eritrean extraction. His father came to Switzerland as a refugee, before becoming a social worker as well as the owner of a small restaurant in Geneva. This is where he met his wife, who is also Eritrean and works as an early childhood educator. A few months ago, their rapper son came to his dad’s humble eatery, the Meskerem, to premiere his debut album. “The queue was at least 200 metres long,” his father recalls with emotion. His son got his first taste of the mic as a teenager, and went on to train as a sound engineer. Mairo’s production has pulled in the listeners and been lauded by the press. “Mairo chiefly works in a studio that he built himself. This setup means he can make music the way he wants to,” according to the magazine of the www.hytrape.com website. The rapper, who divides his time between Geneva and Paris, works in tandem with his “brother” Hopital, who creates the sounds, rhythms and musical collages. Hopital also produced the album. Mairo’s lyrics cover everything from personal issues to wider social themes. “I’ll bring her wads of cash instead of flowers”, he chants, concerned about the intentions of people in show business. “They want you to be the goose that lays golden eggs,” he says. The young man, who started his career with the rappers of the Geneva posse SuperWak Clique, does not hesitate to lay bare even his deepest wounds. “I’d never thought my folks would live apart, or even come to hate each other,” he sings in “Paramount”. “Hold me, mum” Mairo asks, conjuring an image of his mother sleeping on the living room couch. The flow (the rhythm of the words) is fast. The diction is impeccable. There are cryptic slang terms and swallowed syllables. All that matters, though, is the sound of the words. The musical collages are eclectic. One track features an Eritrean pop song from the 1960s. Another has the crackle of Radio Londres playing over a rap background. “When it’s your turn to speak, you just can’t shut up”, the artist warns on “Antidote ou venin” (“Antidote or poison”), one of the 13 tracks on this Swiss rap opus. STÉPHANE HERZOG Instagram: www.instagram.com/mairoxtrm/ Dad was an engineer. His daughter was born in the shadow of a nuclear power station, the child of “a strong-willed, proud mother and, quite possibly, a scoundrel of a father”. That was in 1977. He specialised in nuclear generators and was helping to build the Kori nuclear power plant in South Korea, where he met her mother. But only weeks after the commissioning of the plant and the birth of his daughter, he upped and left without a trace. The narrator turns detective 40 years later. Her father’s absence has fuelled her “inner reactor”, she notes metaphorically. And she coolly proceeds to piece together the fragmented pictures. The trail begins in Wales, where her father grew up, and continues to East Asia before ending in Monroe, Michigan. Her father worked at Monroe’s Enrico Fermi 2 reactor, which has suffered numerous mishaps over the course of its operating history, as the narrator notes sardonically. “Generator” by Rinny Gremaud is a remarkable, critical, reflective work in which factual and biographical elements intersect. Gremaud, who was born in Korea like the narrator, is adept at describing the technical ins and outs, and consequences, of working on the construction of a nuclear power plant and, in doing so, shedding more light on the absconding father. Industrial desolation is a recurrent, emotive theme on her journey. Energy, that unrelenting force, has no regard for humans or nature. For this reason, Gremaud chooses to fictionalise her father as a means of joining the dots. “I could have asked my mother more questions,” she writes, “but I prefer to invent everything myself.” So that “grey areas, havens, and hiding places” remain for all concerned. This allows the narrator to avoid claiming the moral high ground while maintaining an effortless grip on a story that flits between imagination and reality. Gremaud draws on personal experience to tell the story, combining lucid analysis with humour and biting irony. Her commentary is quite caustic at times. Such venting betrays a certain vulnerability. There is a subtlety here that lends her prose its own beautiful character. The narrator finally stands at her 82-year-old father’s front door. And then turns on her heels and walks away for good. She knows all she wants to know. BEAT MAZENAUER “Hold me, mum” Nuclear family MAIRO: “LA FIEV” 2025 Label Monde Libre RINNY GREMAUD: “Generator”, A novel. Translation by Holly James. Schaffner Press Inc (will be published in January 2026). Paperback, CHF 27 Swiss Review / July 2025 / No.3 23 Books Sounds
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