In a book, produced using software that obeys the movement of his eyes, the former member of the Fonky Family looks back on his life, his career in music and his fight against illness.
Writing despite quadriplegia. Pone is one of the most influential composers of his time in French rap. Former member of the Marseille group the Fonky Family, it is to him that we owe the hits Marseille bad boys or Street art.
Affected since 2015 by Charcot’s disease, a neurological disease that affects the central nervous system, the musician is today bedridden, paralyzed, voiceless and entirely connected to machines, but that does not prevent him from continuing to produce.
After a return to music with a first album composed with his eyes, Listen And Donate in 2021, Guilhem Gallart, his real name, is now writing and telling his story in a sincere and touching autobiographical work called A little furtherfor which he confided in BFMTV.com.
“My eyes are a mouse”
Published on April 12 by JC Lattès, this book was written in two years using software that obeys the movement of his eyes and allows him to write or speak using a voice generated by his computer. .
“I have a computer equipped with eye tracking. It’s an infrared strip that captures the movement of my pupils and software transforms them into data. My eyes are a mouse”, summarizes the artist.
If he describes himself as someone “not liking to talk about himself”, Pone explains that he was encouraged in the idea of embarking on the writing of a novel on his story by his community which follow him on facebook.
“When I came out of intensive care in 2017, I started writing little anecdotes about my life before and my group that I published on Facebook and I received positive comments,” says Guilhem Gallart.
He continues: “I was told that I wrote well and that it would be good if I wrote a book. I let myself be convinced. I put that in the back of my mind and the seed germinated. J I wrote the entire story in a year. Then, the second year, I rewrote the whole thing 19 times.”
Pone was also able to count on the support of the British singer Kate Bush, for whom he composed with the help of his eyes a tribute album entitled Kate & Me in 2019, and who signed the preface to his book.
“Love has taken us where we’ve been”
For writing A little further, Pone plunged back into his earliest childhood between Toulouse and Marseille. The 50-year-old artist looks back in particular on his discovery of hip-hop and graffiti culture, as well as on his first steps in music as a producer within the collective that will rock his career: the Fonky Family.
Composed of Rat Luciano, Sat l’Artificier, Don Choa, Menzo, Fel, DJ Djel and Pone, this Marseille group marked the beginnings of rap in France and enjoyed great success in the 90s and 2000s with titles such as If I had listened to themor Without remission before splitting in 2007.
“Starting from nothing, without any contact, in the music world, without a musical parent, all from modest backgrounds, it was love that carried us where we went. And that has no price”, writes Pone in his book to sum up this adventure.
“I needed love”
Pone also talks about Charcot’s disease from which he has suffered since 2015. In a chapter entitled “Acronym”, the artist returns in particular to the announcement of his diagnosis, on April 17, 2015, which upset him and his wife. Wahiba and their two children.
“He (the doctor) comes in, sits down and announces the sentence to me, soberly, as one would order a dish in a fancy restaurant. ‘If you are here, he says, it is to look for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis’ (…) I have just taken a knockout from which I will take a year and a half to get up, “says Pone in his autobiography.
“This evening of April 17, I wanted us to watch a cartoon all together in bed, I needed love. I’m looking for the words to describe the trance in which I found myself. Only one comes to mind: cataclysm,” he continues.
If this passage was one of the most difficult to write, according to him, Pone assures that recalling these painful memories helped him to move forward. “It plunged me back into dark hours. I cried but I think it did me good. I must have needed to exorcise things”, notes the musician.
“Degeneration is very difficult to live with”
Pone confides in a few confessions that he often thought of death during certain difficult stages of his illness. Nevertheless, A little further is far from being a testimony on the end of life. It is quite the contrary.
Guilhem Gallart’s story overflows with positivity and combativeness, even when his heart stopped beating in 2017. While he was placed in an artificial coma due to his advanced stage of malnutrition which involved his vital prognosis , he “never thought of assisted death”, he assures.
A subject at the heart of the debates in France, in recent months, in particular because of the comments of the former journalist Charles Biétry, also suffering from Charcot’s disease, who announced at the beginning of April having organized his assisted suicide.
“A few months ago, I saw one of his television appearances and I knew he had Charcot, the way he spoke. It made me sad for him but I completely understand his position” .
“The idea of dying in pain is not terrible. Degeneracy is very difficult to live with. I understand that we want to shorten it,” says Pone.
And to add: “Afterwards, there are a lot of parameters to consider: the entourage, the care, but above all the acceptance. Personally, at the beginning of the disease, I did not want to be fitted. Today I’ve been living on machines for 6 years now, and I’m very happy about it.”
Always looking for new challenges, Pone is already working on future projects. As soon as his book was written, the artist confided that he still had “a lot of things pending”. “Here, we are finishing a children’s story with my illustrator. Afterwards, I’ll see.”
A little furtherby Guilhem Pone Gallart, éditions Lattès, 368 pages, 20.90 euros
