The African

by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Praise for J. M. G. Le Clézio’s The Prospector

  Hypnotic and mythic … Le Clézio brilliantly conveys the sublime and terrible beauty of life and its twin, death, in devastating evocations … a remarkable work.

  ALA Booklist (starred review)

  A gentle portrayal of a man haunted by visions of his ideal childhood … [Le Clézio’s] writing is deeply evocative and descriptive.

  Publishers Weekly

  Praise for J. M. G. Le Clézio’s Desert

  Finalist for the American Library Association 2010 Notable Books List

  Finalist for the American Literary Translators Association 2010 National Translation Award

  Finalist for the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation 23rd Annual Translation Prize

  Desert is a rich, sprawling, searching, poetic, provocative, broadly historic and demanding novel, which in all those ways displays the essence of Le Clézio.

  The New York Times Book Review

  In Desert, as in all of his books, J. M. G. Le Clézio finds new ways of writing about the intersection of man and place, in a way that manages to create an encompassing and empathetic humanism that doesn’t depend on the overestimation of human beings.

  Adam Gopnik

  This work contains magnificent images of a lost culture in the North African desert, contrasted with a depiction of Europe seen through the eyes of unwanted immigrants. The main character is a utopian antithesis to the ugliness and brutality of European society.

  from the Nobel citation by the Swedish Academy

  Also by J. M. G. Le Clézio in English

  from Verba Mundi Books and

  David R. Godine, Publisher

  THE PROSPECTOR

  translated by Carol Marks

  DESERT

  translated by C. Dickson

  J. M. G. LE CLÉZIO

  THE AFRICAN

  Translated from the French by C. Dickson

  First published in 2013 by

  David R. Godine · Publisher

  Post Office Box 450

  Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452

  WWW.GODINE.COM

  Originally published in French in 2004 as L’Africain

  by Mercure de France

  Copyright © 2004 by J. M. G. Le Clézio

  Translation copyright © 2013 by C. Dickson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts embodied in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact Permissions, David R. Godine, Publisher, Fifteen Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts, 02108.

  Cet ouvrage publié dans le cadre du programme d’aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien du Ministère des Affaires Etrangères et du Service Culturel de l’Ambassade de France représenté aux Etats-Unis.

  This work received support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States through their publishing assistance program.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Le Clézio, J.-M. G. (Jean-Marie Gustave), 1940–

  The African / by J.M.G. Le Clezio.

  p. cm.

  HARDCOVER ISBN 978-1-56792-460-2 (alk. paper)

  EBOOK ISBN 978-1-56792-512-8

  1. Le Clézio, J.-M. G. (Jean-Marie Gustave), 1940—Childhood and

  youth. 2. Authors, French—20th century—Biography.

  3. Nigeria—Description and travel. I. Title.

  PQ2672.E25Z46 2012

  843'.914—dc23

  [B]

  2012005141

  CONTENTS

  Bodies

  Termites, Ants, etc.

  The African

  From Georgetown to Victoria

  Banso

  The Rage of Ogoja

  Neglect

  EVERY HUMAN being is the product of a father and a mother. One might not accept them, might not love them, might have doubts about them. But they’re there, with their faces, their attitudes, their mannerisms and their idiosyncrasies, their illusions, their hopes, the shape of their hands and of their toes, the color of their eyes and hair, their manner of speaking, their thoughts, probably their age at death, all of that has become part of us.

  For a long time I dreamt that my mother was black. I’d made up a life story, a past for myself, so I could flee reality when I returned from Africa to this country, to this city where I didn’t know anyone, where I’d become a stranger. Then when my father came back to live with us in France upon his retirement, I discovered that in fact it was he who was the African. It was hard for me to admit that. I had to go back in time, start all over again, try to understand. I wrote this little book in memory of that experience.

  BODIES

  I HAVE A FEW things to say about the face I was given at birth. First of all, I had to accept it. To say I didn’t like it would make it seem more important than it was to me as a child. I didn’t hate it, I ignored it, I avoided it. I didn’t look at mirrors. I think years went by without my ever seeing it. I would avert my eyes in photographs, as if someone else had taken my place.

  Around the age of eight, I went to live in Nigeria, West Africa, in a fairly remote region where – apart from my mother and father – there were no Europeans, and where, to the child I was, all of humanity was made up solely of the Ibo and the Yoruba people. In the cabin where we lived (there’s a colonial tinge to the word cabin that might be offensive today, but it accurately describes the lodgings the British government provided for military doctors, a cement slab for the floor, four unplastered, cinder block walls, a roof of corrugated metal covered with leaves, no decorations, hammocks hanging from the walls to be used as beds and – the only concession to comfort – a shower connected with iron pipes to a reservoir on the roof that was heated by the sun), in that cabin then, there were no mirrors, no pictures, nothing to remind us of the world we’d lived in up until then. A crucifix that my father had hung on the wall, but with no human representation. That’s where I learned to forget. It seems to me that the erasing of my face, and of all the faces around me, dates back to the moment I entered that cabin in Ogoja.

  Also dating back to that moment, or resulting directly from it, if you will, is the emergence of bodies. My body, my mother’s body, my brother’s body, the bodies of the young boys in the village with whom I played, the bodies of African women on the paths around the house or at the market by the river. Their stature, their heavy breasts, the shiny skin on their backs. The boys’ penises, their pink, circumcised glands. Faces, no doubt, but like leather masks, hardened, stitched with scars, with ritual markings. Protuberant bellies, navels that looked as if a flat stone had been sewn under the skin. The smell of bodies too, the touch of them, the skin that was not rough, but warm and light, bristling with thousands of hairs. I recall a feeling of extreme closeness, of many bodies all around me, a feeling I had never known before, a feeling that was both new and familiar, one that ruled out fear.

  In Africa, the immodesty of bodies was marvelous. It lent perspective, depth, it multiplied sensations, wove a human web around me. It fit in with the Ibo country, the meanderings of the Aiya River, the village huts, their straw-colored roofs, their earth-colored walls. It shone out in those names that worked their way inside of me and meant much more than the names of places: Ogoja, Abakaliki, Enugu, Obudu, Baterik, Ogrude, Obubra. It permeated the great wall of the rain forest that stood around us on all sides.

  When you’re a child, you don’t use words (and words don’t get used). Back then I was a very long way from adjectives, from nouns. I was incapable of saying, or even thinking: admirable, immense, power. But I could feel it. How the tree
s with their straight trunks soared up toward the night sky clamped over me, enveloping – as if in a tunnel – the bloody gash of the laterite road leading from Ogoja to Obudu. How acutely I perceived the naked bodies shining with sweat in the village clearings, the large silhouettes of women with children hanging on their hips, all of those things come together to form a coherent whole, free of lies.

  I remember entering Obudu quite well: the road emerges from the shadows of the forest into the bright sunlight and leads straight into the village. My father stops the car, he and my mother have to talk to the officials. I am alone in the middle of the crowd, I’m not afraid. Hands are touching me, running along my arms, over my hair, around the brim of my hat. Among all the people milling around me, there is an old woman – well, I didn’t know she was old. I assume it’s her age that I remarked first because she was different from the naked children and the men and the women of Ogoja, dressed more or less in Western clothing. When my mother comes back (perhaps slightly uneasy about the gathering), I motion toward the woman, “What’s wrong with her? Is she sick?” I remember asking my mother that question. The naked body of that woman, full of folds, of wrinkles, her skin sagging like an empty water pouch, her elongated, flaccid breasts hanging down on her stomach, her dull, cracked, grayish skin, it all seems strange to me, but at the same time true. How could I have ever imagined that woman as my grandmother? And I didn’t feel pity, or horror, but rather love and interest, kindled by having glimpsed a truth, a real-life experience. All I can remember is that question, “Is she sick?” Strangely enough it still burns in my mind today, as if time had stood still. And not the answer – probably reassuring, perhaps a bit embarrassed – my mother gave, “No, she’s not sick, she’s just old.” Old age, probably more shocking for a child to see on a woman’s body, since ordinarily in France, in Europe – land of girdles and petticoats, of brassieres and slips – women are still exempt, as they’ve always been, from the disease of aging. I can still feel my cheeks burning, it goes hand in hand with the naïve question and my mother’s brutal response, like a slap. All of that remained unanswered inside of me. The question probably wasn’t: Why has that woman become deformed and worn with old age in that way? But rather: Why have I been lied to? Why has that truth been hidden from me?

  Africa was more about bodies than faces. It was an explosion of sensations, of appetites, of seasons. The very first memory I have of that continent is my body being covered with little blisters caused by the extreme heat, a benign disorder that affects white people when they enter the equatorial zone, comically known as bourbouille – prickly heat in English. I’m in the cabin of the boat as it sails slowly down the coast past Conakry, Freetown, Monrovia, stretched out naked on the bunkbed, with the porthole hanging open to let in the humid air, my body sprinkled with talcum powder. I feel as if I’m in an invisible sarcophagus, or as if I am a fish trapped in the boat, coated with flour, before being put into the frying pan. Africa was already taking my face away and giving me a painful, feverish body in return, the body that France had hidden from me in the anemic comfort of my grandmother’s home, devoid of instinct, devoid of freedom.

  In that boat bearing me away to another world, I was also being given a memory. The African present was erasing everything that had come before. The war, the confinement in the apartment in Nice (where in two attic rooms five of us lived, and sometimes even six, if you count the housemaid, Maria, whom my grandmother hadn’t been able to resolve to let go), the rationing, or the flight into the mountains where my mother had to hide for fear of being rounded up by the Gestapo – all of that was fading away, disappearing, becoming unreal. From that moment on, there was to be a before and an after Africa for me.

  Freedom in Ogoja was the supremacy of the body. Boundless, the view from the cement platform on which the house was built, like the cabin of a raft floating on the ocean of grass. If I search my memory, I can retrace the vague boundaries of our compound. Someone who had kept photographs of it would be surprised at the things a child of eight was able to see there. A garden, probably. Not a pleasure garden – did anything in that country exist for pleasure alone? But a useful one, where my father had planted an orchard: mango, guava, and papaya trees and, to serve as a hedge in front of the veranda, orange and lime trees, most of whose leaves had been stitched up by ants to make their suspended nests filled with a sort of cottony fluff that protected their eggs. Somewhere amid the bushes in back of the house, a coop where guinea fowl and chickens cohabited, the existence of which I was only aware of due to the presence – directly over it in the sky – of vultures that my father would sometimes shoot at with a rifle. All right then, a garden, since one of our servants was called a “garden boy.” At the other end of the lot there must have been the cabins for the servants: the “boy,” the “small boy,” and especially, the cook, whom my mother was fond of, and with whom she concocted recipes, not traditional French food – but peanut soup, roasted potatoes or foufou, the yam paste that was our daily fare. Every once in a while, my mother would launch into experiments with him, guava jam or candied papaya, or even sherbet that she’d crank by hand. In that courtyard there were, most importantly, always lots of children who would come over to play and talk every morning and whom we didn’t take leave of until nightfall.

  All this might give one the impression of a very organized, colonial, almost urbane life – or at least a rustic one, in the manner of the English or the Normans before the industrial revolution. Nevertheless, it was absolute freedom of the body and mind. In front of the house, in the opposite direction from the hospital where my father worked, began an endless, slightly rolling, open stretch reaching out as far as the eye could see. To the south, the slope led down to the misty valley of the Aiya, an affluent of the Cross River, and to the villages Ogoja, Ijama, Bawop. To the north and the east, I could see the great wild plain scattered with giant termite mounds – cut off from the streams and the swamps – and the beginning of the forest, the stands of giants – irokos, okoumés – and, stretched over it all, an immense sky, a raw blue dome in which the sun burned down, invaded by storm clouds every afternoon.

  I recall the violence of it all. Not the secret, hypocritical, terrifying violence that all children born in the middle of a war are familiar with – having to hide when I went out, spying on Germans in gray greatcoats while they stole the tires from my grandmother’s De Dion-Bouton, listening again in a dream to stories of trafficking, of espionage, veiled words, messages that came from my father via Mr. Ogilvy, the American consular officer, and especially hunger, the lack of everything, the rumor about my grandmother’s cousins eating only vegetable peelings. That violence wasn’t actually physical. It was muted and hidden like an illness. It was eating away at my body, it gave me irrepressible fits of coughing, such painful migraines that I would hide under the long skirt of the side table, my fists pushed into my eye sockets.

  Ogoja introduced me to another kind of violence, one that was open, real, that made my body tingle. It could be seen in every detail of life and nature all around. Thunderstorms, the likes of which I have never seen or dreamt of since, the inky sky streaked with lightning, the wind bending over the tall trees around our garden, ripping the palm leaves from the roof, slipping under the doors to whirl around the dining room and blow out the oil lamps. Some evenings, a red wind from the north that would set the walls aglow. Sheer electrical energy that I had to accept, grow accustomed to. To that end, my mother made up a game. Count the seconds separating us from the lightning’s point of impact when we heard the first thunderclap, listen to it approaching kilometer after kilometer and then fading away out toward the mountains. One afternoon, my father was operating at the hospital when the lightning burst in through the door and silently spread out over the floor, melting the metal legs of the operating table and burning the rubber soles of my father’s sandals, then the bolt gathered itself back together and went out the way it had come, like an ectoplasm, to return to the depths of
the sky. Reality was in the legends.

  Africa was powerful. For the child I was, violence was all-pervasive, unequivocal. It filled us with enthusiasm. It’s hard to talk about it today, after so many catastrophes, so much indifference. Few Europeans have experienced that feeling. The work my father carried out, first in Cameroon and later in Nigeria, created an exceptional situation. Most of the British with assignments in the colony accomplished administrative duties. They were military appointees, judges, district officers (or D.O.s, the British pronunciation of which made me think of a religious term, as if it were a variation on “Deo Gratias” from the mass my mother celebrated on our covered terrace every Sunday morning). My father was the only doctor within a sixty-kilometer radius. But citing that distance is meaningless: the first administrative city was Abakaliki, a four-hour drive, and to get there you had to cross the Aiya River on a raft, and then a dense forest. Another D.O. resided near the French Cameroon border, in Obudu, at the foot of the hills where gorillas still lived. In Ogoja, my father was manager of the dispensary (an old religious hospital the nuns had abandoned), and the only doctor north of the province of Cross River. He did everything there, as he later said, from delivering babies to performing autopsies. My brother and I were the only white children in the whole region. We hadn’t the slightest inkling about what might forge the somewhat stereotyped identity of children brought up in “the colonies.” When I read British “colonial” novels of those years, or the years just prior to our arrival in Nigeria – for example Joyce Cary, the author of Mister Johnson – they are completely unfamiliar to me. When I read William Boyd, who also spent part of his childhood in British West Africa, I can’t relate to it either. His father was a D.O. (in Accra, Ghana, I believe). I never experienced what he describes – the cumbersome colonialism, the ridiculous antics of the expatriate white society on the coast, all of the pettiness that children take particular notice of, the disdain for the native people, of whom they knew only the faction of servants who had to indulge the whims of their masters’ children, and above all, that sort of clique that both unifies and separates children of the same blood and in which they are able to glimpse an ironical reflection of their defects and their masquerades, and that, in a manner of speaking, forms the training ground for racial awareness that, in their case, takes the place of the school of human awareness. Thank God I can say all of that is completely foreign to me.