Over Seas of Memory Read online

  Praise for the French edition

  “The flourishing memory of the overseas territories is constitutive of French history and identity. . . . It is one of the contemporary paradoxes, moreover, that this book brilliantly brings to light: those who are nostalgic for the empire on which the sun never set are the quickest to refuse the best things to come from the overseas territories. Mémoires d’Outre-Mer is undoubtedly, resplendently, one of them.”

  —Bertrand Leclair, Le Monde

  “A very beautiful piece of French prose. A writer who transcends banality, with a purity of writing.”

  —Sébastien Lapaque, Le Figaro

  “Mémoires d’Outre-Mer is one of the most beautiful novels of this season, with all that you would want from a novel. . . . Add to that the cleverness of the novel’s form (a hint of a detective investigation into the occupant of a nameless grave), which closes where you had opened it, and especially the beautiful language of Michaël Ferrier, who makes literature from many different written sources.”

  —Jean-Baptiste Harang, Le Magazine littéraire

  “With his remarkable Mémoires d’Outre-Mer, Michaël Ferrier explodes all boundaries, all borders, geographical and mental. . . . With this novel, and its superb style, he enriches and renews the image that we might have of this country (Madagascar), which is much more than its lemurs and deforestation. The author also reflects on the notion of identity. ‘To understand what France is, you have to go and look elsewhere,’ he writes. It is the object of the book to show that France is not a small hexagonal space but a limitless territory, steeped in its history here and elsewhere, nourished by the experiences of all those it has welcomed. This very topical book is essential reading.”

  —Muriel Mingaud, Le Populaire

  “What is the only thing that can fight against death? Memory. That’s it. Ferrier has written an adventure novel on memory, a singularly intelligent novel.”

  —Vincent Roy, Art Press

  “This rich novel (the term does not do the work justice) lives up to its title [and is] driven by a conviction to record the reality of a world made from diversity.”

  —Valérie Marin la Meslée, Le Point

  “Great novels are like cyclones. They announce themselves in shudders, rustling, little shakes, and through narrative workings, these currents of hot air grow in strength and vigor; they rise like waves, breaking and multiplying in flashes and splinters, and become the very movement of the novel. Mémoires d’Outre-Mer is a literary cyclone, an art of the wind, the story of a man of the wind, a man who flies free, over an island and a time, and who grapples with the betrayals of history. . . . The important novelists are always precise and informed historians, their ears are as fine and sharp as their pens, and they possess their own knowledge and style—that divine blessing.”

  —Philippe Chauché, La Cause littéraire

  Winner of the French Voices Award

  www.frenchbooknews.com

  Over Seas of Memory

  A Novel

  Michaël Ferrier

  Translated by Martin Munro

  Foreword by Patrick Chamoiseau

  University of Nebraska Press | Lincoln

  Originally published in French as Mémoires d’outre-mer © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2015

  Translation © 2019 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska

  French Voices logo designed by Serge Bloch

  Cover designed by University of Nebraska Press; cover illustration © Orlando Hoetzel.

  All rights reserved

  This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE Foundation (French American Cultural Exchange).

  Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut français.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Ferrier, Michaël, author. | Munro, Martin, translator. | Chamoiseau, Patrick, writer of foreword.

  Title: Over seas of memory: a novel / Michael Ferrier; translated by Martin Munro; foreword by Patrick Chamoiseau.

  Other titles: Mémoires d’outre-mer. English

  Description: Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, [2019] | “Over Seas of Memory was first published in French as Memoires d’outre-mer. Editions Gallimard, Paris, 2015.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046957

  ISBN 9781496213204 (paperback: alk. paper)

  ISBN 9781496216021 (epub)

  ISBN 9781496216038 (mobi)

  ISBN 9781496216045 (pdf)

  Classification: LCC PQ2706.E775 M4513 2019 | DDC 843/.92—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046957

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  For my father

  Long after the days and the seasons, the living and the lands

  —Arthur Rimbaud

  I am of no nation recognized by the chancelleries

  —Aimé Césaire

  Contents

  Foreword by Patrick Chamoiseau

  A Man Leaving

  France and Its Offshoots

  The Red Circus

  In Praise of the Acrobat

  Boxing by the Waterside

  Queer-­Looking Specimen

  Mixed-­Race Montaigne

  The Colonial Specter

  Creole Jazz Band

  Presences of the Plague

  The Madagascar Project

  The War of the Airwaves

  Walkway of Lonely Death

  Epilogue

  Foreword

  Patrick Chamoiseau

  Whoever knows Mr. Michaël Ferrier knows this: that he is woven of the same matter that he explores in his sumptuous writing. A man of faraway and nearby lands, of a thousand belongings and scrupulous fidelity, his life, his choices, and his movements reflect an experience in the world that cannot be summarized in a simple family tree. It is therefore not surprising that to lead us in the footsteps of his grandfather Maxime, he will take with him almost the complete totality of the world.

  His quest will see him dive not into the branches of a somewhat everyday familial relation but into the dizzying mystery set up from the outset relating to three graves (“Three tombs; three persons; three islands”) and the mise en abyme of one of them. An inaugural cemetery: as if he first had to make a blank slate of all that common sense can imagine for a life, a country, a nationality, and moreover and especially, of our understanding of the world in which we live.

  If his grandfather is the central reason for this exploration, the theme is what Édouard Glissant calls “Relation.” By means of the wretched workings of Western conquests and colonization, the world has become the Tout-monde, the world as one, everything. In our consciousnesses, our lives, our individual experiences freed from the old restrictions relating to identity and belonging, the world has been opened up to its own diversity. At the same time it has achieved a form of unity that is impossible to define. Our cultures, civilizations, and imaginaries flow in interactive, unstoppable, unpredictable ways. As a result, our individual destinies have been liberated, even propelled, into a chaotic and open planetary alchemy. Over and above communities and nation-states, individual formulations have become determinant. Everyone finds themselves having to organize their lives (their ethics, their values) on a basis that is no longer that of “my land,” “my parish,” “my language,” “my ancestors,” “my history.” For each of us everything is connected to everything; everything is now shaped in unpredictable multiple ways in a coming into contact of cultures and visions of the world, nati
onal histories and old phenotypes. This unprecedented mixing, far more unpredictable than a simple form of miscegenation, produces a human reality that is at once apparent and opaque, that we live day by day, but that most often we do not see, that we struggle against sometimes in ourselves and all around us. “Delectably interwoven!” says Michaël Ferrier, who embraces the phenomenon.

  He is right.

  All it would take would be for everyone to sit down and consult their own archives, as the narrator does here with what he has left of his grandfather, to collate the wanderings, proliferations, and uncertainties of contemporary lives. In the wake of Maxime Ferrier, the world will reveal its colonial horrors (“But for now, what you have is the waltz of euphemisms: the conquest is ‘pacification,’ revolts are ‘incidents’ [or ‘troubles’ when there are too many casualties], and the great wars of independence are grudgingly afforded the status of ‘events’”) but also the new complexities that testify to what we are today. The protagonists know that “origins mean nothing”: what really makes a person is how the world has formed and shaped them. They know that the major languages are constantly in contact with a thousand other languages, that they have all derived and evolved, and that they testify to a relational alchemy that cannot be denied. Therefore, the point of departure is not especially a strain, nor simply a wound as it might have been, but it is a completion, like the flowering of a bud: “At the same time, they retained the memory of their origins—in the form of scars or else as sweet souvenirs—and carried it proudly on the open seas.” The seed opens onto itself, and the fruit, the fruit opens onto the world.

  In this novel “we climb back into time but also descend it; we cross it and take it up again,” and not only time but almost all of the Indian Ocean, this intertwined space whose multi-millennial scale is that of an opera. Around Maxime Ferrier, the enigmatic grandfather, “there are knots, many levels of time set against or layered on top of each other, pieces of memory that demand to rise again, resurfacing in a great tempest from the bottom of the abyss. You need to know how to move around in there, in this enormous archive, to listen out, be on the lookout: certain memories are trapped, others blocked, others still recalcitrant or vindictive, and they try to place over the top of them all as a kind of cover a great unified memory, with a single resonance, monotonous, and supposedly national.”

  We are here in the chaotic matter of the Tout-monde.

  This impulse toward an open, inexhaustible, even indefinable totality is inaugurated by a small act of alphabet terrorism committed by the grandfather. The original name, Février, is transformed into Ferrier with just a distortion of the single letter v, like a bolt on a door that you throw off in order to escape—not just from the indignity of bearing the name “of the shortest month of the year!” but from that of having to stay in one place with a solitary national history, from vertical, proud languages, from closed and fixed identities . . . The grandfather is curiously free. He walks in the mobility of his name that comes to structure his being. He chooses the land of his life: Madagascar. He resists oppression and is largely consumed in love. He remains all along a person able, at the most crucial moments, to “choose something else,” as if the plasticity and fluidity of Relation were the page on which he wrote, sketched his body, the story to come, the grave that remains always in the making, to be completed.

  It is not surprising that just like his name, his body itself, an acrobat’s body, is inscribed in this plasticity as in the refusal of any rigid authority over the skeleton and the bones, of the gravity of the Earth itself, or of the poverty of the single relationship with the land: “Acrobatics, beneath its festive exterior, is not just entertainment: it is a very special way of being in the world, a form of aerial combat, as well as a hidden, secret battle.” Thus, he enters into other coordinates of space and time, another state of the body itself. He has his own tempo, a sort of organic music that leads him to the other side of things, their invisible source. He will hold on to that time, which is his own, until his dying day.

  Finally, the novel highlights an unexpected effect of colonization: “When it comes down to it, the native peoples are no longer Malagasy, French, or anything. They are left there, in sufferance, on the overseas shore. Because nationality is never a right; it is a favor that they are awarded. The native people slide from the rank of inhabitants to that of onlookers; they disappear bit by bit from their own country. Absent, phantoms, they are a décor, an ambiance, a picturesque but also exploited and taxpaying ornament in the grand spectacle of progress and colonization, a background canvas. They are there but not there: specters in their own country.” Specters also in the matter of the world. The destiny of Maxime shows how these specters are richer than those who damned them, that they are enriched by many lands, names, stories, by a horizontal presence in the world, the only one that allows us to live in the full splendor of Relation.

  But in what is almost an instruction manual for the world, the human quintessence remains. Maxime can be divined, without really being fully revealed to us, in his outbursts and wanderings but also through those who bear witness to the tracks of his journey: “When I meet older people, I see clearly that they have come into possession of a secret, which transforms life definitively into destiny and which makes them shift into another dimension. Their very body is not the same; they float in the atmosphere as if they have been extracted from the rock of time and yet are completely caught in its flow: they are lookouts, at the edge of another world, which is not death but the renewed power of life, its permanent passage.” It is from the edge of this other world, in an enthralling acrobatics of writing and vision, that this text stands, overlooking, radiating.

  In Mahajanga cemetery there are three tombs. They gleam, inconspicuously, in the midday sun. All three are almost identical: same height, same color, same dimensions. They are simple and sleek, like in an artist’s sketch: with neither sculptures nor engravings, neither flowerpots nor ornaments, the three stone rectangles seem placed on the land like ships cutting across the water. Facing southwest, turned toward the sea, they are set at the same level, placed together in a geometric structure, and connected by paths overgrown with grass, over which lizards cross, their eyes keen, their tongues agile. On top of each stone there is a simple cross with no inscription, a cross like you would find on a road rather than in a cemetery.

  In their sober and discreetly wrought elegance, the three graves provoke immediately the greatest confusion. There is nothing lugubrious about them, nothing that sends a shiver to the soul—nothing sinister or sepulchral. The stone is pale, carefully painted and polished, and absolutely denuded of details. It forms a flat, bare, unadorned surface and is made of a material that absorbs light. The whiteness of the three tombs catches your eye as soon as you enter the cemetery: the people who live nearby call them the “Trois Lumières,” the Three Lights. Each gravestone rises up from a four-sided vault and is constituted of three tiers that build gradually to the sky in ledges placed one on top of the other—like so many additions to the initial square mastaba—that seem to intensify and propagate the luster of the mastaba and to give out a strange luminescent power.

  Then the eye is drawn like in a painting to the strange network of contours that the tombs create: according to the time of day and the position of the sun, the shadows’ shapes, and the passage of the wind, the movements of the branches sketch on the bright stones a series of multiple, ever-changing motifs—an anchor, a fishing boat, a fish . . . The whole thing gives out a feeling of grace in its lines and contours, a sense of lightness and space in the positioning of its various parts. The affinity between form and material, structure and proportions, and depth and perspective gives a unique impression, at once inexplicable and inexhaustible: the angles and edges of the steles appear to bring about a strange conjunction of movement and immobility. You approach, you go back, your gaze moves from one tomb to the other, the three crosses dance in the sweetness of the sea and the faint perfume of the m
ango trees.

  They are never more beautiful than now, at midday, with the sun at its zenith—vertical illumination . . . We like to speak of cemeteries as being places of silence and melancholy, where all the terminal rot and decay of life comes to rest, as if our lives are destined to end in degeneration or, at best, in the mausoleum. But no, it is not like that here. There is a real racket going on in this place, sound and dust . . . To the right I hear the furtive hiss of a heron rising up from the coast. Farther away, over the ocean, there is the humming sound of an aircraft. And over there, way down low, there is a whole hidden orchestra of little movements in the grass—frogs sliding, crabs pattering, spiders crackling, curled up in their web making . . . They are the denizens of the in-between places, invisible and musical: you have to listen carefully to hear them, beneath the clicking of the ants loaded down with pieces of straw and other derisory treasures—the noisy junk of cemeteries.

  The more you look at them, the more you hear circles of music that seem to rise up and spread around the three tombs. Shadows tremble. White-headed vanga birds twitch; corncrakes and lapwings take flight, whistling through the bamboo. Stonechat birds provide the rhythm, snakes dance, getting munched at sometimes by dogs rummaging around in the grass. From time to time there is a solo by a dragonfly or the improvisation of a white butterfly . . . Now the slightest movement sideways opens up another angle in your vision and brings to life a multiplicity of breathing sounds, bodies, accents, and characters that are so many open trails or tracks that never close over again. Maxime, Pauline, Willy, Francis . . . Nuñes, Beau Bassin, Maurice . . . All the names of long ago. Aunt Émilia, Marie Adélia d’Albrède . . . Éliane . . . Is there no one left to listen to their story and to gently gather again the leaping sounds of the conch shells and of humans in the nighttime?