Over Seas of Memory Page 5

  What a waste, to forgo the real name of his forefathers,

  To want to take another built on chimeras!

  So, you can be French by trunk, by wood, by stump . . . by stub or by stem! So, why not by branch or offshoot? . . . by leaf? by paper! What a wooden, pompous language, it has to be said. None of that really exists anyway. I am French by ear and by conviction.

  On board the flight to Madagascar, I flick through the newspapers and magazines and watch the television news . . . What confusion, what a jam, it’s all messed up . . . So many mixed-up memories! As soon as you touch down in France, everything becomes confused, complicated, opaque . . . History, geography, and time itself are from that point uncertain. 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, 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.

  Today one would say that the cartography of France stops at the borders of the Hexagon. I have taken with me Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, a kind of official guidebook of the Third Republic . . . Now, nearly 150 years later, we still have not left it behind.

  You are French, you know the story: André and Julien are two little boys from Lorraine, what are called “Optants” in French, as they opted to leave the territories annexed by Germany in 1871 to keep their French nationality.

  Here we are, then, in their company on the byways of France: on foot, on horseback, in a coach, in the depths of a forest or on a mountaintop, in a dairy or a paper mill, a factory or a cheese maker’s . . . In the 1877 edition there are no fewer than 120 illustrations, 196 etchings, and 19 maps, all to describe France and its heroes.

  The meandering of the two children is punctuated with poetic landscapes, geographical insights, historical reminders, and common sayings. From the fair at Épinal to the foundries of the Creusot, from the hills of Auvergne to the Rhône Valley, passing by the Artois, Orléans and the ports of Marseille, the journey is pleasant and varied and, above all, instructive. They explore Rouen and its cotton, Versailles and its columns, the circus of Gavarnie, and the mountain streams of Pau. We discover the glass, crystals, and mirrors of Lorraine, the great plain of the Limagne and its candied fruits.

  One day we find ourselves in the Jura Mountains, in the company of “great flocks of villages, led by a single shepherd.” Another day we discover the logging industry and the great steam power hammers. Here and there the journey is enlivened by lessons on various things, including moral issues: we learn about “honesty,” “the economy,” the “way to gain someone’s trust,” and the “way to look after horses.”

  But it is not only geographical landscapes that we find in this traveling epic. The book is also overflowing with historical tales: Joan of Arc; Vercingétorix and ancient Gaul; Desaix and the Battle of Marengo; Bayard, the brave and irreproachable knight; the expeditions of La Pérouse . . . We also meet mother Gertrude and mother Étienne, father Guillaume (makes you think of Balzac and Le Cousin Pons and La Cousine Bette). At the end everyone ends up at the idealized farm of the Grand’Lande, which reminds you of Rabelais and Thélème Abbey.

  The France that people love is made up of hardworking farmers, industrious workers, meticulous clockmakers, courageous soldiers, prodigious artists, daring scientists, and fabulous writers!

  Here’s what they say about La Fontaine: “He is one of the writers who have immortalized our language: his fables have traveled the world over; they are read everywhere, translated everywhere, and taught everywhere. They are full of verve, grace, and natural things, and at the same time they show men the faults that they must correct.” That is so true!

  Certainly, the maxims cited in the epigraphs of each chapter can be in turn amusing, tiresome, or irritating: “Be clean and decent, the poorest people can be so” . . . “Those who work are always held in esteem.” But certain pages are full of marvelous poetry, like the description of Provence, with its “woods forever verdant with their orange, lemon, and olive trees, which descend from the high mountains to the sea.” And what could you add to this piece of disarming wisdom: “All you need is to know the twenty-four letters of the alphabet and to want; with that you can learn the rest”?

  It is an admirable text, at once broad and precise, pedagogical and precious. It is a discovery of the country through the land, the air, and the light. It is a whole poem, a whole country in a single sweep. Along the way the frieze unravels a childlike series of games and toys, touching scenes of vineyards and foundries, mulberry trees and silk farms, swing bridges, guns and ribbons, and not to forget the noble landscapes of orange trees in the environs of Nice or the silkworm lace on the reed trellises of the Dauphiné.

  This history does, however, have its shadowy parts and even its blind spots. Julien is—rightly—“very proud of France” when he recalls that “it was France that was first to abolish slavery in its colonies” (chapter 87), which alludes to the decision of the Convention, on 4 February 1794, but he says nothing about its reintroduction by Napoleon in 1802. There is also this little phrase in chapter 76, on “the white race, the most perfect of the human races,” which is terribly typical of the time. In short it is France, with its improbable nuances, its paradoxes, its contradictions.

  It is, moreover, a strange book, written by a man, G. Bruno, who was in reality a woman (Augustine Fouillée, née Tuillerie), in a very refined language, even if it is addressed to children, and which tells of the search for an uncle Frantz, whom they think they will find in Marseille but who left for Bordeaux . . . Ah, Bordeaux! It is always there that France finds its refuge, between the blue of the ocean and the clarity of the wine, so close to the shores, the threshold to the overseas regions. And what is the family name of these two French children? André and Julien Volden . . . a Norwegian name! In short it is a strange muddle that underlies the clarity of the overall book.

  But the great absence in the Tour de la France par deux enfants can be summed up in a single word, superb and luminous in its very opacity: the outre-mer, or the overseas regions. You do find in the later editions a few passages on what was still known as Annam (chapter 122), or the “agricultural tests in the colonies” (chapter 123), but those “four million square kilometers, populated by thirty-eight million people,” that “France possesses or protects” (strange ambiguity in that phrase) are each time dismissed in a few lines . . .

  This is because the book is underpinned by a single idea: “the resolution to remain French and to live in France.” You can therefore be French only in France, and this is what is drummed into you in the eight million copies that were sold over a hundred years of this enduring best seller.

  One could, based on this nineteenth-century model that is now completely outdated, imagine a permanent rewriting of the Tour de la France through the ages. André and Julien would stand aside successively for:

  Michel and Martine in the 1950s,

  Philippe and Catherine (or Anquetil and Poulidor) in the 1960s,

  Christophe and Nathalie (or Stone and Charden) in the 1970s,

  Nicolas and Céline—not Louis-Ferdinand to be clear—in the 1980s,

  Kevin and Élodie in the 1990s,

  Thomas and Léa in the 2000s,

  Emma and Nathan in the 2010s, etc.

  You would, of course, take into account urbanization, industrialization, and the most recent technological changes. In the twenty-first-century version of Le Tour the Engravings Gallery would be completely photoshopped. The Maps Index would be digitized and put on a DVD with interactive features. The Technical Index would be expanding rapidly, and the Famous Men one would have people. The Moral Index would have more or less disappeared.

  Or
then again, let’s dream a little: you could also sketch a different history of France, made up of intervals and crossings, a whole series of cracks and crevices and sidesteps.

  Instead of the panorama, you would have a view from above, with multiple and renewed vistas.

  You would replace the circular logic of the tour of a single, unified France with that of the detour and the unpredictable.

  In other words, you would take apart the norms, reintroduce a more playful approach, explore France’s blind spots, that which it has always considered its outside or its extremities, its offshoots and outgrowths. You would go to the heart of things, bring out everything that has so often been put to the side and closed off—and presented in a very singular way.

  This alternative itinerary would pass through, for example, all the French overseas departments and territories but also all the territories where the history of France was formed, deformed, transformed, and recomposed: colonies, trading posts, protectorates . . . To mention only the most obvious ones, you would have: Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, Réunion, Mayotte, Polynesia, Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, Wallis and Futura, Saint Martin, Saint Barthélemy, New Caledonia, the Southern and Antarctic Lands . . . And not to forget the well-named Scattered Islands: Bassas da India, Europa, the Glorioso Islands, Juan de Nova, Tromelin . . . (which are all currently subject to competing territorial claims).

  And then there is Clipperton Island, which is twelve thousand kilometers from France but which is nevertheless part of France since 28 January 1931, by the arbitration of the International Court and King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy. Did you know that? We have compatriots in the heart of the Pacific Ocean, in what is, according to the expert calculations of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the most isolated atoll in the world, in that little heap of gravel, coral sands, and guano, populated by reptiles, crustaceans, and fish, just as French as you and me.

  How could this be? A multi-territorial France, existing in different times that are unaware of each other, that are related, intertwined, superimposed on each other? . . . It is a disconcerting topography, an improbable encyclopedia . . . Endless surprises. It would no longer involve “learning France through the sole of its shoes” but remembering that it was also forged by men and women with the wind at their backs, poets and politicians, migrants and travelers. That France has more than one side to it.

  This shift in perspective—which is not possible even now as I speak to you; it’s barely a hypothesis—would reveal many other sides to France: transient and resistant, fragile and indubitable, so alive and so French. It would also create a parallel geography, land based and maritime, sensual and intelligent, on the move and moving, in an emotional sense. You might then succeed in showing that variety has constantly accompanied the historical creation of France, inside and outside, in Europe as in the Antilles, in Africa as in the Indian Ocean.

  Thus, the idea of plurality would return, in names, places, and memories. France would become again what it has never stopped being, a heterogeneous yet also coherent zone, at times antagonistic, of course—as in Haiti, when the colonized people appropriated the words and ideals of the French Revolution against France itself, to give full voice to the most stirring ideas that France had pronounced in that century. You would speak about Fanon and Vivant Denon, Molière and Césaire, or even the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, that incomparable fencer, not so much the “black Mozart” or the “Voltaire of music,” as he was called in his time, as quite simply one of the great French figures of the eighteenth century. And then there would be all the others, the invisible ones, the anonymous, the dead with no gravestone, those without whom France would not be France.

  Basseterre and Marigot . . . Cayenne and Saint-Denis . . . Mamoudzou and Gustavia . . . Mata-Utu and Nouméa! A kind of import-export process, another model, other nuanced perspectives . . . Thus the epigraph in chapter 53 that I am reading just as the plane begins its descent to the Antananarivo airport would take on its full meaning:

  “There are few countries as varied as France: it has every facet, every climate, and produces almost every crop.”

  The Red Circus

  Here it is. It begins here. It is steep, very steep. It rises up out of the earth: an infinity of rocks and summits. Antananarivo is born here in the fury of the mountains; it is an event in itself.

  Antananarivo is a city that rises and descends. As far as the eye can see, it continually reinvents itself in a succession of lines and dashes: streets that rise and streets that turn, the roofs like pointed hats, the serious-looking palaces, the almost vertical footpaths, the breathtaking slopes that skirt disheveled neighborhoods. One can only say that the city unfurls along an extraordinary landscape of hills and rocks, “a rough sea whose immense waves seem as if they were suddenly fixed during a storm,” as Paulhan said. To begin with, the city covered three mountains, then twelve, and today it is eighteen. It is as if the city were born from a decision taken at a meeting of the mountains in a faraway land.

  What a surprise! What a joy! At first look a great wild laugh rises in you as you stand before this beautiful capital city. From the lower part of town (which begins at the Analakely market) to the higher part (from the Isoraka district to the ruins of the Queen’s Palace, which overlooks the southeast of the city), all you see are little cobbled, sloping streets, gray basalt staircases on granite hills that are pink at dawn, orange at sundown, and crisscrossed with changing light, with roads and pathways cutting across them, riddled with little rammed-earth houses next to sumptuous dry masonry tombstones. Here and there you see fences made with wood shaped like circumflexes. Everywhere there are tiled roofs and wood balconies, little shutters opening onto immense ravines, verandas overlooking the wonder of the empty spaces below that are devoured by trees, people, and gardens.

  The staircase steps are full of vendors and beggars. Crippled men follow you for a coin or two, to sell you a hat, a bracelet, a car tire, or a glass of water, while little girls in white dresses sing hymns and shine in the distance like little gems. Young people themselves look like overhanging rocks, and the old are like trees at the edge of a precipice.

  In flights of stairs and flights of sparrows, the little streets descend, hopping in small steps, from the full sun of Ataninandro to the red coral of Andravoahangy, then fork off and broaden toward Ankaditapaka, where opens up the whole plain of Ikopa and the green squares of its rice fields. For a mountain girl, Tana, as the city is known, is the queen of the rice fields. According to the season, she sits above a vast landscape of hens and scarecrows, sheaves and bundles, sowing and hoeing, to the rhythm of the precise gestures and songs of the pickers.

  At every step the pedestrian is taken aback by the high-wire act of the roads and alleyways. They scamper, gambol, slam, jump, climb back up to the sky, or throw themselves into a neighboring ravine. Here nothing waits or stops, nothing arrives late. Let’s move on . . .

  You pass by the little forest of Analakely, cross the village of the skylark, go across the ditches dug by the people (tiredness gives you wings), and find yourself in the place where all your questions are answered. All around you it’s a whole circus, a spectacle, to say the least: summits, crags, thorns, tufts and crests, furrows and railings, braiding, headlands, overhangs, chasms, sewers, valleys, vales, cuts, and mountain needles . . . And then suddenly, out of the blue, you see a rock decorated in flowers like a fine bell tower.

  It is a complete nightmare for cars, which create terrible pollution low down in the city, but it is a delight for walkers: a whole city to climb up or hurtle down. “If you go against the current, you are the prey of the caiman; if you go with it, you are the prey of the crocodile,” says a Malagasy proverb. That says it all, there is no way to escape: Antananarivo has caught you in its delicious trap.

  The whole city seems to be on constant alert, exposed as it is to the clouds and the winds in its rocky setting. So, one obviously wants to find things out, get to know the city; you
move around from place to place. You climb and climb, walking close to the sky. Near the fourteen hundred–meter highest point of this superb site, behind the remnants of the Queen’s Palace, is found a viewpoint indicator. It was here during the monarchy that those condemned to death were executed, decapitated by an ax or stabbed by an assegai. It is to the piling up of all those bones, swept away by the rains after being gnawed at by birds of prey that the place owes its terrifying name: Ambohipotsy, or “the white place.” Today, taken over by ferns, trees, and dahlias, it has one of the most beautiful wind roses that you could find anywhere in the world. You stop for a moment, you sit in one spot and then another. From high up on the viewpoint, the view is uninterrupted. You say to yourself that you are going to finally grasp what it is, this city.

  At first view it seems to be set out in the shape of a Y; oriented from the southeast to the southwest, the two upper branches of this Y turn toward the west so that they encircle the whole city, which was built on a vast hollow that was more or less leveled out. Historians and geographers will tell you that at the beginning of colonization, the new district, a grid of streets, avenues, and businesses, rose up in the lowest part of town, in the branches of the Y, which gave it a semblance of order and organization. However, you never really get over the initial amazement, its explosive impact: very quickly, as the other streets and districts take shape randomly, set against the natural escarpments, you see other letters pitching, forming, then separating: the P of the Mahamasina stadium and the road that leads there, the twin Es of Isotry and the neighboring plateau of Isoraka, the slightly proud R of the former Colbert square, the slender C of Ambadinia, and soon the shapes, for a long time foreseeable in their very irony, of a M, an F, or an S. The city unfurls its alphabet: it is a claybook, a book of land and signs.