Jean-Marie Le Clézio - The African

The journey to Africa brought all of that to an end. One radical change: upon instructions from my father, before departing, I was to cut my hair — which I had worn long until then, after the fashion of young boys from Brittany — which resulted in my getting an extraordinarily bad case of sunburn on my ears, and my being forced to enter the ranks of male normality. Never again did I have those horrendous migraines, never again would I be able to give free reign to the temper tantrums of my early childhood. To me, arriving in Africa meant entering the antechamber of the adult world.

* On the northern coast of South America (1814–1966), now Guyana.

AT THIRTY YEARS of age, my father left Southampton aboard a mixed cargo headed for Georgetown, in British Guiana. The rare pictures of him at the time depict a robust, athletic-looking man, elegantly dressed in a suit, a stiff-collared shirt, tie, vest, black leather shoes. It had been almost eight years since he’d left Mauritius, after that fatal day in 1919 when his family had been evicted from the house in which he was born. In the small notebook where he’d jotted down the main events of the last days spent at Moka, he wrote: “I have only one desire now, to go far away from here and never to return.” British Guiana was in fact on the other side of the world, diametrically opposite to Mauritius.

Did the tragedy of Moka justify his going to such a remote place? At the time of his departure, he was undoubtedly filled with such determination that it remained with him all of his life. He couldn’t be like other people. He couldn’t forget. He never spoke of the events which had led to the dispersion of all of the members of his family. Except every now and again, just to let out a burst of anger.

For seven years he studied in London, first in an engineering school, then in medical school. His family had been ruined, and he had to rely entirely on a government grant. He couldn’t afford to fail. He specialized in tropical medicine. He already knew he wouldn’t have the means to set himself up in a private practice. The episode of the calling card that the head doctor of the Southampton hospital had demanded was only a pretext for cutting off ties with European society.

At the time, the only pleasurable thing in his life was going to see his uncle in Paris, the passion he felt for his first cousin, my mother. The vacations he spent in France with them were an imaginary return to a past which no longer existed. My father was born in the same house as his uncle, they had grown up there each in turn, they were familiar with the same places, they had known the same secrets, the same hiding places, gone swimming in the same stream. My mother had never lived there (she was born in Milly), but she had always heard her father speak of it, it was part of her past, it felt like an inaccessible yet familiar dream to her (for back then, Mauritius was so far away, one could only dream of it). She and my father were united by that dream, they were drawn to one another as are exiles from an inaccessible land.

No matter. My father had decided to go away, he would go away. The Colonial Office assigned him to be a doctor on the rivers of Guiana. As soon as he arrived, he chartered a pirogue with a roof of palm leaves, propelled by a long-axle Ford motor. Aboard his pirogue, in the company of his team, nurses, pilot, guide and interpreter, he sailed up the rivers: the Mazaruni, the Essequeibo, the Kupurung, the Demerara.

He took pictures. With his Leica Bellows camera, he collected black-and-white snapshots that depicted, better than any words, the remoteness of the post, the enthusiasm he felt at discovering the new world. Tropical nature was not new to him. In Mauritius, in the ravines under the bridge in Moka, the Terre-Rouge River was no different from what he found upstream on the rivers in Guiana. But that country was immense, it didn’t belong to human beings quite yet. His pictures show loneliness, abnegation, the feeling of having reached the most distant shore in the world. From the wharf at Berbice he photographed the dark sheet of water over which a pirogue is gliding past a village of sheet metal scattered with scraggly trees. His house — a sort of chalet of planks on stilts, on the edge of an empty road, flanked by an absurd lone palm tree. Or else the city of Georgetown, silent and slumbering in the heat, white houses with shutters closed against the sun, encircled by those same palm trees, haunting emblems of the tropics.

The pictures my father liked to take were those that showed the interior of the continent, the incredible power of the rapids his pirogue had to bypass, being hauled up on logs alongside the tiered rocks where the water cascades down between the dark walls of the forest on either bank.

Kaburi Falls, on the Mazaruni, the Kamakusa hospital, the wooden houses along the river, the shops of diamond hunters. A sudden calm on an arm of the Mazaruni, a sparkling mirror of water that sweeps you away into a dream. In the photo, the stem of the pirogue can be seen floating down the river. I look at it and can feel the wind, smell the water, despite the rumbling of the motor, I can hear the unbroken whirr of insects in the forest, can feel the anxiety springing from the coming of night. At the mouth of Rio Demerara, the hoists are loading Demerara sugar onto rusty cargo ships. And on a beach, where the wash comes rippling up to die, two Indian children gaze out at me, a small boy of around six and his sister hardly any older than he is, both with bellies distended from parasites, their black hair in a “bowl cut” just over their eyebrows like mine at their age. From his stay in Guiana, my father brought back only the memory of those two Indian children standing at the edge of the river, watching him, grimacing a little from the sun. And the images of a still wild world that he glimpsed along the rivers. A mysterious and fragile world ruled by sickness, fear, the violence of gold prospectors and treasure hunters, one in which the despairing chant of the vanishing Amerindian world could be heard. If they are still alive, what has become of that boy and girl? They must be very elderly, near the end of their lives.

Later, a long time afterward, I too traveled to the land of the Indians, along the rivers. I met similar children. The world had probably changed a lot, the rivers and forests weren’t as pure as they were in my father’s youth. Yet I thought I understood the sense of adventure he’d felt getting off the boat in the port of Georgetown. I too bought a pirogue, I navigated standing upright in the bow, my toes splayed to get a firmer grip on the edge of the boat, swinging the long perch in my hands, watching the cormorants taking flight before me, listening to the wind whistling in my ears and the echoing of the outboard motor sinking into the dense forest behind me. In examining the picture taken by my father in the front of the pirogue, I recognized the prow by its slightly squared snout, the coiled mooring rope laying crossways in the hull to serve as a bench from time to time, the canalete or Indian paddle with a triangular blade. And before me, at the far end of that wide “lane” of river, the two great black walls of the forest closing back in.

When I returned from the Indian territories, my father was already ill, locked into that obstinate silence of his. I remember the gleam in his eyes when I told him I’d spoken of him to the Indians, and that they had invited him to come back to the rivers, that in exchange for his knowledge and medicine, they would offer him a house and food for as long as he wanted. He’d smiled faintly, I think he said, “Ten years ago, I would have gone.” It was too late, you can’t go back in time, even in your dreams.