The African
The African is a first time in 2004 in French under the title L'Africain published autobiographical story by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio , the 2007 appeared in German. The narrator's father worked as a doctor in West Africa for 22 years from the late 1920s to the 1950s . The narrator introduces him as "the African".
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Preliminary remark
In the novel Onitsha from 1991, Le Clézio first discussed what he took with his mother in 1948, when he was 8 years old, for a trip to Africa to meet his father, who was unknown to him. However, the autobiographical element is hidden in “ Onitsha ” in the 12-year-old Fintan, whose narrative perspective is only one among a few others.
In “ Der Afrikaner ” the first-person narrator explicitly engages in what he calls “ the most significant part of my childhood ”, when he and his brother, who is one year older, get to know a completely different life with their father. Before the trip, he dreamed that his mother was black. Because he had already imagined his return to France in advance, which would make him a stranger in his surroundings; with his mother as an imagined African, he believed he was better able to cope with the fantasized new reality. But when his father returned to France when he retired, he realized that he was the African. That demanded a new perspective on his family. As a reminder of this, he wrote the story (p. 5), which he illustrated with numerous black-and-white photos that his father took in Africa.
British colonial doctor
The narrator weaves the dates of his father's life into the continuation of his narration in a non-chronological way. Put together they give the following picture of his life:
He was born in Moko, a town in the interior of Mauritius, at the end of the 19th century - probably in 1896 - and left the island in 1919 after the family had been driven from the house where they were born and scattered to the wind. His father never commented on it and was always filled with anger about it. The son later found a note in one of his father's notebooks that he only wanted to go away and never return (p. 57 f.). He went to London, received a scholarship to study, studied at an engineering school for 7 years, then medicine. Because of the scholarship, he had to take on charitable work. Instead of taking a job at Southampton Hospital in the Tropical Disease Department, he suddenly volunteered for colonial service. He left England in 1926 and went to Georgetown in British Guyana . From there he performed his medical service in a pirogue on the rivers inland. In the photos left behind, the narrator recognizes “ a mysterious world characterized by disease, fear and the violence of gold panners and treasure hunters, and in which one can hear the hopeless farewell of the doomed Indian world ” (p. 62). With this he had taken the first step out of a thirst for adventure, which led him into another world and forced him to " spend the war time in exile, to do without his wife and children ", and " in a certain way inevitably made him a stranger " (P. 50).
In 1928 he went to Africa, where he stayed for 22 years, first in western Cameroon - " there he spent the happiest years of his life " (p. 78) - and later in Ogoja in the north of the neighboring province of Cross River in Nigeria , where he worked in was the only doctor within a radius of 60 kilometers. Except for two short vacations to get married in 1932 and to give birth to his children in 1939 and 1940, he never returned to Europe until the end of his service life (p. 49).
The man whom the narrator met in 1948 had been worn out and prematurely aged due to the equatorial climate. His dream of a " continent in the state of grace that resembled the image of the vast grassy plain over which shepherds drove the cattle, or the image of the villages in the area of Banso in the ancient perfection of their clay walls and palm roofs " (p. 122) , had given way to pessimism after the war. He saw himself as a failed man who had left his son with an instinctive aversion to the colonialist system since childhood (p. 71). Back in France, he lost his British citizenship with the independence of Mauritius in 1968 and finally no longer received the small pension that Nigeria, which had become independent, had undertaken to pay. The country in which he worked and where his son had had the most impressive experiences during his visit was lost in the Biafra war between 1967 and 1970 and " was brought before the whole world, but only because it was dying " (p. 124 -127).
First years of marriage in West Africa
From London, the father visited his uncle, the narrator's grandfather, in Paris as a student and spent his holidays near his cousin, the narrator's mother, who was born in France and with whom he fell in love. The shared dream of the vanished Mauritius brought the two closer together " like emigrants living in exile from an inaccessible country " (p. 59). They married in 1932 and spent six years together in West Africa.
At that time the father was working in Bamenda in Cameroon and from there supplied an area that had hardly been affected by European colonization . His father and mother would never have felt so free as they did there (p. 88), even if the densely populated country was ravaged by diseases and tribal feuds elsewhere. The mother told him about the boisterous parties in the villages. The narrator imagines that at night they made love “to the rhythm of the drums vibrating underground, tightly pressed together in the dark, covered in sweat, inside the hut made of mud and rice, which was no bigger than a chicken coop ” (p 94). At that time his father had “ dreamed of a re- blossoming Africa freed from the colonial yoke and the curse of the pandemics ”, which ultimately left him with a deep hatred of colonialism in all its forms (p. 121 f.). Because he also had to bury his wish that his children would inhabit this country, in which he had enjoyed it for a long time. His wife, who had returned to France in Brittany for the birth of their first son in 1938 , stayed in Europe also because of the war that broke out in 1939 , which forced her to go with her parents to the unoccupied zone in Nice . An attempt by her husband to get her over Algeria through the desert failed because of the strict border controls.
The narrator's childhood years in West Africa
When the narrator met his father in Ogoja, an advanced post in the English colony, he was faced with a bitter man whom he was learning to fear. The brothers were immediately subjected to his authoritarian rule and had to submit to the discipline he had prescribed, but only in the morning and in the evening, as long as he was not doing his job as head of the hospital.
However, Africa gave him overwhelming and fascinating impressions on a completely different level, such as the physicality that became visible everywhere in the people and their nakedness, which made their faces recede and in which the furrowed body of a decrepit old woman had something genuine for the child. It seemed new to him, but at the same time familiar and close. The violence experienced on the part of the father was superseded by a completely different violence: It was the many insects, especially ants , the actual rulers of Ogoja, who terrified him in an attack that they would be eaten alive, or those in Nearby termite town on a wide grassy plain , where he and his brother destroyed termite mounds in a kind of obsession and saw themselves operating under the spell of an unfathomable power.
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During the thunderstorms in the afternoon, he went to his mother to seek protection and counted the seconds from the lightning strike to the thunder that became audible. He watched as his father set a family of scorpions on fire with high-proof alcohol . To protect against malaria , he swallowed quinine with water from a filter device before going to bed .
In memory, a mixture of rituals and familiar things turns these domestic scenes into important intimate moments. At the same time, however, he must ask himself whether his memory of having enjoyed freedom of movement, freedom of thought and freedom there is not deceiving him. Because the war years in Nice were gloomy and the time after his return from Africa hard, because he suffered from the brutal severity of his father and the high school with its raw manners made him an eccentric (p. 22 f.). As he writes, he understands why " the time of Ogoja like an ethereal substance that circulates between the walls of reality " overwhelms him numbly. The time when his father and mother rode together across the highlands in the kingdoms of Western Cameroon is also hidden in it (p. 133 f.).
reception
Joseph Hanimann ( SZ ) discovers in the narrative flow of Le Clézios the emergence of a strangeness free of exoticism, which has nothing to do with the “ fine colonial world ” familiar from literature . The author fantasizes on the traces of his father's life in a world in which happiness and catastrophe, drama and celebration live closely together, so that it becomes understandable how this could have shaped him in the long term. However, his political reflections on the Biafra war seem too sudden to him.
Walter van Rossum sees in Die Zeit Le Clézio take a “ wonderful detour ” “to find his father again ”, whom he never met. He is not interested in therapeutic clarification or late reconciliation, but “ just a magical touch ” that life did not allow him.
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Individual evidence
- ↑ The following is quoted from the edition published by Hanser: Der Afrikaner , Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-446-20948-0 ; here p. 127.
- ↑ African coins
- ↑ Uncover what has been spilled