At 82, Le Clézio, this calm mutineer, abdicates neither his anger nor his revolt, which rejuvenates him. Even winning the Nobel Prize did not deter him from denouncing, again and again, the vices of the Western world, the neocolonialist excesses, globalization, dehumanization, and its procession of injustices, the exploitation of the weakest by the stronger, the degradation of the planet, the warmongers. Sixty years after “the Minutes”, he continues to think that to write is to verbalize and take up the defense of “ unwanted ». He welcomes them with open arms in this collection of universal short stories. The child slaves of Peru and the street urchins of Nogales, Mexico, who “Run like the rats they are ». The African women of the avenue Daumesnil, the ghostly shadows of the Paris metro and the North African workers employed on French winter construction sites. THE « cholos » mistreated by the police of Panama and the peasants chased from their land by the « narcotics ».
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immaculate fable
There is especially Maureen, alias Maureez, the little Mauritian of the first short story, “Avers”, which gives its title to the book. Daughter of a fisherman from Baie Malgache, on Rodrigues Island, who disappeared at sea, despised by her classmates who call her a “ big pile », beaten by her stepmother, sexually harassed by the latter’s companion, Maureez flees like a wild animal into the mountains, where she invents an ideal friend, Bella, to whom she speaks in an imaginary language. . Placed in a religious institution, then taken in by a beekeeper, she ended up finding her voice by singing, in churches, in front of a public in a trance, the blues of slaves, the hymns of the humiliated, and trumpeting “Ave Maria”.
This immaculate fable with accents of ritornello is hardly in the dark taste of the time, where cynicism disputes it with nihilism. But Le Clézio is from another time. He doesn’t care about fashion and reserves his talent for simple hearts and sensitive souls. At the age of renunciation, he does not renounce. “ survivor of a war », as he likes to recall (he was born in Nice, in 1940), the Franco-Mauritian author of “l’Africain” still wants to believe in a better and fairer world. He remains forever the little boy, hidden in a cellar during the bombardments, to whom his grandmother, to reassure him, in a voice of « old black nene », « warm night voice streaked with insects »hummed Creole lullabies, which spoke of exile, of journeys without return, and of which the short stories of “Avers” could, long after, be the singing verses.
JMG Le Clézio: “Nostalgia has an unhealthy taste”Obverse. News from the undesirablesby JMG Le Clézio, Gallimard, 224 p., 19.50 euros.
