A Nobel Endeavor

March 1, 2009

If you have never heard of this year’s Nobel Prize winner in literature, J.M.G. Le Clézio, don’t be too hard on yourself, as his body of work (over 40 novels!) was virtually out of print in English until news of the prize hit the headlines. At the age of 23, Le Clézio wrote his first novel, The Interrogation, which was shortlisted for the prestigious Prix Goncourt, and has continued to be honored for his work ever since, with thirteen percent of French readers voting him the greatest living French writer in 1994.I managed to learn all this just before leaving for the bookstore Quatre Vents in nearby Mermoz, where he and a fellow writer with arresting dark curls named Hubert Haddad, winner of a major 2008 prize in Francophone literature for his book called Palestine, had agreed to a question-and-answer session with our students (a session, which, unfortunately, was dominated by pedantic teachers asking tripartite questions – you know, the kind that take longer to ask than to answer. While I am on a rant, let me not forget to mention the teacher who answered her ringing cell phone midway through the event, because all of us in the vicinity of course preferred to have a share in planning her evening than hear these eminent writers talk about their craft..!).

To return to Le Clézio: he was raised bilingually (his father was a Mauritius-born British doctor), spending his childhood in Mauritius and Nigeria and his adolescence in Nice, which may help to explain the omnipresence of sunlight and the sea in his work. As an adult, he traveled extensively, earning a doctorate in early Mexican history and teaching in Korea and Thailand as well as living with the Embera-Wounaan tribe in Panama, so that he may justly be called a citizen of the world. 

One of the things he loves best about Mauritius is the coming together of cultures, the unity of diversity that may be found on the island. Just as the island’s cuisine is a blend of Chinese, Creole, Indian and European influences, so is the religious (and linguistic) landscape a pluralistic one: though the dominant religions are Hinduism, Christianity, and Islam, there are many who adhere to Chinese and Buddhist faiths as well.

For a successful writer, he is surprisingly humble; dressed in a casual blue shirt, he confessed freely that he had been no good at sports, math, or Greek at school. He is easily distracted: he tried memorizing an English dictionary, but it didn’t quite work, he admitted with a sheepish grin. Likewise, he mentioned rather self-deprecatingly how during his adolescence the blank sheets of paper before him would serve as a mirror of his internal state. Even now, as a Nobel laureate, he insists that he is no wiser, no more savant, than anyone else. He is neither a spokesperson for the downtrodden (though he shares feelings of indignation when it comes to injustices such as colonization, the dominance of Western rationalism, etc.) nor is he an authority on writing – the most he can do is advise aspiring writers to fight against all the external forces that might prevent them from writing.

For Le Clézio, the role of the writer is ultimately not to preach any kind of moral or solve the world’s problems; instead, it is to describe the joys and to capture the extraordinary moments of human existence, which is quite a ‘noble’ mission in and of itself.

 About the Author : Tamara-Diana Braunstein brings us her stories from Senegal every week. She was born in Brooklyn, New York. She is a restless wanderer who earned an MA from the University of Freiburg and has worked in a youth hostel in the French Alps, a law firm in Montreal, the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as in university press publishing. At the moment her home base is Dakar, Senegal, where she is supposed to be teaching but is doing far more learning, as you will see by reading her blog at www.senegalschoolmarm.blogspot.com