The African
the African is an account of Clézio published in 2004 (ISBN 2-7152-2470-2).
This book pays homage to his/her father, doctor in Africa, from which it had been separated a long time, and with the Africa (as in Onitsha ), where it passed his childhood. He tells this part of his life passed near his unknown father in an unknown country. He thus will discover this new stage. Clézio describes the doctor and the man who it was: its severity, its uprightness. It is worn by the country, by loneliness but the author does not judge it, in spite of the lack of love and affections which it lived. Africa for him was an excessive continent.
This text is illustrated of photography of Africa. It is the dazzling crossing of one at the same time free and tormented childhood that we offers Jean-Marie here Clézio while making us share the radical and formative experiment of Africa. It is in 1948. It is eight years old. With his mother and her brother, it leaves Nice to join his father who is doctor in Nigeria and which remained there during all the time of the war, far from his wife that it likes and of his/her two children that it did not see growing.
The power and the beauty of this book precisely lie in the simultaneity of these two meetings: Africa and the father. Like two dreamed countries, awaited, hoped. It is the meeting with Africa which opens this book in the shape of self-portrait: Africa in what it has moreover violent one, brighter, seizing for a child come there for the first time. He discovers then the world in a new way, believed, intimate: the freedom of the bodies, magic matter of a country where all is excessive, the sun, the storms, the vegetation, the rain, insects. A country which teaches forever the proximity of the bodies and nature. All is described in an acute way.
Coming rythmer this irruption from the tactile memory, there are the photographs taken by the father, with Leica with bellows, photographs in black and white which are almost the diary of a man who forever really been able to speak with his/her children, a broken, ravaged man by his trade, the distance of its family, her condition from abroad. It is with clearness and tolerance that Jean-Marie Clézio reconsiders on the figure of her father, her violence and her hardness, her lack of love and tenderness, but without never judging it. He even manages to describe the moments of happiness of his parents, at the beginning of their love, before the birth of the children, and lets appear that he was born not only from these moments of happiness, but also of this secrecy which Africa revealed to him: to learn how to be in the world, to look at it, to discover it, simply, before it disappears.
Jean-Marie Clézio signs here her most intimate book, most sensual, truest. A book which lights all its work.
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