Beachcomber Magazine 05

Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio HERE AND ELSEWHERE ICI ET AILLEURS The island of Mauritius, a land to which the ancestors of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Literature emigrated, initially existed in the writer’s imagination before becoming a recurrent source of inspiration for his work. Terre d’émigration de ses ancêtres, l’île Maurice a d’abord été pour le prix Nobel de littérature 2008 un pays imaginaire avant de devenir une obsédante source d’inspiration de son œuvre. J ean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio has two passports, French and Mauritian. Two nationalities and two identities that reflect the person he is: a man and a writer who lives between continents and between worlds. Elusive, solitary and secretive. Over the decades, his cosmopoli- tanism has been intensified by his relentless peregrinations to all four corners of the world. His favourite countries include France, from where his Breton ancestors emigrated, Nigeria, where his father was a bush doctor, Mexico, where he is fascinated by pre-Co- lumbian history, Panama where he lived with Indians in the tropical jungle for four years, the United States, where he has found refuge in Albuquerque, South Korea and China, two countries where he once taught, and of course Mauritius, where his forefathers emigrated. “ My nomadism has something Mauritian about it, ” he says in a Parisian cafe during a brief stopover between two flights. “ Mauritius was a desert island not that long ago. It is an island that has been populated by people who have come here to live, by choice or by force, from all over the world, Europe, Africa and Asia. I’ve done what many Mauritians do, arrive, leave and return… ” PARADISE LOST AND FOUND He was born in 1940 in Nice where he spent his childhood and adolescence, before escaping and roaming for many years. He first set foot in Mauritius when he was approaching forty. Until then, Mauritius had existed in his imagina- tion as a dream, a kind of paradise lost, a place that his embittered grandparents were forced to leave after some terrible family quarrels. Yet, from the very first time he stayed on the island, he had a strange sensation of déjà vu. “ The places, the people and the landscapes seemed familiar to me. My father’s library in Nice was packed with books about Mauritius. The walls of the apartments were plastered with postcards, maps and family photos from there. Mauritius was the centre of everything .” Perhaps the mythical island of Mauritius from his childhood, the “ stone raft ” as he calls it in his most recent novel Alma (Gallimard, 2018), aroused in the 2008 Nobel Laureate this desire to escape that always drives him. Perhaps the island was also the sub-conscious but fundamental wellspring of his work, even though it was a long time before it actually appeared in his novels. “ I wasn’t born on the island, I didn’t grow up there, I barely know it, ” he writes in Alma, “ and yet I feel in me the weight of its history, the strength of its life force, a kind of burden that I carry on my back everywhere I go. ” A MAN OF MANY STORIES Jean-Marie Le Clézio regularly stays on Mauritius, he likes to write and draw here, and the scent of the sugarcane flower always fills him with wonder. The family quarrels have subsided now, and he can contemplate Eureka, the family house in Moka, without feeling nostalgic, with its 109 doors and windows and its beautiful columned veranda. His 1985 novel, The Pros- pector, was the first time that Mauritius appeared in the historical and geographical landscapes of BY ANTOINE DE GAUDEMAR PHOTOGRAPHS NATHALIE BAETENS 