2023-08-31 21:05:11
This is the highlight of “The Faded Memory”, a story published Thursday by Mercure de France editions.
Washed out because the memory transmission had its shortcomings. Some of the many stories the future writer had heard remained shrouded in vagueness.
This violent blow dealt to a colonist, especially. At a time when it was out of the question for a sugar cane plantation worker to have a life other than his daily work, this man rebels. And it’s a stain in the family history, which no one dared to talk about.
“My grandfather was very quiet. My grandmother had a somewhat… burst way of telling stories,” the novelist told AFP. In the book, she reports that in Creole, it was called “trankil trankil”.
“I vaguely knew”
This ancestor is one of the heroes of the Mauritian woman’s tribute to her lineage from a village in Andhra Pradesh, in the south-east of India, and transplanted to Mauritius, far at the end of the ocean.
He was born in 1911, almost four decades after the arrival of the first “coolies” of the family, these “committed” Indians to whom the British Empire promised a better life on the tropical island. To park them in camps.
“I vaguely knew that my grandfather had been imprisoned (for his act of rebellion, editor’s note). I didn’t really know under what conditions. I didn’t know that his first child was a baby and that he was expecting a second. That he and my grandmother had to leave,” says his granddaughter. Even, “there is a part of my family who did not know at all”.
By questioning all its members still alive, by searching the archives, it has gathered the scattered pieces of a forgotten file.
The 23-year-old young man was a laborer in the 1930s when the global economic crisis caused the standard of living to fall in Mauritius as elsewhere.
“To start all over”
“I saw him in his youth, as I did not know him. Strong, handsome, tall, several heads taller than everyone else, when we are small… And that was wonderful”, says the author.
At the end of a day, a foreman decides to penalize him for not having done the work required of him.
“Le Blanc lied”, he will tell his granddaughter only once. “He wasn’t listening to me, I punched him, he fell.” But according to his son, in this altercation, the trigger had been an insult in Creole against the mother of the plowman, who died when he was a child.
The consequences will be terrible. Sentenced to prison, banished by his employers, reproved by his community, he loses everything.
“I don’t know where he spent his months incarcerated. I don’t know how he felt. Was he sad, was he angry? How was my grandmother? These are things that I will never know”, underlines Nathacha Appanah.
The holes are not filled. It only indicates where he will redo his life and overcome misery.
“My grandfather, this man who was expelled from the plantation, who made my family have to start all over again in very difficult conditions, I think he passed that on to his son, who passed it on to my brother and I: the difficulty of finding one’s place. Are we going to be asked one day to leave where we are? I didn’t know where it came from, me”.
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