Alma by J.M.G. Le Clézio (review)

Jérémie Felsen travels from France to the island of Mauritius to research his family's history and ties to slavery. The reader follows through the eyes of Jérémie, one of the main narrators in Alma, the story of the island's present and past tied to colonialism. The voice of Dominique, alias "Dodo the homeless," is intertwined with the voice of Jérémie and presented in the text in italics. Dodo is the wanderer, the marginalized, whose voice is always in the present tense and brings a different perspective in the novel. Dodo carries on his face the damages of an illness, a reflection of the destruction of the island that brings into the novel the world of ghosts, spirits, and nature that has disappeared from the island of Mauritius. Indeed, Dodo is such a ghost himself. For both Jérémie and Dodo, slavery is a part of their lives that weighs heavily on their destinies. The reader's journey on the island of Mauritius starts with Dodo's wanderings. As Jérémie arrives on the island of Mauritius to find his roots, Dodo finds himself in France to explore his own. The initiatory journey for Jérémie starts with the stone he carries in his pocket, inherited from his late father. It is a strange stone gizzard from the bird, Ralphus cucullatus, also called the dodo, which was decimated with the arrival of the colonizers on the island in the seventeenth century. Both men have a common space on the island of Mauritius called Alma, the fields and land of the Felsen family. Alma has recently been renamed Maya, designating the change of landscape to serve the illusions of tourism, profitability, and modernity while erasing the traces of the past history of colonialism. Through the eyes of Jérémie and Dodo, the reader discovers the two faces of the island. On the one hand, Jérémie discovers the romantic Creole island through the stories of 94-year-old family member Emmeline Carcénac, who loves to narrate her stories in a childish prattle. On the other hand, through Jérémie's visits to the island and Dodo's peregrinations, the reader hears the echoes of colonization, the brutality of slavery, and the injustice and violence toward people and nature as shown in the ravaged forests and the women led to prostitution. Jérémie discovers the empty archives and realizes that the memory of the island is also being lost with the last remaining figures of Artémisia, Zobeide, and Jeanne Tobie, blowing away with time as their stories remain between the fantasy and reality of a lost paradise. Does this discovery symbolize that the memory of slavery is erased forever, or is it a convenient accident to abolish the memory of injustices as the identities of the slaves transplanted to Mauritius without their original names or birth certificates are made invisible? For Le Clézio's reader there is always room for the poetry of places, nature, and the history of the people that inhabit it.