Sang mêlé par Patrick Zaoui (review)

Zaoui, Patrick. Sang mêlé. Nouméa: Madrépores, 2016. ISBN 979-10-92894-04-2. Pp. 74. This first novel by an Algerian-born clinical psychologist exposes the complex identity struggles troubling contemporary Kanak/New Caledonian society. Through the story of a young woman’s search for her father in the Oceanian archipelago, Zaoui provides a brief look into a Kanaky/New Caledonia still in search of its own national and political identity. The interweaving narrative perspectives of the story—set alternately in the island’s Northern Province, where the author has lived since 1999, and in France—mirror the various voices that make up the demographics of the collectivité sui generis. The novel opens at dawn as the blond, French Sophie, a doctor on the island for two years, navigates the dangerous Caledonian roads. Overly confident and lost in her thoughts, the young doctor is blinded by the sun as she rounds a curve and hits a Kanak (aboriginal New Caledonian) boy,Maxime.This event will alter the lives of every character of the novel. Sophie, plagued with guilt, attempts to assuage her conscience by taking care of Maxime, now a tetraplegic. Her frequent visits to Maxime’s residence and the boy’s affection for and trust in the woman guilty of rendering him handicapped bother his father, Victor, who sees his only child as a “victime innocente de l’arrogance des Blancs” (9). When Maxime finally dies, Sophie, feeling as if she has lost her own child, spirals into a psychosomatic depression. The second chapter leaps forward twelve years, introducing us to the protagonist of the novel, Sophie’s daughter Chloé, a child of “sang mêlé.” Born months after her mother’s return to France from the island, Chloé’s relationship with her mother is forged through supervised visits with the perpetually sedated Sophie, who has been institutionalized in a psychiatric ward for nine years. Of her father, Chloé knows only that he is a Kanak from New Caledonia. Comments on her appearance serve to remind her of the unknowns and the unspoken details of her heritage:“Elle n’aimait pas son physique. Il trahissait une histoire trop compliquée dont elle ne voulait plus rendre compte” (21). Determined to discover her origins, to find the father she has never known and to recuperate her lost history, the adolescent decides to travel to the archipelago, accompanied by one of her mother’s therapists. The subsequent chapters alternate between the narrative of Chloé’s trip and flashbacks of her mother’s relationships with two Kanak men twelve years earlier. The oscillating narratives make for a suspenseful read. We wonder, until the final chapter of the short novel, if Chloé’s father could be Victor, the father of the deceased Maxime. Or might he be Baptiste, the Kanak psychologist and Sophie’s former colleague, with whom she had an affair preceding her return to the metropole? The short length and easy-to-follow style of Sang mêlé help elucidate for readers unfamiliar with the Oceanian island the questions of belonging, of racial and ethnic tensions, and of the necessity for dialogue that characterize a complicated, diverse society anticipating a referendum on independence at the end of 2018. University of Nebraska, Lincoln Julia L. Frengs 254 FRENCH REVIEW 91.3 ...