2024-04-05 07:24:56
by Rosella Postorino
From April 2nd and for four Tuesdays Rosella Postorino tells the story of the author’s life, 110 years after her birth. Here is her part about her childhood in Indochina
The little girl has two reddish braids, tight like ropes, and a small, frail body. Her face full of freckles, tanned by the sun, from an outdoor existence, always barefoot. Her eyes are almond-shaped, like an Annamite, a little Creole who is more yellow than white – she looks like a mixed race, can you see her? she grew up eating mangoes and pickled freshwater fish, eating cholera junk: that’s what she calls her mother.
But the little girl can’t help it if she prefers rice to bread, if she spits out meat, apples, which look like cotton, and loves soups from Mekong street vendors. Sometimes, when they take the ferry, her mother buys her a portion. The little girl speaks the language of her native land, even though her mother is a French governess, daughter of farmers from the North, who came to teach in the Indochinese colonies with her husband, a mathematics professor. Soon, for her, she was widowed.
The girl was only seven years old at the time. born in 1914 in Gia Dinh, Cochinchina, on 4 April. the smallest of the Donnadieu family. Marguerite: that’s her name.
With her brothers, Pierre and Paul, she dives into the river in the evening, while the indigenous children, smeared with saffron against mosquitoes, play around her, do somersaults, dive in and resurface – can you see the scene?
Try to imagine it, because there isn’t a photo of that moment. A snapshot of childhood. Nobody took it, just as nobody took the photo of the famous crossing to Saigon. Nobody knew that, during that crossing, the little girl would meet a Chinese man, much richer than her, twelve years older than her. Marguerite was fifteen and a half. That photo missed the hole, the crack, from which her most famous novel emerges.
The Lover, winner of the 1984 Goncourt Prize, was published when she was now a woman, or rather an old lady, with a forty-year literary career, known to all as Marguerite Duras. It was she who gave herself this surname, Duras, in 1943, upon the release of her debut, Gli impudenti, to establish her new identity as a writer.
It has always struck me that his best-known and most translated novel, a worldwide success, was born by chance: from the failure of another project. It was a photo album, which would tell her life through some photos of her, of her and of her from her films: she would choose them and comment on them. It would have been called La photo absolue, The absolute photo. As often happens, the project stalled. Indeed, it transformed. The lover germinates from that material, from the series of photos that should have portrayed an entire life. But Duras wrote that her life story does not exist.
This statement is one of the paradoxes to which those who love it are accustomed: like me, or perhaps like you who are listening. However, it also arises from the awareness that neither photos nor writing will ever be able to give an integral, authentic account of a life.
In The Lover Duras declares that she had already foreseen, in other books, the story of the little girl who crosses the Mekong, but concealing it, because the environment in which she had begun to write required modesty on her. Are you referring to her family, to the literary context, to the Communist Party in which she served? Who knows. In any case, she says, now I will tell what he has so far remained hidden.
And this is what confuses the waters. It plays with the reader, it allows itself everything that writing allows. This is how he does autofiction, well before autofiction became a trend. And it even makes her popular. Only God could have taken the photo of the ferry, because only he knew the importance of the Mekong crossing that day in Marguerite’s existence. But God, as we know, is always distracted. Precisely because it was not taken, says Duras, that photo represents an absolute.
Among the images that no one, not even God, has captured, there is also the one I was trying to evoke together with you, just now. The image of Marguerite bathing in the river with her brothers, hunters of tigers and panthers in the forest, while her mother calls from her bungalow, shouting as always, threatening yet another crisis. This too is a failed photo, and this too represents an absolute for me.
the absolute of childhood, and therefore inevitably marks a destiny. About her Her destiny as a writer.
I believe, sometimes, that all my writing comes from there, among rice paddies, forests, solitude, says Duras in an 1989 interview with Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre. And he adds: I really don’t know what drives people to write other than, perhaps, the loneliness of childhood. He talks about that solitude for the first time in one of the War Notebooks, four notebooks filled between ’43 and ’49, which remained unpublished until 2006.
In the pink notebook, he asks himself why he writes about those memories, and he answers that it is due to an instinct of exhumation: he doesn’t want to forget. If I’m not true to myself, she says, who will I be? It is in this fidelity to oneself, a concept as simple as it is mysterious, that I trace the origin of writing – of anyone, not just Duras.
His was a wild childhood, in which everyday life consisted of insults and beatings from his older brother, Pierre, who the more he depended on opium, the more brutal he became. It was fear for her brother Paul: his fragility excavated a heartbreaking tenderness in Marguerite. They were the sudden changes in her mother’s mood: Marguerite suffered her beatings without reacting because she feared for her, for her safety.
The mother had fallen ill after the dam affair, which Duras would narrate in A Dam on the Pacific, in 1951. Madame Marie Legrand, Donnadieu’s widow, had invested all her savings to obtain the grant of land, which however had soon become turned out to be uncultivable, because it is cyclically flooded by the sea. The corrupt system of colonial concessions awarded the best lands to those who paid bribes under the table, and defrauded everyone else.
How could she know? She was deceived. But she did not resign herself to the injustice: she convinced other farmers to help her build a dam — think about it, a dam. To dam the ocean. Who knows how he managed to get people to listen to him.
The collapse of the dam definitively threw her into madness, as well as poverty. The spectacle of her prostration is perhaps what most unites her three children, very different people, and who loved her, her mother, with the same mad love as her.
The Genealogies project
In life there is no one, said Marguerite Duras. Yes someone only in books. I’m someone who writes, not someone who lives. My life story doesn’t exist. 110 years after her birth, Rosella Postorino enters the work of the French writer to tell the story of her obsessions that inhabited her. In each episode there is one: childhood, motherhood, desire, death. In my eyes – explains Postorino – Duras’s writing was formed underground in that family in which she felt forced into silence. The portrait of Marguerite Duras is part of the Genealogie project: writers of the present recount those of the past to build a female pantheon, in the belief that the history of literature is also a history of women of letters, writers who must be rediscovered to recover voices, experiences, inspirations . After Postorino’s episodes on Duras, Caterina Venturini’s ones on Audre Lorde follow; Igiaba Scego on Nadal El Saadawi; Sara De Simone on Emily Dickinson.
April 5, 2024 (modified April 5, 2024 | 09:23)
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