The rock and the axe

It is often said that English-language authors peddle in ideas and French authors peddle in words. Alice Zeniter is passionate about both. Marked deeply by France’s colonial history, she is an heir to the committed authors of the postwar period who sought to fight injustice through literature, following in the footsteps of Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Kateb Yacine rather than the more formal writers of the nouveau roman.

Zeniter is also a film-maker and left-wing militant. Having rubbed shoulders with her – she is fifteen years younger than me, and we studied at the same “factory” of intellectuals, the École normale supérieure – I have witnessed her sensitivity to language first-hand. She was the first person I knew to use the word racisé. Roughly translatable into English as “a person from an ethnic minority”, and much more correct and effective than describing someone in terms of the colour of their skin, it is a word that has been rejected by both the Académie française and Jean-Michel Blanquer, a former education minister. I also recall seeing Zeniter on television, railing against the use of word ensauvagement (literally, “turning savage”) to describe the supposed increasing violence in society, criticizing the term’s prevalence in contemporary French politics when it has its origins in the extreme right and the colonial imaginary.

Born of a French mother and a father of Kabyle background, Zeniter is the granddaughter of a harki. These Algerians fought with the French army during the war in Algeria and were persecuted after independence; only a small proportion of them were allowed to take refuge, and settle, in France. She recounted the painful history and the complex heritage of the harkis in her novel L’Art de perdre, (2017; The Art of Losing, 2021), which won several major prizes. What is so satisfying about her new novel, Frapper l’épopée, is that her language, which has until now been perhaps a bit too neutral, or “flat”, has been freed from the weight of her ideas.

The book’s narrator, Tass, is from New Caledonia, where she works as a teacher, making her an “anxious representative of the French state” (my translation). When Tass was a child, she was told the story of her homeland, but never really the story of her own people: she has always found it difficult to explain New Caledonia to her friends back in France. In one of her classes there is a pair of Kanak twins, a boy and a girl, whom she finds intriguing: are they somehow linked to the mysterious independence movement? Or perhaps, she worries, she is “exoticizing” them, with their curious tattoos?

When the twins disappear from her classroom, Tass, who has become increasingly anxious about them – not least when she starts to suspect the girl is pregnant – sets off from Nouméa, the capital, on Grande Terre, to the far end of that island in search of them. As we follow Tass on her quest we come to learn about the various different identities on the conflicted island, encountering characters whose destinies all come to intersect with the broader one of the New Caledonian archipelago. These include three young Kanaks, members of a tiny independence group: Won’t-marry-a-poor-man, Daughter-of-success and The Creek. Their unusual names come from the protective oaths the ancestors granted on these people, and help to lead readers into the textures and myths of their world.

Le Caillou (“the little rock”), as its inhabitants affectionately call New Caledonia, is far, far away from the French mainland, located between Australia and Fiji. What is France even doing there, we might wonder? In French, Histoire – History – is written with a capital letter, to differentiate it from histoire (story). And the letter H is pronounced hache, like an axe, leading Georges Perec punningly to refer to “L’Histoire avec sa grande hache” (“History with her big axe”). Zeniter has a very personal way of wielding her axe, of cleaving both sides of her narrative – the History part and that concerning her narrator’s private story.

What does it mean, then, to be born on Le Caillou? Tass travels back and forth between Nouméa and her Parisian boyfriend, and the flight takes more than twenty-four hours with stopovers, but her partner’s incomprehension about her identity separates them more than the distance. He was born in Orléans, in the heart of France, the city of Joan of Arc. The novel begins with them splitting up, and a subsequent melancholy infuses the book, woven from questions. As the narrator wonders “Who am I?”, she poses a fundamental question that the island seems to want to ask of itself.

New Caledonia was stolen from its original inhabitants, the Kanaks, and first colonized by convicts, condemned to prison there, never to return – the French government gave them plots of land to cultivate on their release. In a succession of surprising chapters in which Zeniter departs from Tass’s point of view, History returns to give us characters drawn from real life. The most famous of the deportees was the anarchist Louise Michel, a former member of the Paris Commune and here a political prisoner. The author quotes from Michel’s diary and the poems she collected from the Kanak people. After this cohort came settlers from the French mainland, and from all these exiled people the “Caldoches” were born. Following them were Javanese servants, then near-slaves from Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan, hired on false promises, then the Americans during the Second World War and a few “pieds-noirs” from Algeria. Then came a lot of workers, mostly from France.

And all this because nickel was found, along with cobalt, chromium and manganese. Zeniter tells us how the island became a mine that initially belonged to the French state. Money flowed, some people got rich, but the Kanaks benefited little. What followed was upheavals, revolts and the infamous 1988 hostage-taking on the island of Ouvéa, where pro-independence activists held twenty-seven gendarmes. In the subsequent assault led by French government forces, nineteen activists and two gendarmes were killed. Thence came the Matignon and Nouméa agreements in 1988 and 1998, bringing a fragile peace to the island, and since then few in mainland France – including among its literary establishment – have been interested in New Caledonia.

More recently, however, the region has returned to the headlines. In mid-May Emmanuel Macron and his then minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, came up with the preposterous idea of allowing French citizens who have been living in New Caledonia for ten years to vote on local issues. This was tantamount to flouting the hard-won rights of the Kanaks (who represent 41.2 per cent of the archipelago’s population, according to the most recent census, taken in 2019). The result was an awakening of the independence movement, which had laid dormant like a volcano deep in the caves of New Caledonia. You didn’t need to be an expert to predict both this eruption and the subsequent riots.

By then Zeniter had already written her novel, with its premonitory sense that New Caledonia is a place of great metamorphosis, perhaps even a sort of canary in the coal mine for the whole planet. One sign of the author’s growing maturity is her intuition: good writers are always a little bit prophetic. This is not a question of catching the “right subject” so much as of allowing oneself to be permeated by the times: to get porous to the “epic” in progress, to hear what is deeply stirring the world in a way the media has not yet picked up on. If journalism is the world’s consciousness, literature is its unconscious. Think how Toni Morrison anticipated the perpetuation of racial violence in our present day, or how Kafka told the history of the twentieth century in metaphors before the bloodshed of totalitarianism actually began.

Frapper l’épopée’s most powerful, disconcerting passage is the moment when the island reveals itself to Tass: “two centuries of pain and accidents … the history of her lineage, the ancestral Western she has often tried to imagine and which always slipped through her fingers”. At this point she has fallen into a deep ravine, where a chorus of voices warns her off this “taboo place”. A strong poetic magic infuses what follows. It is this poetry that gives voice to the island – with more power than factual accounts and political assertions could ever hope to match.

Marie Darrieussecq’s most recent novel is Fabriquer une femme, 2024

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