It was primarily with a desire to pay tribute to her Guadeloupean grandmother who died in 2007 that actress, playwright, historian and author Geneviève Rochette began writingOfilao (Hands Free), a first novel inspired by his grandmother, but also by his own childhood. Against a background of social crisis, the author goes back in time, digs into the past as troubled as it is luminous and reconciles herself in a certain way with death.
The death, that of his grandmother first, that of his mother in 2008 then of his sister in 2015, is intimately involved not only in the writing of the novel, but also in the journey that led to this result. First conceived in the form of a screenplay, then a play, the story emerged, not without difficulty, in the form of a novel.
And it is somewhat thanks to her friend Gilbert Laumord, a Guadeloupean theater man, that Geneviève Rochette will go to the end of her writing: “I had the impression that Guadeloupe was becoming a tomb for me. And it was he who told me: “No, Guadeloupe is not a tomb because in Guadeloupe, everyone who dies leaves. ofilao and theofilaowe live in it” […] He told me: “You have to be reconciled with the dead.” And it was the last breath that helped me to continue and give birth to this story, ”says Geneviève Rochette on the phone. A novel about death, therefore, but also about the father-daughter relationship, family secrets and, a lot, about miscegenation and racism. Having spent a lot of time with her grandmother in Guadeloupe when she was a child, Geneviève Rochette wanted to tell in this novel her relationship to interbreeding. “There is something disturbing about being a descendant of the master of the slave. At one point in the novel, I talk about the somewhat schizophrenic aspect of that. When I was young, I remember that what I found hard was always being a bit apart in Guadeloupe. And I was coming here, and I was a bit different too,” she says.
She also remembers being slightly annoyed when her grandmother told her about her appearance ” po screed — paler skin tone. “And me, there, indeed, with my straight hair, my paler skin, I felt like a visible minority,” she adds.
There is something troubling about being a descendant of the master of the slave. At one point in the novel, I talk about the somewhat schizophrenic aspect of that. When I was young, I remember that what I found hard was always being a bit apart in Guadeloupe. And I was coming here, and I was a little different too. Genevieve Rochette »
Several events experienced by Inès, the main character of the story, are also copied and pasted on what the author has personally experienced. For example, there is a moment in the story when Inès, a child, leaves school to go and join her grandmother. A student calls out to her, saying: “Is your grandmother black? ! in a contemptuous tone. That, the author lived it. “It was the first time that I took the measure, that I realized that we designated a skin color. So that’s a lot of what is, unfortunately, very present in Guadeloupe. Divide, racism. And within a family, there’s this — my grandmother was black, my grandfather was mixed race […] I felt it very early when I was young, this racism and this way of treating black people in a different way. In a society where there is so much interbreeding, it is all the more troubling. It’s something I wanted to witness. »
transcend death
In Ofilao, the floor is first given to Inès, 31, from a Quebec mother and a Guadeloupean father, who redoes the Montreal-Pointe-à-Pitre route, during which she plunges, not without apprehension, into the last manuscript of his father, Honoré. She discovers this distant father through his writing, this text dedicated to his daughter in which he tells and reveals himself.
Through these stories, as a way of weaving the story, there are the words of poets, Aimé Césaire and Gaston Miron, to name a few, which extend the thoughts of the characters, support them in this journey. “Me, it fascinated me. I discovered Gaston Miron when I was at the National School [de théâtre du Canada], at 20 years. I had read snatches of Césaire and I found that there were really very strong correlations between them […] I find that they are two emblematic poets of rootedness, of colonization. I come from two colonies and I have always found it fascinating. I feel doubly colonized and I like the idea of relating to these poets who have thought about these questions. But poetry transcends things, it sheds a little light without this very dark side, ”explains the author.
A light that is perceptible in the novel thanks to these poets, but also a lot thanks to the assumed and sensitive writing of Rochette. “When I was little, I believed that my grandmother lived in heaven, since I had to fly to her. And to leave Montreal on December 23, when it was minus twenty degrees, to land in Guadeloupe five hours later, under a hot and humid sun that excited all the senses, it was necessarily paradise! says Inès at the start of the novel.
Like this heroine, Geneviève Rochette manages to weave this link between the living and the dead, between the past and the present, by placing them in this ofilao, place of all possibilities, neutral, suspended between heaven and earth. A borderless space that goes beyond the limits of the territory, where one can distance oneself from reality, even reinvent it, while ensuring communion with other beings.