On the death of her grandmother, baptized the “savage” by her grandfather, in turn called “El noère”, a young woman embarks on a particular quest for identity. She sets out to “talk to the dead”, as she says, to go back in time and find her origins.
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We follow her in this ambitious project, halfway between the intimate and the universal, the personal and the historical, which begins very concretely at the Archives Society, to lead her to the sadly famous island of Gorée. , off Senegal. Objective: to unearth an unknown past where identity and skin color are intimately (painfully?) intertwined.
Attention: a train awaits him here which will take him where he has not been going for a long time. We understand that we are about to hear a little-told story. In any case, rarely like that.
Bianca Joubert, who is here on her third novel, twice winner of the Radio-Canada literary prizes (for The embroiderer in 2012, then The leopard does not move without its spots, in 2016), alternates here between narrative (particularly around her great-grandmother, Adriana, a Micmac child transplanted into a white family) and historical parentheses, fantasy and facts, with an admittedly limpid pen, but a construction that carries through confusing times. And which means that we lose the thread of the genealogy a little, so much the story with a capital H that it relates is also disconcerting.
We think of slavery, of course (and this slave market on Wall Street, did you know that?), through the character of this “irsute” man, crossed by Adriana, precisely, somewhere in a wood. A man born free without knowing it, and almost a life slave. How many have lived like him? The story doesn’t say so, but the novel, which reads like time travel, is funny.
Flesh-colored
Bianca Joubert
Alto Editions
256 pages