Montreal Book Fair: Makenzy Orcel, show the world

We are all the sum of our passions, our encounters, our experiences, our losses and our contradictions. It is a sum that builds us and sometimes also betrays us.

This is somewhat what sheds light on the approach of Makenzy Orcel, whose seventh novel, A human sum, a sort of ambitious world book, was this year among the four finalists for the prestigious Goncourt Prize. This is the second part of a trilogy begun with animal shadow (Zulma, 2016), of which it is the French counterpart.

“The three books can be read independently, but the basic idea is to draw a triangle that goes from Haiti to the United States, via France,” explains Makenzy Orcel from Paris, where he is based. from a decade. “This triangle is the base of the man and the writer that I am, that of my imagination”, he also explained, a few days before his visit to Montreal – where a chapter of this new novel takes place. .

A human sum is the post-mortem autobiography of an unnamed, white-skinned young Frenchwoman who has settled in Paris since leaving her native province. The novel opens with the story of her death, when in desperation she has just thrown herself under the rails at the Gambetta metro station. Just like in animal shadowwhich already made us hear the voice of an old Haitian woman after her suicide, voluntary death is the beginning and the condition of the story.

In a torrential way, without really catching her breath, the narrator thus revisits her comfortable childhood, but without happiness lived with failing parents. Until a first drama, which will cut her life in two: the rape she suffered at the hands of an uncle.

Death, a window on life

His arrival in Paris, his studies and his loves. His too beautiful love story with Orcel, a Malian in exile who will perish in the Bataclan attack, before his toxic and in a way fatal relationship with Makenzy, French and white, macho and manipulator.

And her project to record the conversations heard in cafes, in the metro, in order to make what she herself calls a “sum”, auscultating the “exulting heart of the city” and the humans who make it up. . A project to which the torrential narration with accents of magical realism of the Haitian writer comes to echo.

According to the narrator, “everything becomes clear from death”. It is the very first sentence of the novel, taken out of the ether, blown from beyond. And what clears up? Almost everything, believes the novelist.

Makenzy Orcel underlines the alienation which marked this too short existence, its erased character. “You feel like she’s like a shadow, a breeze that blows from time to time, a presence you don’t feel, someone who doesn’t have a voice because her word doesn’t count. “She whom we did not believe when, for the first time, she took the floor to denounce her attacker.

“I think for her, death broke something, it allowed a kind of breathing. And by speaking from death, she broke this parenthesis where we all move between the past and the future. She is now free to speak up and say anything. »

Muted, the novel reflects on freedom. Cut in two between the little girl she was and the adult she has become, fleeing from herself despite her quest for a happiness that is nevertheless “banal” – a house, a garden, a dog, a husband “self-respecting” and children — the tragic heroine ofA human sum has never been able to find its own freedom, reproducing maternal patterns. “He’s a star who failed to shine, who went too far in a relationship that didn’t work,” sums up Makenzy Orcel.

“We don’t know what death is, neither you nor I, but it’s very interesting on a romantic level. And I built the story with this question in mind: what can death tell us about life, about ourselves? They say in Haiti that the dead are in the truth and we are in the lie. And in a way, he adds, death is a window into life.

Show the world

This prolific poet and novelist, born in 1983 in the very poor neighborhood of Martissant, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, clearly has a predilection for female voices. He adopted one earlier in animal shadowbut also in The immortals (Mémoire d’encrier, 2010), his very first novel, where he made us hear prostitutes in Port-au-Prince in the wake of the violent earthquake of 2010.

He explains that the female voice often seems to him more accurate than that of the man. “I am a man, I know myself more or less, I know how I think. So, literally, I don’t find myself very interesting, explains Makenzy Orcel. When I work from the voice of a man, I have the impression of being too present and going too much into my personal stuff. It does not interest me. »

“Speaking from a woman’s voice also allows me to look at myself, as a man,” he adds.

In any case, the novelist is not afraid of being accused of appropriation, sexual or cultural. “For me, whether it’s a black, white, brown, yellow, green or blue character, the novel is first and foremost an invitation. An invitation to see the world in its beauty and in its ugliness, in its elusiveness. The world is waiting to devour us. We cannot stay at home waiting for the world to come to us. And the novel, through the voice of this woman who grew up in a certain opulence, shows a certain universality of human misery. »

Whether he is interested in an old Jewish neighbor of the narrator or recounting the experience of the refugee Orcel, it is important for him to show behind the scenes. “It’s not just these beautiful streets with these well-aligned trees and these beautiful squares. It’s not just this Paris, there’s something else. And me, that’s what I do, I show something else. I say to the reader: come with me, we are going to descend into the foundations, go behind the walls. »

“Because as a writer, you have the right to cross cultures, to show them and to question them. But never for the purpose of domination, judgment or contempt. The writer is neither a lawyer nor a judge. Me, I simply show the world”, concludes Makenzy Orcel. It is his credo as a man and as a novelist.

A human sum

Makenzy Orcel, Shores, Paris, 2022, 624 pages

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