Michaël Ferrier – författare

Based loosely on the author’s life, this novel recounts the narrator’s journey following the footsteps of his Mauritius-born grandfather, Maxime, who abruptly boarded a boat bound for Madagascar in 1922 and never returned. MichaËl Ferrier tells a tale of discovery as well as the elusive, colorful story of Maxime’s life in Madagascar, which included a stint as an acrobat in a traveling circus and, later, as a diver and artist on marine expeditions. Maxime’s story is one of adventure but also romance. He falls in love with a refined young Pauline NuÑes, Ferrier’s grandmother, whose well-to-do family of Indian merchants owns a hotel famous for playing the latest music-including American jazz-and throwing popular dances and parties. Over Seas of Memory weaves these personal stories with the island’s history, including its period as a Vichy-governed territory at the center of what was termed “Project Madagascar,” the Nazi plan to relocate Europe’s Jewish population to the island.As Ferrier interlaces his family’s intimate story with the larger story of colonialism’s lasting and complicated impact-including the racial and ethnic divisions it fomented-he engages with critical issues in contemporary France concerning national and cultural identity.

“But when I close my eyes, I first fall as if drowning into the silty waters of the Chari River, which traces the border between Chad and Cameroon, and into which so many men, women and even children were thrown, sometimes still alive, their hands knotted behind their backs, or tied up in a shoulder bag. I sink with them towards the sand and the clay, down amidst the green and the brown, passing purple weeds, shards of pottery, and crocodile scales. My head is heavier than a cannonball and carries me toward the abyss: I dive into a bottomless bag where the letters collide or slip away, call out to or ignore each other, I bathe in an unlimited space free from the constraints of cycles and dates, and I enter into the time of childhood, which indeed has no concept of time. […] all my memories take flight in the wind of the sands, the past flows in the river, plays out in the branches, explodes in the foliage. The past is all around me now - and I laugh when I say ‘the past,’ because none of all this is past.” Michaël FerrierIn 1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of N’Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michaël Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family, and memory.

“But when I close my eyes, I first fall as if drowning into the silty waters of the Chari River, which traces the border between Chad and Cameroon, and into which so many men, women and even children were thrown, sometimes still alive, their hands knotted behind their backs, or tied up in a shoulder bag. I sink with them towards the sand and the clay, down amidst the green and the brown, passing purple weeds, shards of pottery, and crocodile scales. My head is heavier than a cannonball and carries me toward the abyss: I dive into a bottomless bag where the letters collide or slip away, call out to or ignore each other, I bathe in an unlimited space free from the constraints of cycles and dates, and I enter into the time of childhood, which indeed has no concept of time. […] all my memories take flight in the wind of the sands, the past flows in the river, plays out in the branches, explodes in the foliage. The past is all around me now - and I laugh when I say ‘the past,’ because none of all this is past.” Michaël FerrierIn 1979, two young boys play Scrabble in a hot, dusty district of N’Djamena, Chad, while around them war rages, apparently destroying all in its path: people, places, and memories. And yet, just as the boys take their letters from the depths of the pouch, so Michaël Ferrier draws from the darkness words and images that he reassembles into a beautiful and moving tribute to the city, its people, and the childhood that seemed to end there in those days of chaos and destruction but which he brings miraculously back to life in a defiant, poetic statement on the power of friendship, family, and memory.

“Now they are all wondering where they come from, who they are and what they are doing here. They are trying to show that they are French or, on the contrary, that they are not French, they cling ever more tightly to their laws, their customs, their traditions or their tribulations, their look and their lingo, their regions, their religions. They are proud of the empires of their fathers and the oaths of their brothers. It is the hubbub of memories, the great memorial tumult: one memory against the other, they stand shoulder to shoulder while elbowing each other out of the way, greasing each other’s palms, and then pointing the finger at each other.The truth is that these people are sealed off inside their heads, ears watertight, nothing seeps in. Their problem, a certain difficulty in relation to time, their great naivety, believing that time passes, they no longer know how to decipher the messages of the dead. Not a soul left to gather tenderly the spirits of the dead, to then speak more gently about things... No one knows how to remember or how to forget anymore, no one knows how to be French anymore.” - Michaël Ferrier