There’s a Monster behind the Door, by Gaëlle Bélem, trans Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, Bullaun Press, 176 pp, €14.95, ISBN: 978-1739842369
The Rarest Fruit, by Gaëlle Bélem, trans Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert, Bullaun Press, 224 pp, €14.95, ISBN: 978-1739842383
There’s a Monster behind the Door is a propulsive picaresque tale of a young girl growing up on the Île de la Réunion in the 1980s, a volcanic island paradise filled with bougainvillea, frangipani and spices where the dark legacies of colonisation remain in the psyche of those whose ancestors were transported in their thousands from East Africa and Madagascar from 1725 until 1848, and enslaved, the Cafres. The French East India company brought the first slaves from India (illegally by its own statutes) from Pondicherry, Goa and Chandernagore at the end of the seventeenth century, but then African slaves from Mozambique, Tanzania and Madagascar were used to cultivate the highly profitable coffee, nutmeg, vanilla and later sugar plantations. When slavery was eventually abolished on the island in 1848 a system of poorly paid indentured labour began with new workers imported from India and China. Île de la Réunion was a forgotten colony until 1946 and then a DOM (a département d’Outre-Mer), not an independent country like Algeria or Senegal but a little bit of France in the Indian Ocean. Or maybe not…
As the young narrator puts it, ‘in this topsy-turvy tropic … people have mastered the art of taking one name to refer to something else. The island chameleon is actually a lizard, sweets are biscuits, pastilles are sweets, pistachios are peanuts, and Arabs, also known as “Z’arabes”, come from India’. The Zarabes are North Indian Muslims, the Zoreils are white metropolitan French people, the Malabars are Hindu Tamils, the Yabs are poor whites, also known as ‘petits blancs’ while the rich planter families are the ‘gros blancs’. It’s not so much a melting-pot as a lasagne. The Swiftian narrator judges her birthplace harshly. By the 1980s the island is ‘a heap of rubble on the edge of the world where the worst human superstitions, chased out by waves of European scepticism, had finally found a welcoming harbour’. Every home has its television and consumer durables yet in many islanders’ minds a dark fatalism, borne of poverty and despair, lingers. The protagonist is an only child whose parents are wilfully ignorant, reject education, instruction or affection of any kind and, while providing her with the most basic material needs, deny her curiosity and instil fear by beatings, the Dessaintes family motto being ‘That’s the way it is and that’s that!’
The parents are monstrous, but behind them lie other monsters. The unsettling narrative perspective fluctuates and splits between the adult’s and child’s point of view:
If the Dessaintes child nevertheless insisted on knowing the reason for which something was forbidden, the why of the breeze that blew, the how of the Mascarene martin that sang, or the wherefore of a rainbow’s formation (…) the Dessaintes immediately blurted out the most frightful stories, an avalanche of unpredictable, vivid and irrefutable horrors. This all to smother the child’s curiosity, to prevent her from any new investigation and to stunt her desire to listen and to talk. This may have been all well and good. Except for the fact that this child, their only child, was me!
Unsettling switches in viewpoint are part of the satirist’s armoury. Winding sentences take you to unexpected places, sometimes ending in a twist of mordant humour or a casual aside. The tyrannical Grandfather is the only person in the family who gets to eat meat while at the weekends he goes on terrible drunken binges, returning home to beat his ten children. Once a year he would fast for two weeks, only consuming fruit and water: ‘He was no longer the abominable meat-eater from the East, but a fat, tropical caterpillar whose head or tail could be seen – it was never clear which was which – in the trees whose fruit he ate (…). Once again, he would only eat fruit for two weeks, more out of concern for his cirrhosis than out of Christian fervour.’
At story level too, the reader is drawn to share the narrator’s scathing judgements until the tale abruptly swerves to a desolate place. We discover that the malign mother experienced terrible deprivation, loss and loneliness before the heroine’s birth. You laugh with the narrator at the frantic partying at her parents’ wedding, ‘women bitterly passing remarks on this one’s leopardskin tights or that one’s fuchsia miniskirt’, ‘a procession of heavy hips and haunches like joints of meat, adorned in flashy colours’. You laugh at the kitsch homemaking of the newlyweds. But suddenly the narrative darkens. ‘It is true that their ancestors were among those strong and wiry Cafres who were seen disembarking in Saint-Paul Bay one accursed day in the seventeenth century (…) they had no idea what was going to happen, not only to them but to their children over the course of two, four, even seven generations (…) they didn’t know what awaited them. Nobody had ever returned to their native land to tell their story.’ Almost everything is erased, names, customs, stories, beliefs.
When the child goes to primary school and, like many before her, discovers the magic worlds of books, they become not only an escape but also a tool of resistance against her parents’ fatalistic world view. ‘I grabbed the little book out of my school bag and opened it up. A group of jumbled black arabesques was dancing on a little white wall.’ When she cracks reading, she feels empowered: ‘I would read, and invent stories, and make my own books. I would rise above my station and go places people couldn’t imagine me in. Mistress Bélina used to sing out: “Alta alatis patent!”’. (Alta alatis patent, or the heights are open to those who wait. Many Latin expressions run through the book.) She perseveres in her dogged conviction that things should be, and could be, better than they are. As a despairing teenager she discovers the liberating force of books written by dead white males. She identifies with the fictionalised autobiography of a French anarchist journalist from the time of the Commune who also had a difficult upbringing. ‘I am Vallès,’ she writes. She reads omnivorously, ‘Anything that could be used as a door wedge or a paper weight (…) I have a book on my bedside table. Because I don’t have a gun.’ Will the story follow the child saved by books plot? It is maybe naive to expect redemption.
For the narrator, colonisation in Réunion is unique and she contrasts it with other places and writings, alluding to Frantz Fanon’s psychiatric work in Algeria and his books on the psychological violence of colonialism. ‘Any anticolonialist from another French territory would have been quick to evoke the learned inferiority complex, traumatic memories, perverse determinism, collective neurosis and vicious circles of violence – but here they only talked of a difficult end to the century, a century on its last legs.’ Colonisation is different also for ‘our brothers in the Antilles’. ‘The Antilleans did become better writers than us.’ At the time that the story of There’s a Monster takes place, in the West Indies in the 1980s and 90s the Martinican writer Édouard Glissant was developing the productive concepts of créolisation (creolisation, becoming creole) and relation (relationality) to propose new ways of viewing history, language and intertwined heritages. Glissant’s influence can be seen in Bélem’s rich, exuberant polyphonic prose that is anchored in the specifics of the Réunion experience, where French, creole, Latin expressions and learned references collide. Why Latin? There is an explanation at the end of the story.
Regarding cultural influences within each individual or within a whole society, Glissant wants to avoid the term métissage (hybridisation, cross-fertilisation, multi-culturalism) since it has too strong a connection to identity politics and to race, tribe or birth. He prefers the related term créolisation because it is an unpredictable process of constantly renewable and historically changing interactions between birth, language and culture. His focus is not identity but relationality. At the heart of The Rarest Fruit, described as a ‘tragicomedy’, two relationships are in tension, the affectionate bond between adoptive father and son that doubles up with the brutal power relationship between master and slave. The Rarest Fruit is a historical novel, based on the life of Edmond Albius, a young, orphaned slave who was brought up by his adoptive father/owner, Ferréol Bellier-Beaumont, a botanist, and who in 1841 at the age of twelve discovered the secret of pollinating vanilla. The mosaic narrative spans the metropole, Mexico and the Île Bourbon, as Réunion was known during the reign of Louis-Philippe, switching between the protagonists’ private lives and turbulent global events. Behind the story of Edmond lies another story, the very slow percolation of new ideas from France to its faraway colony where the plantation owners, Jacobins, conservatives and monarchists alike, resist the abolition of slavery for decades.
As a tiny baby Edmond grows up in the house of Ferréol, a dour widower, his status ambiguous, neither entirely slave nor family member. Ferréol is Edmond’s stepfather, his ’ti père who wheels him around the gardens in a wheelbarrow, teaching him about Linnaeus and the names of all the plant species in Latin, about how to save seeds, plant, water and harvest, about how to pollinate pumpkins so that they crop abundantly. Edmond has a prodigious memory for Latin names and plant morphology, but Ferréol doesn’t teach him how to read or write.
One evening when Elvire, several of Ferréol’s godchildren and the children of some cousins have joined them for a meal, Edmond lingers in the sitting room, his heart pounding. Ferréol is reading a vicious article in La Gazette about a certain Alexandre Dumas. Not content with being a prolific Parisian author, the man also has the nerve to be Black.
’Ti père, I’ve decided! I’m going to be a botanist like you and Linné.’
This is against nature for Ferréol, ‘he should have expected this: all that talk with Edmond about botany, orchids and cultivating plants under glass’, but a slave cannot be the equal of Ferréol’s godson. ‘Ferréol is too miserly when it comes to long philosophical speeches to explain to Edmond that it’s the law of the shrewdest here, not the reason of the weakest.’ Because he is a slave, the solution is for Edmond to become a gardener, an assistant, not a botanist.
The vanilla orchid had been imported from the New World to Europe and Réunion, but it could not produce any fruit despite the best efforts of botanists like Ferréol, for whom it becomes an obsession and whose stories Edmond drinks in. ‘Ferréol speaks of Cortés, and Edmond sees a grand diab’ advancing bareheaded with his army of flamenco dancers towards a city that he believes is made of gold.’ If this mad scene of flamenco dancers makes us smile, the imperial myth about Africa is no less bizarre. ‘Due to his habit of listening at doors, Edmond has an extremely colonial vision of that other world. He sees it as an unbroken bloc stretching from the Sahara to Cape Town, traversed by rhinoceroses and by warriors bristling with weapons, who, between massacres, dine on the grilled flesh and roasted penises of their enemies.’ Growing up in Ireland, these were the kinds of stories we used to be told about Africa too. On his way back to Seville, Cortés takes some vanilla cuttings laden with flowers. ‘It’s a bee that pollinates vanilla. Without it there’s no fruit. While the Aztecs take the secret of their sacred plant with them to the grave, Cortés squashes one damned bee underfoot.’ The bee is a clue because, by careful observation and experimentation, by mimicking the bees’ action when hand-pollinating the flowers, Edmond discovers how to grow vanilla beans. It’s a eureka moment when he ‘lets out a scientist’s cry. I’ve found it!’.
Edmond has a dream, that Bourbon’s vanilla might bear his name, Vanilla borbonica edmundii, but then he would need a formal education, something that he has been taught to fear: ‘the thought of school scares him stiff, because he knows that, while it has no effect on Whites, school sends Blacks mad’. He knows the cautionary tale about a young man of mixed race who, one hundred and fifty years before, was exceptional, curious, ambitious and courteous, but who was sent mad by studying the humanities and a daily dose of mathematics. ‘One evening, he went to bed after a few Latin declensions and a little algebra. In the morning, he got up and everything disappeared.’ The narrator adopts the same acerbic tone of There’s a Monster behind the Door. The young scholar
became the first inhabitant of Bourbon Island to wear a straitjacket. Partly because it took a long time for antipsychotics to be invented. Partly because somebody needed to make use of the straitjacket. Whatever the reason, the moral of this story travelled from one century to the next until it reached Edmond: it’s better to be poor and stupid than epileptic and crazy.
The idea that education is futile is also the view of the Dessaintes parents in There’s a Monster behind the Door and while the daughter rebels against her whole family by becoming highly educated, gaining a distinction in her final state exams, this achievement is of little use to her after she leaves school. On the contrary, she is in the end punished, because as an educated person ‘she should have known better’. For the protagonists in both novels if you are a black person striving to better your lot by studying and working hard there is a double standard. You are damned if you do and damned if you don’t.
A craze for vanilla sweeps through France, first via the Atlantic ports of Bordeaux and Lorient to Paris, and subsequently through the rest of the world, bringing massive profits to the producers while its discoverer is almost forgotten. While Ferréol grudgingly accepts Edmond’s discovery he cannot overlook that his young gardener is just a slave boy of twelve. On 16 Pluviôse of the year II (February 4th, 1794) a decree had been passed abolishing slavery. However, the local government at Réunion, the Assemblée coloniale, refused to comply. Napoleon legalised the slave trade again in 1802 and although slavery was once more forbidden at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, slave-trading continued unchecked in Bourbon. During Edmond’s lifetime, between 1817 and 1848, 45 000 slaves were brought to the island and when abolition took place on Réunion in 1848 after long campaigning in France by Victor Schœlcher, slaves represented 60 per cent of the island’s population. At this moment Edmond comes of age and the father-son relationship takes a tragic turn. A chapter of the novel is devoted to the paternalistic government emissary Sarda Garriga who, as the historian Yvan Combeau puts it, ‘talked of Fraternity but guaranteed the power of the owners’. Compensation was paid to the owners for each slave who, like Edmond, was not so much freed as let go into a very overcrowded jobs market with nowhere to live. Or, to quote the narrator of The Rarest Fruit,
They had eventually negotiated seven hundred and thirty-three francs for each lost Negro and traded their frizzy-haired slaves for cargo ships full of immigrants arriving by the hundred from India. There! Let them have their damned freedom!
For Edmond, scrabbling around for whatever jobs he can find, indentured labour is far bleaker than his childhood existence at the Bellier-Beaumont house. So much is deducted from his low wages, for food and coffee, that he becomes worn out by ‘the freedom that shackles him’. How free were the so-called ‘free workers’ of Réunion? The appalling conditions in which they lived and worked were not much better than slavery.
Gaëlle Bélem employs a two-pronged approach to recreate Edmond Albius’s experiences, not only by using vivid reconstructive storytelling in the text itself but also through multiple footnotes directing the reader to contemporaneous sources, correspondence about Edmond in the Archives de Bourbon no. 10., and to the accounts of Ferréol’s more generous and enlightened friends, notably Eugène Volcy-Focard’s 1863 book about vanilla cultivation on the island. This dual perspective is needed because the facts of Edmond’s life could ‘fit onto a vanilla leaf’, while there is one portrait of him that you can see on Wikipedia, a lithograph made in 1862 by Antoine Louis Roussin from a photograph that he took. Edmond himself is the rarest fruit, an unusually gifted person living in an extremely unjust and exploitative society.
There’s a Monster behind the Door and The Rarest Fruit make for salutary reading for us in Ireland where the term colonisation is at times unreflectingly used to excuse recent and present failures. Bélem’s imaginative yet darkly humorous portrayal of the hard histories of survivors offers a vital counterweight to such static versions of the past. Incidentally, there is a colonial Irish connection to the island in the person of Henry Sheehy Keating, who was born in Bansha and became governor of Bourbon from 1810-1815, when the British conquered and ruled the Île de France (Mauritius) and the Île Bonaparte, renamed Bourbon again. Slavery continued under British rule and the 1811 rebellion by slaves on the coffee plantations at Saint-Leu was violently suppressed.
The two translators rise creatively to the challenge of putting Gaëlle Bélem’s multi-layered writing into English, providing enough information for the reader, without overexplaining or interrupting the story’s flow. One challenge is how to represent creole dialogue and local expressions, the creole on Réunion being a mix of French, East African, Madagascan and Indian languages. One solution is to leave the creole word as it is, untranslated in the text, another is to have short in-text glosses, while another is to add a translator’s note to the footnotes. All these solutions are adroitly used by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Loubert in their confident translations. Finally, Bullaun Press, a recently founded independent Irish publisher specialising in literature in translation, is to be commended for making these unusual books available to Irish readers and to the English-speaking world.
1/7/2025
Kathleen Shields lives in Dublin. Her translation of Jean Follain, Paris 1935, was published in 2024 by CB Editions.
