DESERT
by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio
Translated from the French by C. Dickson
DESERT is the first book by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio that I have read, although during the gloomy days of the coronavirus, I listened to his audiobook "Mondo" , narrated by Behrooz Razavi . Le Clézio was born in Nice, France, but his mother is an English-born resident of Africa, and he is fluent in both English and French. However, most of his writings are in French. It is clear that spending part of his life in Africa has influenced his writing.
In 2008, the Swedish Academy described Nobel Prize in Literature laureate Jean-Marie Le Clézio as follows:
"Le Clézio is an innovative and unique writer. He has a poetic adventure, and his writings are in an emotional trance. He goes beyond humanity and seeks to restore human civilization."
In this book, the author speaks so poetically and gently about the hardships and struggles of the desert and its inhabitants that it makes enduring life in the desert more bearable. The reader becomes immersed in the author's description of the desert's nature without having preconceived notions about the harshness of nature and the difficulties of living in the desert."
Le Clézio speaks not only of the harshness and roughness of the desert but also of its unparalleled beauty. Just as he laments the aridity and thirst of the desert, he praises its softness and purity. He talks about the desert wind that both causes illness and cleanses ugliness, in such a way that the reader never tires of reading. This novel is essentially a single novel written in three separate chapters titled "Desert", Happiness", and "Life with the slaves". These three chapters follow two intertwined narratives, each with a central character.
Nour is a young boy traveling with his family in a caravan of desert warriors, guiding a blind warrior to meet a spiritual leader. Life in the desert has made Nour a different kind of teenager than one might expect. Lalla is a teenage orphan living in the North Africa—more specifically, North Morocco—who flees to Europe to avoid marrying a middle-aged man. Although the immigration officer tells her that only domestic work awaits her, she eventually becomes a model for a photographer after working in a hotel for a long time.
In this book, Le Clézio talks about migration or, more precisely, journey, both out of the desert and within it. The two characters, Nour and Lalla, have a deep connection with the desert and its hardships. Le Clézio is known for his poetic prose and stark depiction of injustices, speaking about the historical injustice inflicted on the desert people, the cultural contrasts, and the way of life of the desert inhabitants compared to those beyond the Mediterranean Sea, as well as the identity of a person raised in the desert. The intertwined relationship between nature and humans and the exchange between them is highlighted, pointing to the resistance against European oppression.
The final sentences of the book remind the reader that the human struggle for freedom and liberation is endless, and hope always sprouts, even in the desert, which can be depicted by the birth of a child under a fig tree.
In this book, there is a character of a blind warrior, and Nure's main responsibility is to accompany and assist this warrior. The presence of a blind warrior, especially in the desert, raised questions for me. I tried to find the reason for this character and its symbolism from various sources and finally turned to ChatGPT. I received several ambiguous answers, and this one seems closest to reality: "He may represent a different kind of insight or wisdom, suggesting that true understanding does not always come from physical sight."
Nick Turner has provided a brief commentary on this book, the link to which I will include below. I have also posted important sentences from the book further on this page and my website . If you are interested in learning more about this book, you can visit them, and the links are provided below.
Notes from book:
Their cracked lips and tongues were hard and leathery. Hunger gnawed their insides. they couldn't have spoken. They had been as mute as the desert for so long, filled with the light of the Sun burning down in the middle of the empty sky, and Frozen with the night and its still stars. page 2
They were the man and the woman of the sand, of the wind, of the light, of the night. They had appeared as if in the dream at the top of the dune, as if they were born of the cloudless sky and carried the harshness of space in their limbs. page 2-3
It was a timeless land, removed from human history perhaps, a land where nothing else could come to be or die, as if it were already beyond other lands, at the Pinnacle of earthly existence. Page 4
The desert cleaned everything in its wind, wiped everything away. Page 5
when night fell over the well water there, the star-filled desert sky reigned again. page 9
The little girls with copper hair grew up, learned the endless motions of life. They had no mirror other than the fascinating stretches of gypsum plain under the pure blue sky. The boys learned to walk, talk,hunt, and fight simply to learn how to die on the sand. page 13
The next day as the sun was going down, Ma Al- Ainine came out of his house to say the last prayer. the men and women in the camp had hardly slept, for they hadn't stopped changing and stamping their feet. But the great journey across the desert had already begun, and the feeling of abandonment inspired by the march along the trail of sand had already entered their bodies, its scorched breath was already filling them, making mirage shimmer before their eyes. No one had forgotten the suffering, the thirst, the relentless burning of the sun on the infinite stones and sand, or the ever- receding horizon. No one had forgotten the gnawing hunger, not only hunger for food, but all sorts of hunger. Hunger for Hope and for freedom, hunger for everything that is mission and that digs out of a dizzy hollow in the ground, hunger that pushes a man forward into the cloud of dust amongst the dazed animals, hunger that makes him climb all the way up hillsides until he must start back down again, with hundreds of other identical hills stretching out before him. page 36
Lala herself doesn't really understand how that happened, for time doesn't seem to exist anymore when she's sitting next to the Hartani. Words flow freely, go out toward the Hartani and come back to her, full of new meaning, like in certain dreams when you're two people at one. page 83
Lala loves spending her days with the Hartani. He shows all other those things to her alone. He's wary of the others, because they don't have time to wait, to seek out smells, to see desert birds fly. He's not afraid of people. it's rather they who are afraid of him. they say he's mejnoun possessed by demons, that he's a magician, that she has the evil eye. the Hartani, he's the one who has no father or mother, because he came out of nowhere; he's the one a desert warrior left near the well one day, without saying a word. He's the one who has no name. Sometimes Lala would really like to know who he is; she'd like to ask him "where are you from?" Page 99
Naman the fisherman says that the sea is like a woman, but he never explains it. the gaze comes from all sides of once. page 122
Old Naman sometimes says that sea birds are the soul of men who died at the sea in a storm, and Lalla thinks that the white seagull is the soul of the very tall and slim fisherman, with light skin and hair the color of sunlight, whose eyes shine like a flame. page 123
She came from the South, from the open desert, and what's where he had met her, because her tribe was from the South, from the Saguiet Al-Hamra, near the holy city of Samara, and her tribe belonged to the family of the great Ma al-Ainine, the one who was called water of the eyes. But the tribe had to leave their lands because the soldiers of the Christian drove them all- men, weman, and children- from their home, and they walked for days and months through the desert That is what your mother told us later. page 137
when that is slow, mild wind comes, people fall sick, almost everywhere, especially small children and elderly people, and they die. that's why it's called the wind of ill fortune. page 156
Nour thought of the old woman who had given him some tea back there in the Smara camp. Maybe she too had fallen one day, struck down by the sun, and the desert sand had covered her over. But he didn't think about her for very long, because each step he took was like someone's death, wiping his memory clean, as if crossing the desert had to destroy everything, burn everything out of his memory, make him into a different boy. page 188
" One day, oh, one day, the crow will turn white, the sea will go dry, we will find honey in the desert flower, we will make bedding of acacia sprays, oh, one day, the snake will speed no more poison, and rifle bullets will bring no more death, for that will be the day I will leave my love..."
"One day, oh, one day, the wind cease to blow over the earth, the grains of sand will be sweet as sugar, under each white stone on the path, a spring will be awaiting me, one day, oh, one day, the bees will sing for me, for that will be the day I will leave my love..."
"One day, oh, one day, there will be the night sun, and puddles of moon water will gather upon the earth,
the gold of the stars will rain from the sky, one day, oh, one day, I'll see my shadow dancing for me, for that will be the day I will leave my love..."
"One day, oh, one day, the sun will go black, the earth will split open to its very core, the sea will cover the sand, one day, oh, one day, my eyes will see no light, my lips will be unable to say your name, my heart will stop beat- ing, for that will be the day I will leave my love..." page 190-191
when he's finished, the man looks at Lalla and asks, "do you intend to work in France?" yes, lala says. "what job?" "I don't know." " Housemaid," the policeman says, and writes that on his form. page 208
Night falls on the city. lights flicker on in the streets, around the train station, on the iron pylons, and on the long red, white, and green bars over the cafes and the movie theaters. Lala is walking through the dark streets without making a sound, sliping along hugging the walls. page 217-8
That's what Lalla's days are like, here, in the big city of Marseille, along all the streets, with all of the men and all of the women she'll never be able to know. page 218
Here, there are no wasps and flies zooming freely through the air where the dust swirls. There is nothing but people, rats, cockroaches, everything that dwells in holes with no light, no air, no sky. Lalla prowls around the streets like an old black dog with its hair bristling, not being able to find its spot. page 243
They’ve lost everything, exiled, beaten, humiliated, they work on the roads, in the freezing winds, in the rain, they dig holes in the stony earth, they ruin their hands and their heads, driven mad by the jackhammers. They’re hungry, they’re frightened, they’re frozen with solitude and emptiness. (265)
Death came. It began with the goats and the sheep, and the horses too, left in the riverbed, bellies bloated, legs hanging open. Then it was the turn of the children and the old people; they became become delirious and could no longer get back on their feet. Page 291
Most of the Blue men had continued their aimless endless journey, toward the plateaus of the Draa, to pick up the trails where they'd left off.Nour's mother and father had gone back to the desert. But he couldn't bring himself to follow them. Maybe he was still hoping for a miracle, the land that the sheik had promised them, where there would be peace and abundance, which the foreign soldiers could never enter. The blue men had left, one after the other, taking their rags with them. But so many had died on the way! Never would they find the piece they had known before, never would the wind of ill- Fortune leave them in peace. page 324
There was no end to freedom, it was as vast as the wide world, beautiful and the cruel as the light, gentle as the eyes of water. Each day, at the first light of dawn, the free men went back toward their home, toward the south, toward the place where no one else could live . Each day, with the same motions, they erased the traces of their fires, they buried their excrement. Turned toward the desert, they carried out their wordless prayer. They drifted away, as if in a dream, disappeared. page 352
