What We’re Reading: Self-Portrait in Green
Self-Portrait in Green by Marie NDiaye, translated by Jordan Stump (Two Lines Press, 2014)
Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green eludes genre, but is a work of prose, lyrical and elliptical as prose comes, rendered beautifully into English by Jordan Stump. Ostensibly a memoir, Self-Portrait focuses not on narrative, but on the women who shape the speaker. The book opens on an evening in December 2003 along the banks of the Garonne River, which is “rising hour after hour in the dark.” The Garonne, we’re told, can rise above its banks nine meters before it overflows:
We wait, we watch. The object of our vigilance is not some Old Man, it’s not le Mississippi, it’s not le Danube or le Rhône; no one here doubts for a moment that la Garonne’s essence is feminine. She’s brown tonight, heavy, almost bulging. (4)
The threat of a flood sets the tone for the following 100 pages, the possibility of violence just around the corner.
Throughout the book, NDiaye introduces a series of “green women,” among them are a woman standing under a banana tree, the speaker’s mother, and a woman who visits after hanging herself. Some of the women in green are friends, some strangers; all of them are an aspect of NDiaye. This obsession with identity—Who am I? Who is she? Who are we?—suffuses all of her work. Her short story “The Death of Claude François” in the collection All My Friends (Two Lines Press, 2013) features what could be considered a quintessential NDiaye line: “And the woman who looked like Marlène Vador, and who was Marlène Vador, since she’d said so[…]” In Self-Portrait in Green passages like this come up several times:
That’s when I run into Christina, but as soon as I see her I’m not sure it’s her rather than Marie-Gabrielle or Alison. Not that her name escapes me: it’s just that, among those three women, I no longer know which this one is. (14)
I believe that the woman in green, who told me her name is Katia Depetiteville, is not Katia Depetiteville, and I believe that if I asked people in the village for a description of Katia Depetiteville they wouldn’t describe this woman, the woman in green. They’d describe a very different person. But the woman in green doesn’t know that. She sincerely and naturally believes herself to be Katia Depetiteville. And for what reason? Is it so that, at various moments in my life, I might meet up with a woman in green? Because this is only one among many. (25)
NDiaye’s focus on identity speaks to an existential threat of oblivion, more terrifying than the possibility of violence. We fear violence being done to us, but even more we fear being forgotten:
I remember a woman in green from my grade-school days. Tall, brutal, and heavyset, she promises us all a trip to prison if we eat too slowly, if we dirty our clothes, if we don’t raise our eyes to meet hers. […] Because of her, a pall of dread hangs over the school. She carries more than one child off toward a dark hallway, proclaiming that prison awaits at the far end, and cries of terror resound as that stout woman disappears with her little prisoners clamped beneath her green-sleeved arms. The children are never seen again. (11-12)
The fear of being forgotten goes hand in hand with the fear that life has no purpose. NDiaye, like her countryman, Camus, comes seems to come to the conclusion that life is meaningless and we will be forgotten. Her characters roll their stones up the hill and watch them roll back down, but NDiaye doesn’t come to Camus’ conclusion that they might be happy. Ultimately, this meaninglessness is another form of violence her characters are subjected to. NDiaye’s speaker asks, “Was I ever seen again?”
Early in Self-Portrait in Green, when the book’s speaker meets the woman she thinks might be Christina or Marie-Gabrielle or Alison, who tells her about something that has been seen around:
“A bunch of us saw it, in our yards, on the riverbank, in… Apparently there were even people who saw it in the schoolyard. The mayor… the mayor knows all about it. He saw it too. Something black, and quick. Oh, there were plenty of people who saw it. (18)
At the end of the book, NDiaye’s speaker hears children shouting and finds them gathered around “a dark form, moving and anxious” in the street. “The children ask if I saw it, if I can tell them the name of what they saw.”
“Time to come in now,” I say, shivering. “No, I don’t know what that’s called,” I tell them. “I don’t think it has a name in our language.”
There’s something sinister at the heart of Self-Portrait in Green, something intangible and frightening. If asked what it is I would answer as NDiaye does: I don’t think it has a name in our language, whether that’s NDiaye’s French or Stump’s English. With a long list of accolades to her name, NDiaye is surely a writer to reckon with, though too few of her works have been translated. Let’s hope that Stump and others continue to bring her bewildering prose to the English-speaking world.
What other writers are producing brilliant work, but not yet reaching an English-speaking audience?
Baboon by Naja Marie Aidt (Two Lines Press, 2014)
This isn’t a book where you’re going to get emotionally attached to the characters; instead, you’re going to wince when you recognize how lifelike their lives truly are: chaotic, sometimes violent, and messy. And believe me, you’re not going to want to look away. Baboon is a collection of short stories that, like the cover art, are magnified at the moment of destruction or implosion. Energy thrums beneath the daily surface for these characters—a dark energy that threatens to unwind the very structure of their worlds. Adultery, child abuse, crumbling relationships, beasteality, sex addiction, and physical ailments are all present in this collection. These stories enter the minds of people who do the things we say we could never do, but despite that, happen on a daily basis everywhere.
Aidt is a prolific Danish poet and author, and has won much recognition, including the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for Baboon in 2008. This English edition of Baboon is translated by Denise Newman (who has translated many well-known Danish authors) so we can finally devour Aidt’s work here in English-speaking countries.
The characters, while not warm and fuzzy, are expertly crafted and hyper-real. Aidt is master at creating characters that are unaware of the magnifying glass hovering above their daily lives. The voice of these characters is unassuming, nonchalant almost, but that’s why the moments in these stories pack such a punch—they sneak up on you and engulf all of your senses. These aren’t characters who experience the clearly positive type of “personal growth” that is common in self-discovery story lines. Rather, these are characters undergo change and growth, yes, but it’s more of an murky unveiling of their true, raw thoughts and feelings.
This excerpt is from the opening story “Bulbjerg”, about a married couple who is dangerously lost in some woods with their 6 year old son and a dachshund. Juxtaposed with the chaos and tension of that situation is what is going on in the husband’s mind:
When I woke up this morning, you were watching me. We were both lying on our sides, facing each other, and you were watching me. I smiled. The light fell from the skylight in a sharp diagonal line onto the white duvet. I felt like I was being spied on. Then Sebastian was standing in the doorway. He said the dog had peed on the rug in the living room. A little while later I could hear you laughing and chatting in the kitchen. We used to do it on that rug. We were here in the fall, it was cold, and in the evenings we lit the fire. I slowly peeled the clothes off her, and she looked beautiful on the red Persian rug, in the warm light from the fire. She spread her legs. She looked at me with dark, almost sorrowful eyes. Your sister has a tighter cunt than you. I wonder whether you’re born that way or if it’s just because she’s so young.
Aidt sneakily shifts to the narrator talking about his wife, to then her sister, when you begin to see the real situation for what it is. Pronouns are significant here; in this story, for example, “you” is used throughout to refer to the narrator’s wife. The word holds an accusatory tone throughout, a metaphorical jabbing finger. Then, Aidt switches without warning to “she” to denote that no, he’s not talking about having sex with his wife on the rug, but rather her sister with whom he is having an affair. It’s a subtle shift, but one that hits with purpose.
In “Bulbjerg”, both of these situations (being lost in the woods, and the affair) build steadily until they boil over. Most of the stories in the collection contain more than what meets the eye; so much of the building action happens in the character’s heads with their internal thoughts. Aidt shows us what would really happen if we could read people’s minds. And Aidt doesn’t give us a clean conclusion; we’re left with a mess which can be unsettling at times.
Aidt writes in a very straight-forward fashion, with short, clipped sentences that add to the matter-of-fact nature of these characters. It also juxtaposes the moments of chaos starkly. Take the opening of the story “Torben and Maria”, which is about a mother who abuses her toddler son:
What can you say about Maria? That her hair is blonde and dark at the roots? That she loves roast pork with cracklings? That as a child she loved to look out at the flat fields at dusk in February? Her eyes rested there, under the low sky, in the gray gray light, until it got so dark that she could see only her face reflected on the window, the green lamp on the table behind her, and all the way back to her mother, leaning against the door smoking.
The window, a black mirror.
Maria.
She hits her small child, until the screaming stops. It’s a boy and his name is Torben. Not many people call their sons that any more. Ah, Maria! You can say this about her: “She gave her son the name Torben.”
Soon he’ll be two. He’s a little weakling, and there’s nothing special about him.
This story is painful to read, but also shows how every day situations like this are; people abuse their children, and either no one knows or sometimes people know (such as other family, in this case) but no one does anything about it until it’s in the news or someone else finds out. It’s stories like this which make Baboon get under your skin; they linger there, a bad taste in your mouth, hyper-aware of all the dirty laundry underneath the thin scrim of “proper” social standards. You look around at the world around in a different way after reading Baboon, wondering what is actually going on in the minds of the woman in front of you at Walgreen’s, or the guy running around Lake Harriet.
What other books have shifted the way you view everyday life? Have you encountered other writers that juxtapose straight-forward style with magnified moments of chaos?
