Ladivine

Ladivine is centered around four women: There's Malinka and Clarisse, and then there's Malinka's mother and Clarisse's daughter, both of whom happen to be named Ladivine.

Clarisse doesn't remember much about Malinka's childhood. She remembers that she lived in a small (but always impeccably clean) flat in some Paris suburb; one room for her, and one for her mother. She remembers that Malinka's mother wasn't like other mothers; her skin colour, her job (cleaning other people's homes), her never-failing submissiveness and hope for her daughter. She remembers that when her mother picked her up from school, Malinka would tell her friends it was their maid. She remembers that Malinka, as a light-skinned child of an African woman and a Frenchman she's never met, could pass; left school sick of being pitied, left home at 16, changed her name to Clarisse and became French. Now once a month, Clarisse visits Malinka's mother for a few hours, and they make polite chit-chat that avoids all the unspoken things that lie between them; her mother knows nothing bout her life except that she's obviously doing well. This is what her mother wanted, wasn't it? For her daughter to not go through the same things she did? Well, here's the price.

This is often a stunning novel, even as the second half blurs the line between reality and nightmare a little too much at times; NDiaye gives us a handful of characters who, like the proverbial duck, spend their lives looking calm and harmless on the surface while paddling like mad (possibly literally) underneath to stay afloat. Apart from the few times when the surface breaks and violence erupts, NDiaye doesn't worry much about plot, just lets her characters stew in the juices of all the issues they can never talk about. It would be so much easier if they hated each other, if they didn't care; but love carries responsibility, the kind that eats you up.

There's a very welcome and necessary wave of, for lack of a better word, immigrant literature in both Europe and America these days. Some of it, unfortunately, reads like Post-colonialism For Dummies. Ladivine never does; while all the issues of gender, class, race, yada yada are in there, none of them can voice them, never put words to concepts - hell, past a certain amount of silence, they can't even know about them. They just know there's something there, something wrong that keeps festering, and which obviously must be their own fault. A lesser writer would have concluded this much earlier, with a heartwarming moment of realisation - say, in the bit where Ladivine the younger, unaware of her heritage, travels to her grandmother's country as a tourist. Here, confused at how everyone sees her and not knowing why, it just sends her into even more of a tailspin that can't be broken. And so she does the only thing she's learned; keeps quiet, internalizes, sacrifices. Eats the bitter bread that's been baking for generations, and passes it on without knowing.

Ich spreche kein Französisch.