Miguel Bonnefoy: “Certain pages of books, certain poems were for me like Ulysses’ mast”

Giving birth to yourself by going back to your origins, your roots, and your family past is a bit like the story of Miguel Bonnefoy’s book, The Jaguar’s Dreampublished by Rivages, which has just won the Prix Femina 2024 and the Grand Prix de l’Académie française: “ I have dreamed of this prize since my first novel, Le Voyage d’Octavio, which I published ten years ago, when I arrived in France. I have often been a finalist because the Femina jury has always been very generous towards me. It’s a prize that can give me a kind of beautiful light on my work where I put women a lot forward. »

A family story

The Jaguar Dream is a family saga, flamboyant, abundant, tropical, and sensual. It tells the story of Miguel Bonnefoy’s family over three generations between Venezuela, Chile and France. This extraordinary, extraordinary story mixed with mythologies and legends has as its true heroes, Antonio and Anna Maria, the writer’s grandparents. Born in poverty, they will, through perseverance, work and love, become doctors and surgeons. Then create universities, schools in Maracaibo, the city where they come from. There is a statue of Miguel’s grandfather there today and even a neighborhood named after him. It was on a street in Maracaibo that Antonio was born, around 1910, a baby abandoned on his third day by his parents on the steps of a church: “It’s the family legend that people have always told me. It seems that his own mother died in childbirth and that his father, a sailor, had completely disappeared. This child was abandoned to poverty, but he was taken in and raised by a lady, Thérésa, whom everyone called the mute because she had articulation problems. » This child will grow up in a brothel among prostitutes.

A grandmother with an extraordinary story

Miguel Bonnefoy’s grandmother would become the first female gynecologist in this region of Venezuela. She will be renowned throughout the region as she fought for the right to abortion which was prohibited. When she was younger, she was kicked out of the religious school because the director considered that she was a genius and that she had nothing to do there. She had written it in a letter to her father. She will grow up with this sentence all her life and it will give her the confidence to become a doctor and to climb mountains. Except that when her father died, she found the letter where he actually wrote; “Your daughter is an idiot, she has no business with us. Educate her at home” : “I really liked this idea of ​​this father who, by opening this letter, reads this self-destructive prophecy. And who decides to transform it into a self-fulfilling prophecy to convince his daughter. »

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