In his levitating novels, Miguel Bonnefoy makes the founding myths of the Caribbean palpitate, reconstructing the cosmogony decimated by the conquistadors and the oil industry. A writing of rain, of the mangrove, a trickle of liquid words where resonates “the voices of women and men beyond the depths where they were buried”.
To compose the gesture of Venezuela, country “of mangoes and battles”it deploys a vast romantic petroglyph. A witch’s work in league with black magic, which makes old souls dialogue with those who are not yet born, since “the world’s first landscape”the lemon trees on the hillside of Octavio’s Journey (Rivages, 2015).
Cutting his adjectives to give them the shape of a root, he writes plant poems sculpted by the mountain, as a brother of the “first land, red like papaya”. Between sap and ink, tightness and immensity, the jungle is here an art of writing, to give back to one’s country what should come back to it. Landmarks in this tropical stifling heat, while his new novel appears, The Jaguar’s Dreamwhere Venezuela takes shape through the intertwined destinies of a couple linked like blue macaws, those birds that never leave each other, and their descendants.
Crossing
Son of a Chilean novelist and a Venezuelan diplomat, Miguel Bonnefoy has chosen to write in French. He is keen, he tells “Le Monde de livres”, to draw the “movements of peoples, of families who straddle two cultures.” In his intimate and collective epics, he metabolizes the disconcerting encounter of a character with a country, thwarting ancestries – it is on a misunderstanding that the lineage ofLegacy (Rivages, 2020) inherits the surname Lonsonier, its hero, Lazare, disembarking in Santiago de Chile without speaking the language, explaining that he is coming from Lons-le-Saunier…
The work explores the Bracamonte dynasty in a tree structure, “having come with the wind”, “legendary brotherhood of gold prospectors and workers”The writer says he had these recurring characters in mind from the start. “which would cross from one book to another”but also to have let oneself be guided by them as one went along. “One thinghe notes, is to cut down the tree to make a violin. Another, when cutting it, is to respect the grain of the wood.
In The Jaguar’s Dreammigration is also social: Antonio, that a “a woman who is not her mother saves herself from not having one”will become the most famous doctor in Maracaibo, the oil capital of Venezuela, and will found a university. The geographical exiles will be reciprocal: after her daughter, Venezuela, who leaves the city to go and live in Paris, Cristobal, her son, makes the opposite journey. Marrying a Chilean in Paris, Venezuela ties the country whose name she bears to Chile and France. By leaving her land, one releases the ghosts of past generations: on the day of her departure, she lets go the spirit of Teresa, who took in her father, Antonio, at birth.
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