For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we bring you an extraordinary new work of microfiction by the Guianese poet Mireille Jean-Gilles. Stranded in the central yard of a nameless school, Jean-Gilles’ narrator is confounded by the ugliness and hostility of the buildings’ facades. They assume that the institution they face must be a factory or a prison, so at odds are they with the purpose of a school, and the emotional lives of young people. Yet even as the school is an institute of dehumanization, it still carries prefigurative possibilities: “I sensed that each class must have been an oasis of happiness, full of colors, full of children’s drawings, of colors, from dreamy blue to impulsive purple, a thousand childish colors.” The narrator’s voice spills over with questions in the face of this contradiction, phrases and clauses accumulating one after the other, piled paratactically like the “wildly green leaves” of the mango tree in the schoolyard. They are adrift in this strange place, yet ultimately their dislocation is a source of peace, as they resign themself to the paradox of beauty emerging in a hostile world: “everything was one and its opposite at the same time . . . so I searched no more, just let myself be carried away by the swell of waves.” Read on!
It wasn’t a factory, or a prison, although you might have thought so, it was immense, full of cells, full of rooms, in fact, finally, it seemed to me that it was only a mundane school, it wasn’t the end of a shift, it was only the end of classes, classes for shrill little children or mocking older ones. The prison, sorry, the school, had in its center a navel, an immense navel that must undoubtedly have been what’s called a schoolyard, the schoolyard was finally mute since within ten minutes the entire school had emptied, the signal had been finally given to clear out, it was five o’clock.
Now that I found myself alone at the center, at the heart of this immense schoolyard that could well have been the navel of the world, I could savor a strange calm, the classroom doors were open, the lights were on, the cleaning women were working, a few noises here and there, a few young women who I dreamed were teachers, since in seeing them busy themselves and hang around this place while wanting to leave, I could imagine a thousand voices, a thousand children’s voices: “teacher, teacher,” “hi, teacher,” “sorry, teacher,” “I love you, teacher,” these young women who I dreamed were teachers had sturdy faces, and a shadow of tiredness and sadness in their eyes, tiredness is banal, but why sadness? It’s not less banal, but I think it was my own sadness that I futilely searched for in the eyes of these young women who I dreamed were teachers, still, I asked myself, why so much sadness in their gaze after a day filled with childish emotions, and why did I have that sense of a prison when the school was spilling over with children, all of humanity’s hope, however decadent, I don’t know, I know a part of it, but regardless I was asking myself, and now that five o’clock had passed and I found myself alone in this schoolyard, I had the sense of having a planet all to myself, the walls of the schoolyard, one part was filled with blue color, a bit of yellow, lots of green, absolutely no red, in addition to colors, shapes appeared as well, a tortoise, a jaguar, birds, the peacefulness of the Guyanese forest more blue than green on the walls of the school. In a corner of the yard, a mango tree, full, full of leaves, you would have said its only purpose was to carry leaves, full, so full of green leaves, a little barely visible trunk, a meter tall, a meter and a half, and certainly at least fifteen meters wide, from which the green leaves assembled extended expanded. In this navel of the world, with rediscovered calm, I cast off that sense of a prison that in this moment became shocking to my heart, my eyes, and even, I had to confess, to reason. But my eyes went down another path, and, shocked, I realized that ultimately only the blue-green-yellows of the school wall and this mango tree had anything to tell me, if I could understand them, finally, shocked, I came to my senses and realized that only these elements brought a soul, a beautiful soul to the school, and then, I could no longer invoke my melancholy to justify that incomparable sense of sadness that was emerging from this place. The covered playground in particular, favored for games during rainy days, was dull, colorless, just a few meters linked together to form a square or rectangular space, in any case a banal geometric space, worse still you could glimpse the bathrooms, which announced another place where the vapors, odors made it impossible to even imagine color, in fact, with the exception of the walls of this naval of the world and the wildly green leaves of the mango tree, everything was misery and desolation. Still, a few illuminated signs of happiness managed to reach my heart clouded with monotonous images, my eyes perceived these signs of happiness from afar, they had to do with the classrooms of course, the half-open doors allowing a few traces of black or green tables to appear, I couldn’t really tell them apart, any more than the other accumulated elements of the classrooms, but I sensed that each class must have been an oasis of happiness, full of colors, full of children’s drawings, of colors, from dreamy blue to impulsive purple, a thousand childish colors, and also full of papers stuck to the walls by the teachers despite my black melancholy in their eyes, a thousand sheets of paper completed with tiredness or with love and stuck to the walls like so many works of art to amplify the life and joy of the walls bursting with multitudes of colors and shapes from the children’s classes. So, I no longer knew, vertigo, then again, happiness, sadness, I no longer knew, love, hate, navel of the world, prison, I no longer knew, magic, desolation, hostile facades for whom it seemed the architects were instructed to immerse themselves in ugliness, ugliness for ugliness’s sake, and then the wildly green leaves of the mango tree, children filled with wonder, the drunkenness of the world, yelling children, hell, in this place, everything was one and its opposite at the same time, I no longer knew, so I searched no more, just let myself be carried away by the swell of waves, beautiful or hideous, the swell of waves of the school with its center, the navel of the world.
Translated from the French by Eric Fishman
Mireille Jean-Gilles, born in French Guiana in 1962, is an agro-economist. Wife of the poet Monchoachi, she currently lives in Martinique and works on the financial problems of the French overseas collectivities. She clings to words and numbers with equal passion, always in search of a poem.
Eric Fishman is a teacher and translator. His translations of Mireille Jean-Gilles are part of the collection Elektrik: Caribbean Writing (Two Lines, 2023). He has also translated poetry and prose by Monchoachi, André du Bouchet, and Yves Bonnefoy. Eric is an editor of Young Radish, a magazine of poetry and art by kids and teens.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: