Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, French author and laureate of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, is commonly known as J.M.G. Le Clézio, an abbreviation he rather fancies. His numerous works complement his life’s many journeys, reflecting the injustice and beauty of near and far-away lands. He has lived for extended periods in Nigeria, the UK, Thailand, Mexico, Panama, Mauritius, Morocco, Korea, China, and the United States. He is, literally, a “citizen of the world.” His peripatetic life has allowed him to observe and chronicle rapidly shifting societal paradigms firsthand.
Born in 1940, in Nice, France, Le Clézio grew up amid the chaos of occupied armed conflict, which shaped his disdain for war. He was raised by the women of his family, which no doubt provided fodder for the well-crafted female characters in his work. In 1948, Le Clézio embarked on his seminal journey. He boarded a cargo ship with his brother and mother to join his father, a medical doctor working in Nigeria who he had yet to meet. Onboard, tucked away in his cabin, the eight-year-old filled notebooks with drawings, sketches, and writings—the birth of his writing life. After a year as a united family, the three returned to Nice. His father remained in Nigeria until his retirement.
After spending his adolescence in Nice, Le Clézio first considered making illustrated books, then came a stint in poetry, which he soon abandoned for prose. He settled in the UK in 1959, found a teaching position for a year, and in 1963, at the age of 23, published his first novel, Le Procès-Verbal [The Interrogation]. It won the prestigious Prix Renaudot. Several books followed. His 1980 novel Désert [Desert], awarded the Prix Paul Morand by the French Academy, marked his big break.
Le Clézio’s body of work—novels, essays, short stories—have been translated into more than 40 languages. His essay collection Mydriasis, followed by To the Icebergs came out in a remarkable translation in the U.S. a few months ago. Chanson bretonne suivi de L’enfant et la guerre was published in France a few weeks ago. In addition to writing, Le Clézio continues teaching at universities. He is currently writing a new novel.
We met at the Paris headquarters of publishing house Gallimard, where I must confess I was apprehensive about sitting across from someone who usually avoids talks, book signings, and interviews. That wariness, however, was dispelled the moment he entered the room. He is tall, with an aura emanating benevolence. As we began our conversation, his deep voice reverberated through the room. He spoke slowly, aware of the recorder on the table.
His words hold a palpable authenticity and empathy. “When I began my career, I was extremely timid and I feared meeting people; it scared me. I did not like going on television or radio,” he admitted. With age I got better at it, and now I do my best to make it work, more or less.” Does he read the critics? I asked. “I prefer to avoid them,” he said. “I don’t like critics, especially in this domain. When it’s too glorified I ask myself, but why? When it’s bitter, I tell myself it will discourage me from going on. So I simply don’t read them.”
Here Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, who turns 80 today, weighs in on issues that deeply concern him, including the ecological crisis, global civil unrest, immigration, and the coming U.S. elections.
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Ayşegül Sert: I wanted to start with a quotation from 1980. By then you had published 15 books, you were 40 years old, and on the television program Apostrophes you said: “A writer is new with each book. It’s not a new book but a new writer each time.” Which writer do I have across from me?
Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio: It is another epoch of my life. I had the chance to live with the native population in the forest of Panama, in the Darién, at the border with Colombia. It was a people who lived according to their traditions, as they had done forever, dispersed along the river, the unity of their culture being in the structure of family and not in the concept of nation. There was no chief per se. It was a population that was completely anarchic, and I appreciated my stays there. I learned the language, I discovered a period that linked me to an anterior period when I was a student and doing a university research thesis on Henri Michaux.
AS: Michaux also had a period in his lifetime when he was interested in non-European cultures, from Asia to Ecuador, and he wrote essays on the use of hallucinatory plants as a means of investigation.
JMG: People were quite critical of him, arguing he was losing himself. When I went into this forest, there were native people, healers who use natural plants, and I recall a “doctor” named Colombia—that was his surname because he had studied there—an intensely soft and intriguing character, and people came to consult him. His specialty was visions of the near future; he would take the sap from Datura stramonium, a plant that grows there, and would have peculiar visions. He would then make his prognostic.
He had a gift to foresee floods, which is of high value when you live by the river like they do. He would warn locals of an upcoming flood, and people would take their valuables and find temporary refuge up in the hills and return safely to their homes after the flood. I stayed a long time around him. One day, he told me: it’d be interesting that you see what I see. So he gave me the Datura for three consecutive nights: the first night nothing happened, on the second I was in a bad mood, and on the third night I saw what he saw. I wrote Mydriasis, for he had opened my eyes.
AS: In France, Mydriasis was published in 1973, and To The Icebergs in 1978. Here they are more than four decades later reaching English-language readers.
JMG: I did not read these texts since I wrote them. They are far away for me. It’s always impressive for an author that a translator devotes time to carry your words into another language. Translation is a very difficult thing to do, particularly for these two texts that are almost abstract. When To the Icebergs was first published, Michaux sent me an amiable letter letting me know he had appreciated it. I didn’t live in Paris at the time and when I came to town I had a number of people to see, and he was always one of them. He was a very interesting man. He had, like all travelers, great stories to tell.
AS: You used to visit him at his home on Rue Séguier, not far from where we’re meeting today. Did you first meet the man or his work?
JMG: I began reading Michaux when I was around the age of 15 and I remember thinking that his writing was perfect. At a time in my life when I was not sure what direction to take, a professor advised me to find a literary research subject. I chose Michaux. It just made sense for me to work on his work. I sent him a letter, something along the lines of: “Dear Sir, I am writing a thesis, could I come and see you?” He never replied but he called Gallimard because he had recognized the name.
Earth belongs to everyone, the right of passage has to exist. Birds fly over borders, why can’t human beings?I had not stated that I was a writer in my letter, I had simply signed it with my name. Michaux had left his phone number with the operator for me, and the first thing he told me when I rang was: “Are you that writer?” I told him: “Yes, I write books.” He told me: “Ok, come see me, here is my address.” I went right away!
AS: Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye greatly inspired you to write that first book (Le Procès-Verbal) Michaux recognized you by.
JMG: It was the time of the literary movement Le Nouveau Roman, which irritated me. There was an arrogant literary climate in France. I didn’t wish to go in that direction, it didn’t interest me. I wanted to write something different that would be closer to what I lived. I needed an opening sentence and of course I did not dare write: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born”.
I had a sort of veneration for this author, who was in my view very different from the others, he had managed to write a marvelous and audacious book. I wanted to write a book that would be the continuation of The Catcher in the Rye. You could say I was obsessed with him; I was in my twenties, I remember I had even begun boxing because my sparring partner looked just like J.D. Salinger.
AS: You also met the great American writer William Styron.
JMG: We worked at different times as manuscript readers in Paris. We both did that to make some money that would enable us to continue to write and live. I remember meeting him for the first time in the halls of Gallimard. We spoke of books.
AS: Yours?
JMG: I don’t like to talk about my books.
AS: Let’s talk then about the books by Henry Roth, an American writer who counted for you.
JMG: He lived in a mobile home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He had written an absolute bestseller, Call It Sleep, a magnificent novel in which he recounted his childhood in the slums of New York. It’s a powerful book on the rite of passage. He was a communist in the McCarthy era and he was imprisoned, and by the time he was free he was broken.
Roth’s wife gave piano lessons in their mobile home, and when I visited them I remember I had to duck by the grand piano. They were astounding people. When his wife passed away, he fell into a depression and a friend advised him to write again, which he did, in his eighties. I really liked Mercy of a Rude Stream.
AS: What do you remember most about the years you lived in the United States?
JMG: I was hesitant at the beginning but then I was seduced by the American culture, by its way of living, by the kindness of people, not everywhere of course, but the first interactions, at least the people I met, were warm and welcoming. After a teaching position in Boston, I went to Austin, to Santa Cruz, and one day, as we drove through New Mexico, my wife said: “Here reminds me of Morocco.”
She was referring to the desert, the mountains, the colors, the blue sky. Someone told me I could teach there and I was hired as the replacement of a man who had taught 19th-century French literature and decided to become a real-estate agent. That is very American! One day you decide to become something else, and you can.
AS: When you look at the United States today, what do you see?
JMG: Things started changing after 9/11. Something got blocked in its functioning, not only in the United States but also in Europe, which has constructed itself as a fortress, wary of anything that comes from outside. When we lived in Mexico we needed a car because we lived in a rural zone; we found one in Santa Cruz and every year when we went away for the summer, we took the car out of Mexico to California, left it in a sort of wasteland, and when the summer was over and we were back we picked it up from there and drove to Mexico.
Each time we crossed the border from different points. At Piedras Negras, for example, the passage was relatively easy, and there was no issue. Mexicans had at the time a border crossing card that allowed them to work in the U.S. and return to Mexico to live, and sometimes in the same day. I remember a bridge at El Paso-Ciudad Juárez that was constantly filled with pedestrians going to work one way in the morning and returning home the other way in the evening and there was no problem.
Each time we crossed the border by car, we were in the flow of people passing through in one direction or the other. Gradually, though, things got worse. The current president is not the only one responsible for this. One president after the other shrank that right of passage. At the time there was no wall, no fence. If you prevented people from crossing the bridge, they would have crossed through the water. I don’t know why people got so obsessed about tightening and toughening border policies. Now it has become very difficult and inhumane.
AS: How do you explain this shift—this fear of the other?
JMG: It is psychopathy, it’s based on nothing real, it’s obsessional. Nearby where we lived in Albuquerque lived an old man, he was an undocumented worker, and ever since he had crossed the border he lived there. He was greatly appreciated by the community, he knew how to make fireplaces and chimneys in terra cotta, he was a fine artisan. People would have never thought: let’s send him back.
“The Algerian War was kind of our Vietnam. I was opposed to this war. I thought it was shameful to wage a war on people who demanded their independence.”Who would have made his work after he was gone? There was a real exchange and it was without fear. What’s happening today is appalling, this suspicious way of looking at people, particularly when it’s used everywhere by the power as an electoral argument. Earth belongs to everyone, the right of passage has to exist. Birds fly over borders, why can’t human beings?
AS: During the 2017 French presidential race, you stated that if the far-right candidate Marine Le Pen won, you would give back your French passport.
JMG: It was unbearable. Marine Le Pen represents everything that I viscerally hate: her statements, the personality, her father who is a horrific type. They represent the most deplorable in European politics—fascism and racism—and all that is disguised in polite forms of so-called patriotism.
AS: In a time when divisions dominate the collective psyche, you went the other way: in 2009, you created, with the Mauritian intellectual Issa Asgarally, The Foundation for Interculturality and Peace.
JMG: There is a saying in Mauritius which translates as “There is only one race: The human race”. In Mauritius, there are communities from India, Europe, Africa, China, people who are originally from Lebanon and Pakistan, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus. They live together and accept one another. It is an example of the understanding between communities. I thought Mauritius was the perfect setting to establish a sort of laboratory to extend the idea of interculturality, of how to live together and to exchange—not to tolerate, as is the common use in France—but to go beyond tolerance.
I didn’t know where to start. So, I told myself we need to begin from the beginning, from children, and it became obvious that they learn who is the other they share the space with. We try to establish a dialogue between children from poor schools who go to visit the rich schools and vice-versa; they meet, they get to know one another. It’s an ongoing process. I distribute books, and I intend to distribute books that are not only for children but also can be read by their parents.
To children around the age of ten years old, I give Khalil Gibran’s The Prophet, and it’s very well received. I read it at a time in my life when I felt depressed and it lifted me up to read Gibran. That’s why I distribute his book as much as I can. I tell children, you don’t have to read it but if from time to time you feel consumed by questions you will find answers in this book.
AS: In your twenties, you thought of going into exile to Sweden if you were required to serve with arms for your military service. It is only decades later that you actually went to collect your Nobel!
JMG: The Algerian War was kind of our Vietnam. I was opposed to this war. I thought it was shameful to wage a war on people who demanded their independence. I lived in the UK then, the officers sent letters to my parents in France, who advised me not to return home for the time being. One of the options was to go to Sweden where many dissidents were.
