An Artist of the Green World

Marie NDiaye, Self-Portrait in Green

--Dedicated to Neal Tonken

Green with envy, green with inexperience, a green thumb, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, "the force that through the green fuse," "nature's first green is gold," greener on the other side, "eat your greens," greenbacks, The Greening of America, well-tended greens, the green room, given the green light, green around the gills (?): I could probably find lots more phrases on-line but won't waste the time looking. Green chile. The point is that greeness as a state of being (sometimes) implies life and vitality and renewal. Other times it doesn't, or does so in a way that is quite indirect. Mr. Green Jeans on Captain Kangaroo was an early fascination of mine--he could coax life from the earth and a laugh from the Captain equally well. And though I now live in the brownest of states, I grew up in the Garden State, opulent shades of green for six months of the year back in the days when our planet still had seasons. But green has a bit of menace about it as well--the life that percolates at all times just below the surface of the earth and which is awakened around the time of the vernal equinox is a great mystery and more than a little overwhelming to consider. Green might be hope, but it is also power, menace, yearning, and death.  Jack's climb up the beanstalk; the kudzu that chokes all greens to brown; the sad inevitability of green's fading...this, though not green, is greenish:

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather. 

Maria NDdiaye, the Senegalese-French winner of the Booker Prize, the precocious novelist-playwright who published her first book, Quant au riche avenir, when she was seventeen, is a stylist of grace whose special power lies in the realm of dense atmospherics achieved through minimalist portraits of her characters and vaguely sketched plots. Poetic language in the service of that which is obscure--this is surely the point of Self-Portrait in Green, a novella whose quiet and cumulative effects have little to do with the conventions of story-telling and as much to do with what is left unwritten as with what is written. Women dressed in green, or with green eyes, or who evoke that which is green--or, to be honest, who mostly suggest what isn't green at all but shades of gray and black, colors of mystery, uncertainty, and sadness. See Wallace Stevens.

Mia Weinberg's "Green Painting" depicts movement and density with a minimal palate and few breaks in the monochromatic field of color. The blot of red/brown at the top of the painting breaks apart the sequencing of shades of green--from near yellow to near black. A gradation not unlike the flow of linked stories in Self-Portrait in Green. The rising waters of the Garonne River introduce a note of menace; the first woman of green appears as an apparition visible only to Marie, the narrator. This woman, perhaps the ghost of another green woman, blends into a landscape of banana trees like a figure in a painting by Rousseau. "Is she waiting for me? Does she somehow resent not being seen..." Being seen, being known, is one of NDiaye's central themes, both in SPIG and in another of her books that I am reading, All My Friends. In the greenest of Self-Portrait's plots a complex triangle emerges--husband, wife, and the former lover of the husband. Something unspeakable happens to the wife--or does it? It isn't clear what is being seen and what is being imagined or dreamed. And the resonance of this event colors the other stories: the author's father marrying a green woman and then disappearing; the author's mother in two wholly different shades of green, one resplendent and the other fading to black. Other greens include the green eyes and green trousers green souls of women who are known to Marie or a part of Marie herself, her voice at times a drone, as monochromatic as the single hue of a drive through Provence in mid-summer.

But why green? Why a novel that examines the hues of this ambiguous color? Why color at all? One might think that color would matter extraordinarily to a woman of African descent who lives in a European country (NDiaye now resides with her husband and children in Berlin). Yet Self-Portrait isn't a political book, or a book about race; insofar as it is "topical" this is a book about gender, about a woman's invisibility, her despair (perhaps her suicide), her reinvention, her coming back to life season after season. Perhaps that's it, the greening of Marie--her rebirth and death and birth again. As the Green Knight allows himself to be decapitated to prove a point (Arthur's court isn't the paradigm of morality that it pretends to be), so too do the women who are shades of Marie NDiaye endure invisibility and worse in order to unmask the lies with which women live. Or perhaps not. This sounds sententious and false. The truth is that there is a puzzle at the heart of this small book that has eluded me. It's beautifully written but as opaque as the color that lies at its center.

Marie Ndiaye est aussi discrète. L'écriture de son œuvre, qui compte à ce jour huit romans, ne s'accompagne pas d'une intense présence sur la scène publique et médiatique. Elle se situe en retrait, presque à la marge, des différents champs littéraires : le champ littéraire français et les champs littéraires africains, tant ceux qui se construisent dans les pays africains que ceux qui s'élaborent en Europe. - See more at: http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=2102#sthash.U4gSSecr.dpuf

 Self-Portrait in Green, translated by Jordan Stump, is published by Two Lines Press out of San Francisco. They also have published All My Friends and other titles translated from the French.

George Ovitt (1/19/15)

Marie Ndiaye est aussi discrète. L'écriture de son œuvre, qui compte à ce jour huit romans, ne s'accompagne pas d'une intense présence sur la scène publique et médiatique. Elle se situe en retrait, presque à la marge, des différents champs littéraires : le champ littéraire français et les champs littéraires africains, tant ceux qui se construisent dans les pays africains que ceux qui s'élaborent en Europe. - See more at: http://www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=2102#sthash.U4gSSecr.dpuf