There are territories that, having already been traveled, always appear before our eyes with the adjective of unexplored. Territories, which can be people, like when you return to an already known body. Looks that, in addition to sustaining the world they observe, turn it on with ideas and words that seek to go beyond the sterile.
The journalist and historian Laura Adler decided to venture into both horizons by publishing the biography about Marguerite Duras – with the title of the same name – that Anagrama launched in Spain, back in 2006, and that the Barcelona publishing house recovers, in this present of technological neurosis, in format second edition.
Writing about Duras has a lot of instinct, of writing that slides through the meanderings of intuition. We never really know which Duras we think about or which Marguerite we read. The one that set the concept of pleasure on fire? The one who showed intellectual ambition as the soil on which every woman must build her home? The one where she played with bodies and senses never before described? The one that blew up the bourgeois morality of the European court and its narrow-mindedness? Duras is the vestige of the unexplored and the geography of the Mekong is the place where it all began.
“There is a Duras language. It often speaks within us and sometimes, secretly, to us.” The key to the life and work of the author of The Mistress of Northern China lies in this whispered phrase that Adler hides, curiously, in the prologue of this book. Each Duras novel offers a horizontal reading, for the living room and the bookshelf, but there is another, dangerous and incendiary, that is only understood when we read it vertically, from the exaltation of what one does not want or can name, and that sinks its roots in the childhood of the girl born in colonial Indochina, a childhood that occupies a good part of Adler’s reflections and that helps to understand the obsessions of this woman of breakups and outbursts, always immersed in a thousand literary projects – novels, screenplays, radio-; sewn into the behavior of a territory that permeates all the literature he made – like love – projecting, in each new title, that ineffable desire to return to the only home he had despite the harshness that those lands, and their inhabitants, showed towards she.
Ambassador of an Indochina that ceased to exist except in her memory, Duras grew up deeply marked by a mother, a school teacher for the colonial administration, who upon becoming a widow inaugurated a geography of incomprehension and exposure that marks character and behavior, with three children, and which he makes the central axis of his fictional universe, a universe in which his two brothers have no place, whom he associates with fear and evil, especially the older brother, violent in everyday life, with fierce masculine habits, with games of power based on perversity that end up affecting the entire family. This alien relationship that the girl Duras establishes with her brother cannot be understood without the abruptness of the territorial, that being between two lands, makes it something ruthless. The violence and its humidity.
“In my childhood, my mother’s misfortune took the place of dreams.” A double pain awaits the Duras girl, one that is born inside a house and one that awaits her outside of it, in the school she attends, in her relationships with peasants and indigenous people. In the abuse and sale of her body. Perhaps because of the appearance of pain within the family, abrupt and cruel, the girl’s roots in her environment are strengthened, creating a kind of amalgam in which it is not known where the Duras ends and where the landscape architecture begins. .
“In this land of Prey Nop, in Cambodia, near the Elephant mountain range, you will find yourself surrounded by a hostile jungle infested with tigers, and immersed in a landscape of rice fields, river arms, muddy land and sea foam. He will claim to have discovered there the wild character of a nature where he liked to get lost.”
Born Marguerite Germaine Marie Donnadieu, in Gia Dihn, a suburb near Saigon, which occupies the territory that extends between the Saigon River and the Mekong, she became the trope, Marguerite Duras, by the work and grace of that alluvial land that Until the end of her life, she will evoke a land that she wanted to make eternal through literature, capturing the aroma of the river arms, the rice fields, the velvet nights with the roars of the animals that terrified her, especially, in the nights of loneliness before the absent mother. A land, her own, to which she owes her gaze as a creator and her as a woman.
Last summer, photographer Ana Nance traveled through that geography where it all began and photographed the “river that sleeps.” This portrait filled with the sleepy light that characterizes that dream world allows us to imagine Duras Indochina. In the life and work of the trope everything is reduced to the exercise of wonder, fiction imposes itself with ferocity before the eyes of a girl who at the age of ten “begins the true childhood of her Indochina of hers.”
Thanks to this carousel of photographs, we can understand that fascination – the peasants, the green that floods everything, the perpetual humidity, the sweat, the smell – and, most especially, that awakening to the senses, to the construction of a desire to through them. The order of a world called Duras.
