“Un homme d’écoute”: Listening to Michaël Ferrier’s Mémoires d’outre mer

Abstract

Engaging with existing scholarship on Ferrier’s work, specifically that which identifies the author’s sensitivity to sounds, and with Ferrier’s own writing on music and literature, this article pursues a “sound-studies” approach to the 2015 novel, Mémoires d’outre mer, highlighting the various uses of sounds and arguing that the author be considered in the same way he writes of his grandfather Maxime, as “un homme d’écoute.”

Keywords:

• Sounds
• music
• fiction
• history
• colonialism
• memory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Page references are to the translated version of the novel.

2 Suddenly, the narrator says, “the language of Montaigne and Voltaire is freighted only with puffed-up slogans. The politicians’ mouths are filled with the words immigrant and national identity: they are at once the problem and the solution to every problem. There is a certain tone that is synonymous with this discourse: waxy voices, syrupy like a balm, which gutturalize their vowels and rise at the end of sentences, aggressive syllables, and saddening metaphors… all of that makes itself heard, in every speech. They speak of ‘attributing to the naturalization decree a properly sacramental quality!’ They go mad for economic comparisons: ‘The illusion that imagines that you can make one more Frenchman with a decree inserted into a register of laws is related to that which imagines one can become rich by handling the banknote plate… Let us guard against inflation of nationality! Let us not make any paper Frenchmen!’” (160–61).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Munro

Martin Munro is Winthrop-King Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Florida State University. He previously worked in Scotland, Ireland, and Trinidad. His publications include Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010 (Liverpool, 2014); Tropical Apocalypse: Haiti and the Caribbean End Times (Virginia, 2015). In 2019, he published a translation of Michaël Ferrier’s Mémoires d’outre mer, and in 2022 a translation of Ferrier’s Scrabble. In 2023, he published a translation of Édouard Glissant’s Une nouvelle region du monde. In 2020-21 he was a Fellow at the National Humanities Center in North Carolina. His latest book is Listening to the Caribbean: Sounds of Slavery, Revolt, and Race (Liverpool, 2022). He is Director of the Winthrop-King Institute for Contemporary French and Francophone Studies at Florida State.