Book Around the Corner

Born content in Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut (2017) Original French title: Née contente à Oraibi. Not available in English.

Have you ever read a book and find yourself unable to know what to think about it? That’s how I felt about Née contente à Oraibi by Bérengère Cournut when I finished it.

Cournut is a French editor and writer born in 1979. That’s all I know about her, except that she wrote several books and spent some time among the Hopis.

Oraibi is a Hopi village in Navajo County, Arizona. There’s no precise timeline but I’m thinking we’re at the turning of the 20^th century. At least, if I consider the photos included at the end of the book.

It’s a coming-of-age novel, a first-person narrative with Tayatitaawa’s voice. She’s “the one who salutes the Sun with a grin”, or in other words, the one who was born content in Oraibi. Tayatitaawa tells her childhood and her adolescence, describes her house, her family and her quotidian. She was close to her father and lost him at a young age. He wasn’t a usual Hopi man but he was well-respected in their community. His death carved a hole in her soul, one she had trouble healing to feel whole again. It’s a lovely book, written in a poetic tone and with a strong sense of place.

This book has the soothing quality of a folk tale. It’s full of Hopi customs and cosmology but they don’t come as a statement. They are in the book, described but not too much. They belong to the narrative because they belong to Tayatitaawa’s life and education. The lack of in-depth explanations about rites gives weigh and life to Tayatitaawa’s voice. If she’s a Hopi telling her life to other Hopis, she won’t explain things that are obvious to them. She will tell important facts that belong to oral transmission like the family bonds between clans, clans’ names and roles in the village.

I don’t know if what Bérengère Cournut writes about Hopi customs is accurate. I don’t care. She doesn’t pretend to write a scientific book. Née contente à Oraibi feels like the child of a writer who made a meaningful trip and absorbed her surroundings. She connected with other human beings from another culture and recognized them as other human beings. Nothing else. No awe for their culture. No judgment. No comparison. Her book is her way to share what she captured of Oraibi. She could have written a reportage. She wrote a novel to pass on what she felt about the place, its wilderness and its inhabitants.

We could debate upon the rightfulness of a French author writing a coming-of-age novel with a Hopi character in such a traditional setting. I’m a firm believer that authors may write whatever they want. Even if that means more clichéd books about Provence and mythical French lovers in postcard Paris. It’ll be the role of critics and readers to cull the best ones and point out flagrant inconsistencies or biased tones of the others. To me, there is no alternative. Discussion and debates are the only options. Otherwise, it’s like setting up a book police aka censorship.

If we say that Bérengère Cournut can’t write about Hopis because she’s French and not Hopi, where does it stop? An American historian cannot write about the French Revolution because he’s not French even if he has studied the period a lot more than any average Frenchman?

We’re already on an ice-covered slippery slope as examples keep piling up. A white poetess cannot translate a black poetess because she’s not black. Agatha Christie now wrote And Then They Were None instead of Ten Little Niggers. I call it laziness: it’s easier to change the book title than to take time to educate people and help them see this title as a symbol of its time and talk about slavery and colonization. Let’s erase it, it’s easier and we’ll all forget that people thought it was normal to use the N word.

And I heard that a new cleaned-up version of Roald Dahl’s book is on the way, that Anthony Horowitz was asked to delete the word scalpel from his book to spare Native Americans’ sensitivity as the word is close to scalp. What’s next? LGBT associations asking to rename Pride and Prejudice into a neutral Elizabeth and Fitzwilliam because the words pride and prejudice mean something specific to them?

We are living in an asinine world where there is no space left for nuance and discussion. Marketing gurus target individuals and tailor goods and services to their customers’ liking, leading them to expect that everything has to bend and accommodate to their tastes and way of life. Add the built-in bias of social networks: the contents they push to their users is based on what they liked before and keep them in their community, not exposing them to other ways of thinking and the ability to block content you don’t want to see seals the deal. All this keeps people in their own mental juice and doesn’t leave a lot opportunities to accidentally broaden one’s point of view.

These people who push to rewrite Roald Dahl want everyone’s specificities and sensitivities taken into account. It’s not possible to have a one fits all for everything. Or everything becomes bland because the middle ground on which everyone agrees upon is tasteless. Yes, I understand that Under the Volcano may not be a good book to a recovering alcoholic. The solution is not to change tequila into water in Lowry’s book. It is for readers to use their brain and make an educated decision about the books they read.

What does all this have to do with Née contente à Oraibi? Everything. I closed the book, puzzled because I fleetingly questioned her right to write it. This way of thinking has wormed its way into my brain in spite of me and I don’t like it one bit. Writing about Née contente à Oraibi helped me put things into perspective.

Bérengère Cournut wrote a beautiful book set in a place, time and culture totally foreign to her upbringing. She learnt enough about Hopi customs to write a plausible book and she extracted the essence of her trip. She captured the universal: after all, Tayatitaawa is just a girl who is growing up, who misses her father terribly after his untimely death, who tries to bond with her brother, who wants to understand where she comes from and what she’ll do with her life. No need to be French or Hopi for that. Only to be human.

PS: This book is published by Le Tripode, an independent French publisher. Its editorial line is to consider any book of any genre as long as its good literature. The books are beautiful too. The cover of Née Contente à Oraibi is a creation by Juliette Maroni and it’s a perfect fit for the book. I received it through my Kube subscription and the libraire who chose it for me did well.

This is one of my contributions to Karen’s and Lizzy’s official #ReadIndies and to Marina Sofia’s unofficial French February.