Self Portrait in Green Marie NDiaye, Translated by Jordan Stump
Marie NDiaye's Self Portrait in Green is a startling memoir for someone so private, an author who rarely discloses her personal life or interviews. NDiaye challenges herself with this latest translation from Jordan Stump at Influx Press, in ways that often remain unseen in her other works.
Self Portrait reflects on very personal themes of family: the despised father figure and the home. These themes are pulled apart in deft prose and course through dreamy flood waters of the Garonne river, in a sequence dictated by shockingly green women. This is written out in segments like a diary - but one that keeps returning to December 2003, the month of reported flooding along the Rhône.
Self Portrait's story begins at the Garonne, which we're told rises slowly in the dark of night. The river is the source of domestic disruption, it floods the home. Furniture that can be salvaged is carried upstairs but nothing is the same. Everything is wrecked in a powerful high tide, in her prose it is a singular force.
Then enter the green women.
Who are they exactly? At first, they appear like phantoms. A mother asks her children on their commute to school if they can see a figure, a woman dressed in green, standing in her yard. Then another woman appears, this time named Cristina, in green shorts, assuming a friendly and uncanny intimacy. The women in green are strangers at first, then quickly become fixations. The two who follow however, are women in green the author knows very well, a childhood friend (who later married NDiaye's actual father) and NDiaye's own mother. Both women disrupt NDiaye's relationship with her family and her home, ultimately leading her to question everything she once knew.
The women in green then, can be understood as subversive tricksters, feminine, like the floodwaters, they enter the home and do not stop to consider the damage. When describing her mother as one of the green women, NDiaye writes:
My mother is a woman in green, untouchable, disappointing, infinitely mutable, very cold, able, by force of will to become very beautiful, and able too, and not want to.
NDiaye's idiosyncratic ambiguity remains alluring in prose but Self Portrait also has a knife-edge to it. It cuts so close to NDiaye's life I wonder and flick to the back of the book in order to read her short author's bio for comparsion. It follows:
Marie NDiaye met her father for the first time at age fifteen, two years before publishing her first novel.
A strange but important detail. It would be easy for NDiaye, I think, to shift her hurt onto the green women, after all they do charge into her life and usurp her but it is her father that she circles back to again and again. Accountability shifts and no-one is safe. By the end, I wonder who isn't one of the women in green? Is NDiaye herself one? Is her father, even? Fittingly the Garonne ebbs back into her prose and as its waters level out again, I almost see her wink as she writes:
... the water muddy and calm on either side of the roadway... is the Garonne... is the Garonne a woman in green?