When the Dodo Spoke French: Eco-memory in Le Clézio’s Alma

Abstract

The narrative model of Le Clézio’s Alma exemplifies what Rosanne Kennedy calls “multidirectional eco-memory.” In the novel, memories of slavery and indenture in Mauritius appear alongside the imagined life of the long-extinct dodo. This multispecies scope of memory, implicitly giving birds and humans the same ontological status, is one aspiration of the novel. That said, such ambitious remembering is possible in Alma only through a generational transmission of language. In this article, I thus argue that ancestral language in the novel is essential for the survival of memory. In Alma, the narrator can only imagine (in French) the subjugated lives of the dodo and the maroons because their languages have been forgotten. On the other hand, a detailed Indo-Mauritian memory emerges precisely because Aditi can speak in Creole, English, French, and Sanskrit. However, in the Anthropocene, even the strongest philological grounding (Sanskrit) cannot protect Aditi. She can speak, so she is unlike the dodo or the maroon. However, her walk resembles the dodo’s, heralding the demise of her race. I thus suggest that while the island’s memories are multidirectional in Alma, Le Clézio describes their inheritors’ future as largely singular: in his terms, they are all destined to be “as dead as a dodo.”