Between transnational and postcolonial: mnemonic dynamics in Mémoires d’outre-mer

Abstract The article situates Mémoires d’outre-mer in current debates about lieux de mémoire, and in particular about the ways in which the concept elaborated by Pierre Nora is increasingly scrutinized in the light of its silences relating to colonial memory. Ferrier focuses on realms of memory such as the Mahajanga cemetery around which much of his text is constructed, but also engages directly with one of the subjects of Nora’s collection, the school textbook Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants, in order to open up a discussion of contemporary memory practices in contemporary France. He argues that French memory is often limited to national boundaries, and that any internal diversity is regulated, sanitized, hierarchized, with France’s status as a transculturated, “travelling” culture denied in the process. The novel is a creative reaction to this mnemonic tendency, with the work situated at the intersection of the transnational and postcolonial, two concepts that are far from being synonymous but are nevertheless closely related throughout the text.

text's narrator -operating, we discover as the text unfolds, at an intersection of travel writing with detective fiction -opens the work in a graveyard in Madagascar: "Au cimeti� ere de Mahajanga, il y a trois tombes.Elles brillent, insoupc ¸onnables, au soleil de midi.Toutes les trois sont presque identiques, même taille, même couleur, mêmes dimensions" (M� emoires 13).This is the location to which the narrator returns in his epilogue also, at which point it is no longer a site of death and enclosure but becomes instead "un jardin peupl� e de mille formes qui se r� eveillent" (339).By bookending his account with visits to this resting place of the dead, the narrator not only emphasises the importance of the cemetery in his text, but also foregrounds the quest for the spectral narratives of those buried (or indeed not buried) within it.
Urbain's notion of the archipelago of the dead is significant here.For Ferrier's archipelagic thinking, associating sites seemingly fragmented and scattered in new, centrifugal configurations, extends to, and is indeed rooted in, the cemetery.The site in Mahajanga is not isolated or in any way insular, but connected instead, in the narrator's geographical imagination, with other burial grounds, not least the now disappeared cimeti� ere de Clamart, the final resting place of the eighteenth-century Parisian poor.Here there were common graves, but no individual monuments or tombs.Eventually closed in 1793, the Clamart cemetery was originally located on the rue des Morts, now the rue du Fer-� a-Moulin, birthplace of Ren� e Goscinny but also Parisian home of the work's narrator: "Il y a tout un peuple", Ferrier notes, "de morts l� a-dessous.C'est d'ici que je vous � ecris" (M� emoires 35).This palmpsestic view of Paris betokens a verticality that is central to the poetics of memory that underpins the text.This is, however, an axis that is complemented by a horizontal expansionism, spilling beyond the container of the nation-state and locating the sites with which Ferrier engages in a network associated with relationality rather than any centripetal hierarchy: "pour comprendre la France, il est necessaire de passer par d'autres pays.Il faut aller voir ailleurs pour comprendre ce qu'est la France … " (34).
In this transnational archipelago of the dead, the cemetery of Mahajanga, on the north coast of Madagascar, eschews the anonymity of its Parisian counterpart.A pair of the graves with which the text opens are clearly identified with two of the text's key historical figures: the narrator's grandfather Maxime and his friend Arthur Dai Zong.As is so often the case in sites of this type, however, the graveyard sees these personal aspects become entangled with public ones: we learn that this is also a state-endorsed lieu de m� emoire, a patch of Frenchness in the Indian Ocean, where the casualties of the Second Madagascar expedition of 1895 are buried and commemorated with a monument '� a la m� emoire des militaries et auxiliaires indig� enes morts au service de la France" (M� emoires 17).This lieu de m� emoire is, however, also a lieu d'oubli.
Although, as the narrator notes, "les m� emoires ne se d� echirent pas, elles s'� epaulent", there is nevertheless a clear mnemonic hierarchy, with the graves of the British troops who died in the Battle of Madagascar of 1942, liberating the island from Vichy occupation, remaining relatively un-commemorated at the same site.
In Pierre Nora's multi-volume collection Les Lieux de m� emoire, such cemeteries and memorials to the dead inevitably play a key role: Madeleine Reb� erioux devotes an essay to the mur des f� ed� er� es in the P� ere Lachaise cemetery, against which an estimated 166 Communards were executed in 1871 before being thrown into a common grave; but perhaps more pertinently, Antoine Prost analyses "les monuments aux morts", state-endorsed bulwarks against amnesia that are key to construction of national memory, but identified more with exclusion than inclusion.To take the prominent example of the tomb of the unknown soldier, Bertrand Tavernier's account of the search for the body it contains in La Vie et rien d'autre contains the powerful line: "Pas d'Anglais.Pas d'Allemand", and certainly no tirailleur s� en� egalais (Norindr 13); and the MLF protests in 1970, in honour of the "femme du soldat inconnu", revealed the silenced gendering of such sites (Fell).
The circling, in M� emoires d'outre-mer, around what we might call the tombe d'un personnage inconnu reveals not so much an interest in such lieux de m� emoire as a commitment to their radical deconstruction.Official sites are juxtaposed with and indeed largely eclipsed by their private, familial equivalents.Ferrier elaborates a narrative that suggests how memory practices should be not only personalized and relativized, but also decolonized, transnationalized and ultimately-following this logic-provincialized.The text contains multiple intertexts, explicit and implicit, as we are drawn into its author's literary memory: Perec, Val� ery, C� esaire and many others emerge as interlocutors, cited strategically as part of the devolved, decentred narration on which the work depends.These processes are particularly striking, however, in the narrator's direct engagement with one of the handful of texts that figure among Pierre Nora's own sites of memory, the Third Republic textbook Le Tour de la France par deux enfants, to which a chapter was devoted in Les Lieux de m� emoire by Jacques and Mona Ozouf.Ferrier introduces the work, first published in 1877 and rewritten progressively into the early twentieth century, in his discussion of contemporary memory practices in contemporary France.The book features among the reading matter he takes on a flight from Paris to Madagascar, where its juxtaposition with contemporary magazines and newspapers situates the "petit livre rouge de la R� epublique" (to borrow the terms of the Ozoufs) firmly in the context of our own "troubles de m� emoire" (M� emoires 62).Ferrier performs a gesture of rhetorical inclusion: "Vous êtes franc ¸ais, vous connaissez l'histoire" (63), with the polysemic "histoire" alluding here not only to the peripatetic, pedagogical narrative of the orphans Andr� e and Julien, leaving Prussian-occupied Alsace-Lorraine in search of the m� ere-patrie, but also the state-endorsed history of a republic, une et indivisible, that underpins their endeavours and the pedagogical purposes for which these are deployed.
This recognizability is central to the elevation of Le Tour de la France to the status of lieu de m� emoire.As the Ozoufs remind us, in the century following its initial publication, 8.5 million copies of the book were sold, with multiple readerships meaning that the book's reach was in reality much more extensive.Reflecting on this influence, Ferrier dubs it "un best-seller increvable" (M� emoires 67).The textbook emerged from the trauma of the Franco-Prussian war and the amputation of parts of the Hexagon to which this led.The goal of Andr� e and Julien, in their mission to "apprendre, parcourir," is the restoration of "l'unit� e nationale" (Ozouf and Ozouf 281).Ferrier describes the geographical diversity of the book's "grande fresque itin� erante" (M� emoires 64) while adding that "[l]e manuel regorge aussi de moments historiques" (64).The France that the orphans tour is peopled by national types (or even stereotypes) that would not be out of place in images d'Epinal: "d'agriculteurs besogneux, d'ouvriers industrieux, d'horlogers m� eticuleux … de militaires courageux … d'artistes prodigieux … de savants audacieux … d'ecrivains fabuleux!"(64-65), and Ferrier cannot avoid a certain admiration for this ambitiously encyclopaedic work: "D� ecouverte du pays par le sol, par l'air, par la lumi-� ere: tout un po� eme, tout un paysage en une seule inhalation" (65).
The Ozoufs detected the mechanisms that transformed this textbook into an enduring republican universalist monument, namely its representation-across its multiple editions-of France's internal diversity that is simultaneously celebrated and domesticated.Nowhere is this clearer than in the presentation of language, with the diversity of regional multilingualism serving as a source of confusion for the young travellers, and French acting as a space of certainty, safety and stability: "Bref," note the Ozoufs, "la langue r� egionale est soit frivolit� e, soit p� ech� e" (Ozouf and Ozouf 282).Ferrier acknowledges the broader manifestations of this ethnolinguistic nationalism, linking the book to the persistence of "une grande m� emoire unique, monocorde, monotone, pr� etendument nationale" (M� emoires 62).He is equally interested, however, in aspects of Le Tour de la France to which the Ozoufs, hobbled by the hypernationalist agenda of Les Lieux de m� emoire, pay little if any attention.M� emoire d'outre-mer deconstructs the broader silences of Le Tour de la France, identifying "ses zones d'ombres, et même ses points aveugles" (66) in relation to the French colonial empire.Later editions, notes Ferrier, at least acknowledge the existence of the outre-mer, but in elliptical, even euphemistic terms Il y a bien, dans les � editions tardives, quelques passages sur ce qui appelle encore l'Annam (chapitre 122) ou "les essais agricoles aux colonies" (chapitre 123), mais ces "quarante millions de kilom� etres carr� es, peupl� es par trente-huit millions d'hommes", que "la France poss� ede ou prot� ege" (� etrange ambiguït� e dans la formulation), sont chaque fois exp� edi� es en quelques lignes … (M� emoires 67) French memory remains limited to national boundaries, and any internal diversity is itself regulated, sanitized, hierarchized, with France's status as a transculturated, "travelling" culture, creolized in its own right, denied in the process.
In their essay for Pierre Nora, the Ozoufs had acknowledged this tension between the mobile and the sessile, noting that Andr� e and Julien's journey is a temporary one, leading at the end of the journey narrative to: "le bonheur de la fixit� e, familiale et professionnelle" (Ozouf and Ozouf 282).Like the domestic diversity of France, subject under the Third Republic to the logic of an internal colonialism whose effects are still apparent, any dynamism that the travellers embody is closely policed: "La m� emoire d'une ann� ee sur les chemins est devenue la r� egle d'une existence assise" (282).Ferrier's response is to imagine a rewriting of Le Tour de la France via the markedly Glissantian trope of the d� etour, presenting the borders of the Hexagon not as impermeable but as deeply porous.The result is not revisionist but actively corrective, a recovery of a France always-already present but routinely suppressed: "multi-territoriale, aux temporalit� es qui s'ignorent, se r� epondent, s'enlacent, se superposent" (M� emoires 69).The approach becomes a contrapuntal one, bringing together Fanon and Vivant Denon (a key figure in the artistic world of the First Empire), Moli� ere and C� esaire, creating an alternative itinerary that reaches "par tous les d� epartements et territoires d'outre-mer, mais aussi par tous les territoires o� u l'histoire de la France s'est form� ee, d� eform� ee, transform� ee, recompos� ee: colonies, comptoirs, protectorats" (M� emoires 68).The result is an approach that sketches out memories that underpin "un terrain h� et� eog� ene et pourtant coh� erent" (70).
The intertext of Le Tour de la France is thus an important one.On the one hand, in a number of ways, M� emoires d'outre-mer converges surprisingly with a work that appears to be its antithesis: Ferrier's work is also (to cite again the Ozoufs) a "texte � a tout faire" (278), the transgeneric voguing and wildly eclectic subject matter of which similarly constitute "un livre de m� emoire," even "un art de la m� emoire" (279).On the other hand, however, M� emoires d'outre-mer is an experimental illustration of the alternative narratives that such postcolonial, transnational critique may generate.M� emoires d'outre-mer thus acts as an interrogation of the geographical, historical and ideological limitations of this Third Republic primer but it foregrounds at the same time the need to understand the afterlives of that text, in particular as they relate to the ideologies of memory still evident in the present.The Ozoufs focused on the situatedness of national memory that Le Tour de la France performs: "la m� emoire collective s'accroche mieux aux lieux qu'aux dates" (285), but in the process they point unwittingly to the limitations of the lieu de m� emoire as a concept, marked by its geographical restriction and a reluctance to accept fully the implications of the dynamism and interrelatedness that the practices of memory, when freed from the restriction of state endorsement, invariably demonstrate.
If Le Tour de la France is a lieu de m� emoire, then M� emoires d'outremer is to be read in the light of, indeed is to be understood as generative of, alternative decentred and radically peripatetic memory practices that have been identified in recent years.Astrid Erll foregrounded a transnational, diasporic defiance of boundaries with her concept of "traveling memory," and the notion of the noeud de m� emoire, proposed by Michael Rothberg, Debarati Sanyal and Max Silverman, captures the postcolonial entanglements that underpin Ferrier's own account.M� emoires d'outre-mer deploys a range of tropes and metaphors to capture the mnemonic processes it studies and performs.In a striking scene, the narrator visits the jetty, known as the "mur des fous," constructed by his grandfather during the Vichy occupation of Madagascar.He describes the remains of this mysterious, quixotic project: "Aujourd'hui, on peut encore en voir un tronc ¸on, l� ech� e par les vagues" (M� emoires 278).Ruination is foregrounded, reminding us of the uneven processes of remembering and forgetting whereby the past persists or subsides, and challenging-as Ann Laura Stoler reminds us in Duress-the artificial teleologies implied by other metaphors such as the legacies of colonial empire.It is, however, the closely related figure of the trace, this Derridean and by extension Glissantian concept, that is perhaps most pertinent.In the realm of memory, it reveals itself in what Patrick Chamoiseau, in his account of the French Guianese bagne (Guyane), called the trace-m� emoire.(It is notable that Guyane and Cayenne feature among the alternative archipelago sites that Ferrier evokes.)"J'ai eu du mal," notes the narrator in the novel's opening chapter, "� a retrouver la trace de Maxime Ferrier" (M� emoires 23); "[p]our retracer la vie de Maxime Ferrier � a cette � epoque, les sources sont rares" (49).Thinking of the context in which Chamoiseau coined the notion of trace-m� emoire, it is surely no coincidence that one of these, a rare remaining photograph, the narrator's grandfather is said to have "un air de bagnard" (48); and in a fleeting reference to a journey to China, one itinerary embedded within another, in search of his grandfather's friend, Ferrier notes: "j'ai retrouv� e la trace d'Arthur, au milieu de la vaste plaine de la Chine du Nord" (110; my emphasis).
This focus on the trace has methodological implications.A recurrent trope in the novel, from the preparatory stages in Paris to the fieldwork in the Indian Ocean, is the proliferation of ephemera-"[p]rogrammes de cirque, articles de journaux, rapports de police" (M� emoires 49).Ephemera is rarely ephemeral.This is so evident that, on occasion, the material appears to be taking over the life of the narrator.Accumulating, while in Madagascar, these traces of the past that permit a shuttling between the micro and macro, the personal and the global, the narrator seems on occasion to be overwhelmed: "Les papiers des valises et de la commode ont maintenant envahi tout l'espace, comme des herbes folles surgies du pass� e" (151).In moving from the archival to the ephemeral, Ferrier signals a different mode of travail de m� emoire.To borrow again from Chamoiseau, the author burrows down, going "[d]essous la M� emoire hautaine des forts et des � edifices" (Guyane 15).He seeks-instead of engaging with more traditional lieux de m� emoire-to uncover "des histoires domi-n� ees, des m� emoires � ecras� ees" (16) through the detection, recovery and reassemblage of memory-traces that are "bris� ees, diffuses, � eparpill� ees" (21).Ferrier maintains a healthy scepticism about the reliability of the material discovered, especially that relating to the circus in which Maxime performed.The character Georges tells the narrator: "il y a fort � a parier que ces programmes � etaient en grande partie fictifs" (M� emoires 99), but this creative engagement with the "m� emoires d'outre-mer" of the novel's title nevertheless forms part of a wider pattern of globalizing French national history.
A major intervention in this area, Patrick Boucheron's Histoire mondiale de la France-146 contributions by 122 historians-attracted the ire of Pierre Nora, troubled by the thesis that "l'histoire est diverse, plurielle et complexe" (Boucheron and Steta).Predictably, the usual suspects lined up alongside him: � Eric Zemmour accused Boucheron and his co-authors of seeking to "dissoudre la France en 800 pages," Alain Finkielkraut dismissed them as "fossoyeurs du grand h� eritage franc ¸ais" ("La charge d'Alain Finkielkraut").Ferrier reflects this tradition of history and memory practices that globalize and (to a certain extent) decentre the Hexagon, foregrounding the porosity of its borders, but his approach is that of a much more radical relativization and even-to borrow the term of Dipesh Chakrabarty (Provincializing Europe)-a provincialization of France.This manoeuvre is evident in the work's title: these are M� emoires d'outre-mer, not m� emoires mondiales [or mondiaux] de la France in which the outre-mer is instrumentalized (and in the process further marginalized) as a tool of diversification.Martin Munro reminds us of the ways in which the text engages with this keyword outre-mer: "the contested, paradoxical, contradictory, and in some senses untranslatable concept that the author seeks to question and to some degree reconceptualize" ("The Elsewhere and the Overseas," 111).Central to this reconceptualization is a disruption of the imaginary geography of centre and periphery, illustrated by De Gaulle's dismissive trivialization of France's overseas departments and territories as the "confetti of Empire."Ferrier illustrates the ways in such dismissal hides the fact that narratives of the past built on a myth of national self-sufficiency can only ever be partial.His narrator describes to his friend Xavier a process of de-exoticization of elsewhere: "Madagascar, Maurice, l'oc� ean Indien font partie int� egrante de l'Histoire de France: on ne peut la comprendre si on ne passe pas par eux, et par quelques autres encore" (M� emoires 33).As such, he aligns himself actively with Glissant's withering statement, from L'Intention po� etique: "Vous dites outre-mer (nous l'avons dit avec vous), mais vous êtes bientôt outre-mer" (21).
Reflecting on the implications of such a polycentric, relational approach, Munro describes "the network of historical and cultural connections that the narrative gradually weaves together" ("The Elsewhere and the Overseas" 113).As noted already, these are accumulated not through a tour, which tends to bring the traveller back to a fixed starting point, but through a series of detours whose digressive nature proposes new practices and new geographies of memory.As the title of this article suggests, these are to be situated at the intersection of the transnational and postcolonial, two concepts that are far from being synonymous but are nevertheless closely related.The transnational is reflected in the importance of travel for the text.In terms of literary categorization, M� emoires d'outre-mer is reminiscent of the circus in which the narrator's grandfather performed: "Western, � epop� ee, f� eerie exotique … tous les genres se mêlent" (M� emoires 96).Meeting his friend Xavier in the street in Paris, the narrator rejects the genres proposed for his emerging text-"roman familial," "roman exotique" (M� emoires 33)-and the resulting work indeed plays on its own generic indeterminacy, despite the paratexual assertion of its status as a "roman": at once m� emoire (as its title implies), essay, detective novel, biography and love story, what perhaps underpins this diversity is an unorthodox travelogue-an account of a transnational journey that takes the narrator from France to Madagascar (with tantalizing glimpses of other detours, such as the trip to China in search of Arthur Dai Zong), but where these horizontal axes are complemented by the vertical travel as well as deep, palimpsestic mapping that he conducts in the field.
Journeying is thus a methodology: "si je veux comprendre quelque chose � a la vie de ces gens," notes the narrator, "il faut aussi prendre la route, retrouver leur piste et d� evorer leurs chemins" (M� emoires 189).But travel also provides a prism through which the world is observed.James Clifford described "travelling cultures" (Routes), and the narrator translates this notion into his observation of those he meets or those whose lives he uncovers.The provocative replacement of the term Franc ¸ais de souche with that of Franc ¸ais de branche reflects a broader emphasis on the creolization of origins, epitomized by his grandmother Pauline, whose family's past in Goa signal a Luso-Indian hinterland, one of many traces of the multiple other directions the narrative might have adopted.Note also the telegraphic reference to the peripatetic existence of Axel Le Funambule-"qui m� eriterait," we are told, "� a lui seul un autre roman" (M� emoires 136).These other journeys are encapsulated in the novel's opening scene, in which the narrator, in the cemetery at Mahajanga, pauses to listen to "la rumeur du passage et des grandes migrations, l'� enorme passade du courant, les voyages, les errances port� ees par les bras de mer et les � epaules du vent" (M� emoires 18-19).
This emphasis on transnational displacement is firmly located, however, in a postcolonial frame, and Ferrier is acutely aware of the broader context in which his work is to be situated.Citing for instance "D� enationaliser l'histoire de France," an article in Lib� eration from December 2004 by historian Suzanne Citron, he challenges the reassertion (evident in some contemporary political discourse in France) of "une France homog� ene, une, indivisible, essence m� etahistorique myst� erieusement pr� esente dans une Gaule mythique originelle" (M� emoires 60), and converges with Citron's call for the rewriting of French history in ways that engage with the postcoloniality of the present: Invent� ee pour et transmise par l'� ecole de la IIIe R� epublique [i.e., that of Le Tour de la France par deux enfants], notre histoire multiculturelle et polyethnique doit être r� e� ecrite dans la France d'aujourd'hui, une France postvichyste, post-coloniale, amarr� ee au char de l'Europe, ins� er� ee dans la complexit� e du monde du XXIe si� ecle.(M� emoires 61) Ferrier's response is the elaboration of a practice and poetics of memory in constant dialogue with the two key postcolonial Caribbean authors to whom I have already alluded, namely Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau.Awarded the Prix Glissant by the Institut du Tout-Monde in 2012, Ferrier is one of the most subtle and original critics of the late Martinican author's work; 1 Chamoiseau provided a foreword to the English translation of M� emoires d'outre-mer, and the place of Cr� eolit� e in Ferrier's wider work, not least in his reflections on Japan, is well documented (see "Creole Japan")."La m� emoire," notes Ferrier's narrator, "est comme la mer [ … ].Certaines traces sont perdues, enfouies ou bien vola-tilis� ees, mais elles ne nous parlent pas, ou alors vaguement, confus� ement, comme le murmure de l'oc� ean dont on ne sait trop s'il s'approche ou s'il s'� eteint" (M� emoires 55-56).The engagement with Glissant and Chamoiseau -whose work is part of a broader Caribbean reflection captured by Brathwaite's pithy claim that "history is submarine"-helps us to understand such distinctive mnemonic dynamics, at once relational, deterritorialized, oceanic and archipelagic, that emerge from this reflection and underpin M� emoires d'outre-mer.On the one hand, Ferrier responds to the political critique of French identity politics evident in the authors' manifestoes such as "De loin," an open letter triggered by Nicolas Sarkozy's short-lived (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010) and deeply controversial Minist� ere de l'Immigration, de l'Int� egration, de l'Identit� e nationale.In response to this institution, Chamoiseau and Glissant noted: "Le monde nous a ouvert � a ses complexit� es.Chacun est d� esormais un individu, riche de plusieurs appartenances, sans pouvoir se r� eduire � a l'une d'elles, et aucune R� epublique ne pourra s'� epanouir sans harmoniser les expressions de ces multi-appartenances" (Manifestes 31).On the one hand, our narrator's comment that "certaines m� emoires sont emmur� ees" (M� emoires 62) gestures towards such a critique of an ideological segregation of identities and their relationship to the past, but it underlines at the same time the originality of Ferrier's response in which poetics and practice converge.On the other, he demonstrates the poetics of memory that might be generated by the transversality that Glissant in particular proposed as an alternative to such fixity and confinement.
M� emoires d'outre-mer performs, in its very textuality, such a gathering together of fragmented traces that the narrator himself undertakes.Collecting oral histories of his grandfather from the jeweller Jean Pivoine, the narrator notes: "Je sors mon carnet, mon stylo, je prends des notes … " (M� emoires 198), and this approach shapes the narrative as Ferrier assembles recollections, photographs, documents, references to literature and film … Self-reflexivity is a key part of this approach, as the narrator's agency in identifying and connecting these fragments becomes clear.At the same time, there is a recurrent use of the poetics of enumeration as Ferrier assembles lists of the material he gathers-these lists illustrate the dual functions that Umberto Eco identifies in this rhetorical device: they assemble items "deliberately devoid of any apparent reciprocal relationship," characterized by "chaotic enumeration," as exemplified by Borges, Joyce and Pr� evert, who seek to "chaoticize" order and "reshuffle the world" (The Infinity of Lists 254); and also, as with Perec's Je me souviens or his Tentative d'� epuisement d'un lieu parisien, they are "coherent by excess, [ … ] put[ting] together entities that have some sort of kinship among them" (The Infinity of Lists 254).I mention the list because it functions at the intersection of the chaos-monde and the oftenunexpected relationality that nevertheless underpins any appearance of baroque excess.In terms of the practice of memory, this manifests itself in the clear multi-directionality, central to the text, evident most notably in Ferrier's subtle reflection on the convergence of colonialism and fascism, empire and the Holocaust.This is reflected not least in the Madagascar Plan, the initial plan to relocate by force the Jewish population of Europe to the Indian Ocean island, to which Ferrier devotes significant attention, 2 but also in one of the text's major lacunae, its non-dit surrounding the massacres of tens of thousands of inhabitants of the island by the French state that followed the Malagasy Uprising of 1947. 3  The narrator's allusions to this national trauma are telegraphic: "tortures, ex� ecutions sommaires, deputes arrêt� es en d� epit de leur immunit� e parlementaire, villages brûl� es, militants enferm� es dans des wagons et passes � a la mitraille" (M� emoires 303), but act as a reminder nevertheless that the memories gathered in the novel are neither abstract nor limited to the individual or the familial.Despite their magnitude and the national trauma they represent in Madagascar itself, the 1947 massacres are largely unknown in France."La m� emoire est un muscle," notes the narrator, "si on ne l'exerce pas, elle s'atrophie" (M� emoires 36).It is to the contemporary risks of such atrophication that M� emoires d'outre-mer responds.This is a process that is not only evident in the silencing of the past.It is present also in the ideological compartmentalization or instrumentalization of that past, in ways that deny the transnational, transcolonial and multidirectional relatedness of the type that Ferrier foregrounds.M� emoires d'outre-mer gestures towards the reparative potential of memory.It signals the possibility of memory practices that areto cite the source of one of the novel's epigraphs, Aim� e C� esaire, from his comments on humanism-"� a la mesure du monde" (Discours sur le colonialisme 54).