Multiple worlds

Part of my efforts to identify identity representations and cultural diversity in cultural and geographical spaces other than the Central and Eastern Europe, I discovered today Andrée Chedid and hers "Multiple child". Born in Egypt, of Christian/Maronite Lebanese descent, she spent part of his life in Egypt and, from age 14, in Europe. Although I tried to separate her personal life and experience of the story narrated in the book - a one-arm child whose parents are killed during the civil war in Lebanon - sent to relatives in France, with fragments of memory of family episodes spent in Egypt - it is difficult to do it and, at a certain extent, detrimental to the understanding of the book.

Omar-Jo is a 12-year old, with the calculated distance and human knowledge of an adult, who founded refuge of his traumatised childhood - he lost his arm in the attack where his parents died - in a Manege of Maxime. Little by little he is reconstructing his universe, making laughing people and children and bringing back to life Maxime, whose decision to left his previous career for his dream of the Manege blocked in his impossibility to go beyond his own limits. He owned the idea and the real project but was lacking the grain of enthusiasm to put on the right move the wonder-wheel. Omar-Jo is becoming the soul of this project, accepting to dedicate his time to recreate for free the world of circus.

In visual or written arts, the image of the circus is corresponding to the idea of freedom and children' imagination. Within its limits, all are free to laugh, beyond any social, racial and linguistic differentiations. This is the world shared by Omar-Jo with the others, including with the taciturn Maxime. Brought from his world of hate and fratricide conflicts, he is fighting hard, together with the other characters from the book, to preserve his identity. In this world of appearances, he is himself, outlining its meaning as a human, and asserting his normality, beyond the different perception of his one-arm appearance: "I am a normal kid". And this is starting with the fight to keep his name in the front of his host relatives from Paris. Ironically, he will give a new name, made of a similar composition of two names, to his feminine correspondent - "the poppy lady" - Cheranne, with a destiny split between France and United States. Together, they share the double belonging, but only the boy is presented in interaction with his past and history. His father, Omar, told him once: "You have to learn getting older than the others". This is his destiny of belonging to a world where what matters is survival. And this was, for years, the education the people belonging to his place - the author let know later in the book that it is about Lebanon, Egypt being the direct geographical reference, but this might happen in many other places across the Globe. Lysia, the woman for whom Omar-Jo mother used to work is the older version of this journey: she lost everything, including his social life, wandered from a place to another and living outbursts of sentimental attachment to life.

The structure of the book is very simple, without complicate characters and narrative. The centre of the story is Omar-Jo, but his energy shadows the action of the other presences, missing the multiplication potential of a world as a huge manege where we are trading our nostalgies and the lost roots.