“Oreo”, ahead of its time<

Macha SéryA Jewish immigrant who calls on a voodoo consultant, an anti-Semite fond of Talmud, "a traveling gay executioner", a history teacher with four strings to his bow (paranoia, tap dancing, cost accounting, hatred of nature) , a couple of dwarfs selling dog whistles, a mute sound engineer, a pimp from Harlem in a pink “ass-tadpole” suit… With its crazy characters, Oreo, released in the United States in 1974, baffled the time the few readers who had it in hand.

If some works come too late, others come too soon, and this was the case with this unique novel by Fran Ross (1935-1985), now considered a classic of humor in his country. Its author did not have the chance to have a career comparable to the African-American writers who, like her, made their debut in the seventies, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker or Gayl Jones. Oreo was too parodic, too carnivalesque, too politically incorrect. He challenged all stereotypes of race, sex and religion, deviating from the canons of Black Arts, the artistic branch of the Black Power movement, then at its height, in that he promoted a mobile identity and a mixed culture, unrelated to the history of slavery and the concept of negritude.

Postmodern storytelling

A contemporary version of the Theseus myth, Oreo recounts the family genealogy and New York odyssey of Christine, 15, from the marriage of a black pianist and a Jewish actor, to discover the secret of her birth. Eccentric but also eccentric story by its postmodern narration which cheerfully mixes addresses to the reader, letters, advertising slogans and multiple choice questions, by its network of references drawing at the same time from the sources of learned and popular cultures, as well as by its mix of idioms (English of Oxford, Latin etymology, neologisms, slang, Yiddish terms, southern expressions, etc.), he traces his own truant path. Singular and bravado, funny and touching, like its heroine, an expert in lexicology and martial arts.

“Blending vernacular dialects, bilingual and ethnic comedy, conniving humour, verbal eccentricities and linguistic quirks, this novel dazzles with its ability to purposely test its reader's abilities, as if Fran Ross were writing for an audience that doesn't 'does not yet exist', observes, in the afterword to the French edition, Harryette Mullen, professor of comparative literature at Cornell University (Ithaca, State of New York). It is to her that this literary comet owes its release from purgatory. As she browsed through the cluttered shelves of a second-hand bookstore specializing in far-left and African-American literature in 1994, a dusty cover intrigued her. A woman with an Afro cut wore a Star of David pendant. “I read this novel with great curiosity and discovered a rare pearl, she confides to the “World of Books”. A satire invented by a black American. Why had I never heard of it, nor my colleagues and friends? She tried to meet the author, learned that she had died at the age of 50 and collected some biographical details about her.

Born in Philadelphia, Fran Ross, from the lower middle class African-American, immersed herself in books at an early age. Curious, she liked to listen to the conversations in Yiddish that took place in the store next to her house, as well as in a bazaar where one of her brothers was employed. With her license in communication, journalism and theater in her pocket, she left for New York in 1960, where she worked in several publishing houses and collaborated with humorist Richard Pryor for a TV show.

Harryette Mullen's enthusiasm for Oreo was contagious, since she easily convinced a press officer at Northeastern University (Massachusetts) to republish it in 2000. Six years later, Paul Beatty, the author of Slumberland (Threshold , 2009) and American Prophet (Northwest Passage, 2013), reserved a place for him in his anthology of African-American humor. This is how the translator Séverine Weiss in turn discovered the book and fell in love with it. “She did a translation job of remarkable quality, out of sheer conviction, before sending it to me; I was immediately convinced,” explains Sébastien Raimondi, head of Post-editions, a very young house created in March. “Anti-oedipal novel par excellence, Oreo bears witness to what was tremendously free and inventive about his time, a decade that paved the way for unprecedented forms of expression. Identity, gender, origin, in a word, heritage, are not considered there as a fatality, but as a space of open conflicts that literature can dispose of subjectively, until it joyfully dynamites them. While “identity” motives are experiencing a particularly worrying blowback today, it seemed urgent to me to give Oreo, an irreverent, “mixed-blood” novel to read… and proud of it! »

Here is a picaresque novel that resembles a wine for laying down, kept for forty years in a cellar. Over time, its flavors have blossomed. They burst in the mouth, in a great burst of laughter.

Oreo, by Fran Ross, translated from English (United States) by Séverine Weiss, Post-editions, 292 p., €19.

Theseus, afro haircut

When Christine's paternal grandmother, alias Oreo, learned that her son Samuel was going to marry a black woman, she died of a heart attack; on the maternal side, at the news of this alliance with a Jew, his grandfather found himself paralyzed in the form of a half-swastika. Christine does not feel marginalized or doubly discriminated against. On the contrary, she navigates with ease in all environments, all languages. “In addition to her precocious talent for specular writing, she inherited from her mother a love of words, their nuance and their cadence, their juice and their zest, their cadence and their twist. Having reached adolescence, the young girl left Philadelphia for New York to find her father. Armed with cryptic clues that he left her when he abandoned the marital home, she meets people who constitute as many obstacles to overcome or enigmas to solve. Daughter of a feminist for whom "a good black farfallocrat is a dead farfallocrat", she has adopted the motto of the Scottish regiments: "Nemo me impune lacessit" ("No one provokes me with impunity"). In the second half of the novel, each chapter is titled by a character taken from the myth of Theseus, embodied here by Oreo, his mother being Ethrea, his father Aegeus, his uncle Heracles, Toro the bulldog the minotaur, etc. Fran Ross presents here a feminist tale, teeming with puns and puns, halfway between James Joyce and Mel Brooks. MS

Oreo, by Fran Ross, translated from English (United States) by Séverine Weiss, Post-editions, 292 p., €19.

Extract

“From the Jewish side of the family, Christine inherited curly hair and dark, thin skin (she ranks around 7 on the color scale, and you shouldn't tickle her). From the dark side of the family, she inherited angular features, a sense of rhythm, and thin skin (you really shouldn't tickle her). Two years after the end of this book, she will be the ideal beauty spoken of in legends and folklore – it's up to you to choose the nationality and specify the ethnic group. Whatever face and figure your legends and folklore conjure up in your mind, my little darling, she will embody it to perfection. Christine is no ordinary child. She was born wearing a membrane that her first vigorous howl tore into eight. »

Oreos, page 55

The world

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