Tobacco and chocolate as a symbol of one’s own family history
Published: Wednesday, Nov 6th 2024, 12:10
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Home is a plural in the novel "Tobacco and Chocolate". In it, Basel-based author Martin R. Dean places his own family history in the context of colonial history. The book has rightly been nominated for the Swiss Book Prize.
In secrecy, "the unspoken quickly grows into a taboo" and obscures the view of the past. Martin R. Dean is familiar with these taboos. He was born in Wynental in the canton of Aargau as "a colored child in the white sheets of a woman in childbirth". His father came from Trinidad and his mother was from the village. This family constellation shaped him and sharpened his eye for the fractures in what is commonly referred to as home.
In 2003 in "My Fathers" and now in "Tobacco and Chocolate", he explores his own biography by focusing on the story of his mother. When she was 18, she met a man from Trinidad, the author's father, in London. However, the family's happiness on the Caribbean island was short-lived. In 1960, mother and son returned to Switzerland. They were soon followed by a young doctor from Trinidad, Martin R. Dean's second father.
Three-part research
In his novel, Dean describes a three-part investigation into his mother and his own childhood, his origins and his homeland. Using photographs, he traces the faded memory of Trinidad and finds an extensive network of relatives during a visit to the Caribbean island. In the Wynental valley, where he grew up, he also met the Italian "guest workers" who toiled in the stump factory and were looked down upon.
Gradually, the author discovers that the entire family history is steeped in migration. The socially long-established relatives in Trinidad are descended from ancestors who once immigrated from India as contract workers on the plantations. And his beloved grandmother Erna fled from the north German island of Rügen 100 years ago because of the hunger there. She hid her foreignness in her new homeland under bourgeois decorum.
Against forgetting
Martin R. Dean has always been extremely vigilant about the discrimination and marginalization that he himself has experienced. He places this experience personally and vividly in the colonial context of alienation, which leaves wounds over generations. He combines the bitterness of tobacco with the sweetness of chocolate - both stimulants and products of exploitation.
The fact that he was left out of the distribution of the inheritance after his mother's death is an indication that this exclusion still has an effect today. Where "the family" was awarded the house and inventory by the legal executor, he was left with a small - albeit valuable, because imperishable - remnant: a few photos and the memory.
He wrests from his relatives everything that they have revealed in their "illness of forgetting", he writes. By masterfully combining essayistic reflection and research with literary narrative, he creates an impressive biographical portrait.*
*This text by Beat Mazenauer, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
©Keystone/SDA
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