In the beginning

 

 My Mother, Duras by Jan Cornall
Following the footsteps of Marguerite Duras in Indochina

Prologue

           On a cinema screen in a theatre in Melbourne, a dusty sun hangs over a sea-green horizon. A high-pitched female voice sings a song of Laos, laughs and chatters. The camera doesn't move, stays until the last sliver of gold is gone, stays even after that. There's nothing else to see and yet you can smell the heat, the monsoon rains; the jungle rotting into mud. Off screen, two young women begin to speak in French, telling of a beggar woman who has walked all the way to the Ganges from Savannakhet in Laos — to lose herself they say. Nearly four minutes in and the camera finally cuts to another scene. No people, just a slow pan of a colonial interior; a French embassy in Calcutta as day turns to night; fringed lamps on a piano, a cigarette burning in an ashtray, French doors open to the gardens outside— the beggar woman's song wafting in on the hint of a tropical breeze.  The commentary of the young women is slow and reflective, wistful, even. They are piecing together memories as they talk about the characters who appear on the screen; handsome young men and women in evening dress. A haunting piano tune begins to play, a man and a woman dance, slowly. There is beauty, grace, but the air is thick with a hopeless torpor. At this point in the screening, some people in the audience walk out, not wanting a bar of this French New Wave experimental stuff, but I'm captivated, I want to hear/see more, I want to enter completely into this sad, scent laden world.

          The year was 1978 and the film I was watching was India Song, originally a play, written by the French writer, Marguerite Duras. It was screened at the Pram Factory, an infamous collective run theatre where in the same year I'd acted in another of Duras’ plays, L'Amante Anglaise.  I belonged to a Pram Factory sub-group called Nightshift who championed the dark side and the avant-garde and Duras was one of our heroes.  We couldn't get enough of her and read all her works including: The Sea Wall, Destroy She Said, Natalie Granger,FIX watched her other films: Hiroshima Mon Amour, La Musica. Like us, she loved to experiment, to break the rules, and long before sampling, remixing and hybridity became hip, she was deconstructing theatre, film and new prose forms to create her panoramas of melancholic intensity.

        Her slow, cinematic scenarios of missed and impossible moments drew me in, for like the Buddhist teachings, her writing spelled out the first noble truth — Suffering Exists. As a young woman, long before I found the Buddhist teachers, Suzuki Zen Roshi or Chogyam Trungpa, Duras’ s words went straight to my heart. Articulating a field of feeling I sensed but couldn’t yet express, she transformed it into truth, art, beauty, introducing me to the rhythms and perfumes of an Asian terrain I longed to experience one day for myself.

       It was twenty-four years before I began to explore the countries of South East Asia and thirty-one years before I went looking for Duras in Vietnam, the country of her birth.  Only in the writing of this book did I begin to realise how closely my Asian travels had been framed by Duras’ writing — that the map of sensory landmarks she laid out for me included not only all the smells and scents of Vietnam, the longings and yearnings of desire, but a trail of understanding which would lead me back to the failed hopes and dreams of my own mother, the one who had stitched the threads of melancholy under my skin.

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(c) Jan Cornall 2016
Jan Cornall is working on the final draft of her travel memoir, My Mother Duras. She hopes to have it ready for publication this year.