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Anticipatory Testimonies: Environmental Disaster In Claudine Jacques's Fictional Prophecies, Julia L. Frengs

French Language and Literature Papers

In Caledonian author Claudine Jacques's 2002 novel L'Âge du perroquet-banane, Parabole païenne, a tribal elder warns a man "from elsewhere": "in our country, if you remove a taboo bone, you disrupt the sea, if you touch it without respect you invite a cyclone, if you toss the bones of our elders you provoke a...tidal wave" (54). Although this work is set in a futuristic world after an ambiguous "Great Disaster" on an unnamed Oceanic island, the author manages to allegorically recount the history of the environmental atrocities attributed to the earth's human occupants that have transformed the present reality of …