SOURCE: Motte, Warren. “Writing Away.” World Literature Today 71, no. 4 (fall 1997): 689–94.

In the following essay, Motte examines how Onitsha addresses the concept of the “mother tongue.”

For many critics, J. M. G. Le Clézio's principal virtue as a writer is his ability to construct a novelistic landscape that is dramatically different from the real world of his readers, a deeply evocative, seductive “elsewhere” to which we travel on the virtual journey of his fiction.¹ Such a technique is of course one of the privileged gestures of narrative, at least since Homer; yet in Le Clézio's texts it assumes a richly personal specificity which may be read, I think, as his authorial signature. I should like to examine that effect, focusing upon what I consider to be the most exemplary of Le Clézio's recent novels, Onitsha.

Like many of Le Clézio's writings, Onitsha is a novel...