L'igname rouge, 2024
Stéphane Foucaud

Every summer vacation, my brother and I were sent to the island of Maré to help the aging population in the fields. Except for working the land, time had no hold here. Our days were punctuated by the search for protein. What an adventure it was to find something to eat! I remember us one day of soccer when we hadn't eaten anything: Grandpa, who was acting as goalkeeper, didn't care and pretended not to notice his sweetheart, who would tell him off between the posts. The next day, in our Mbappé and Ronaldo outfits, we had no trouble catching the tribe's so-called competition chickens: they were seriously lacking in training, being chased all year round only by ancestors in walking frames.

The chickens were just in time. The next day, we were expecting Mr. Guizmol, the son of Grandpa's army buddy, who had become a botanist. His discussions about purple yams were endless; he was studying its effectiveness in combating diabetes. He had a contract with a large pharmaceutical company, and his presence coincided with our harvest period. Dressed like an adventurer, under his "Tintin in the Congo" hat, wearing a jacket with multiple pockets, none of which allowed him to take out his penknife, "Guigui," as his brother had nicknamed him, wandered through the bushes. He was looking for vines of "wakokos," wild yams, most of which were poisonous.

At the end of dinner, our researcher slowly took a cardboard tube out of his bag, even more lined with pockets than his clothes. He unrolled the photos of a bamboo carved by our ancestors, exhibited at the Ethnographic Museum in Geneva. Grandpa's reaction was immediate: "The red yam resurfaces from its past!" he sighed, both surprised and overwhelmed. Yet, the story of the yam wasn't colored; the lines incised into the brown plant trunk stood out thanks to the soot that had been rubbed on it. The largest of the tubers was the central character in this archaic comic strip. Observing the rest of the scene, we identified a group of people going into exile in a boat containing the precious yam.

Victor then told us about another of his missions: he had to save his wife from certain death. We understood, in the exchange between the two men, the precious virtues of this root: it blocked cellular aging thanks to its powerful antioxidant. It was the subject of great discord at the time. The immortal sorcerer who consumed it, jealously guarding it in the "indoor" culture of his openwork hut, was driven out by the arrival of the evangelists. A few faithful followed the "guardian of time" to an island that had been off-limits for a century and a half.

After some thought, and in the face of the botanist's grief, Grandpa accepted the mission, not without equipping himself with amulets that would protect him against the telluric forces that the sorcerer surely drew from the red yam. With my brother, we were smoked like common sardines over a concoction of protective leaves, prepared by our healer. We were also part of the journey. The initial excitement diminished with each stroke of our paddles. Indeed, our grandfather, wanting to create an element of surprise, had left the canoe's propeller tucked away in the hut. It was with fear in our stomachs that we approached the islet of the ageless sorcerer. The abandoned vegetation gave the landscape a particularly sinister air. We had to forget about discretion. "Pocket Man," still rummaging in a pocket, stumbled upon landing on a clam shell and went to kiss the cacti in spite of himself. His howls could have cast doubt on the absence of wolves in New Caledonia.

At the end of a path, we came face to face with the faces of our ancestors: we recognized, intimidated, the original matrix of the faces of our current families. Less reactive than us, the islanders nevertheless guessed the reason for our presence. From the group that left in 1840, a few harmless, even vegetative individuals remained, guilty of having defied the heavens. They gave us all the yams, as if to free themselves from a burden. These had lost their blood-red color, described by the tribe's storytellers. They had turned orange, because of the composition of their soil, different from that of our fields. Victor explained to us that the effect of an overly powerful antioxidant caused neurological disorders and cancers. The most resilient humans, having held out until the tuber's mutation, then benefited from real immortality, thanks to a lower astaxanthin content (the most powerful natural oxidant), thus non-degenerative. There were no sorcerers around; the first consumer of the contradictory effects of the magical starch would still have taken two hundred years to die. None of the banished followed us; they preferred to give their souls to the lord, continuing to be isolated as a form of penance.

Back at the hut, the man with the pockets still had to extract the active ingredient from the roots. An unbreakable agreement between him and Grandpa stipulated that all the yams would be burned afterward. The old man would not defy God's will.