Home » Canada » Thélyson Orélien » C’était ça ou mourir[ It Was That or Die]
Thélyson Orélien : C’était ça ou mourir [ It Was That or Die]
Before starting to review this book, I must briefly mention the controversy surrounding it. Though it had huge success in the French speaking world, being, nominated for various French literary prizes,. it has been accused of being written by AI. His Wikipedia page outlines the controversy but there are numerous pages on the web in French, English and doubtless lots of other languages on the topic. He and his publishers denied this and other AI verifiers have taken his side. I am not even vaguely competent to judge so till he is unreservedly proven guilty I shall assume that he did write the book and will review it accordingly. The French Wikipedia gives more details
The book follows the story of Jonas Dorléon, a Haitian history teacher. His mother is dead ,his father has gone into exile. He is not married and does not seem to have a girlfriend. He is a very badly paid, barely enough to exist, and live in a sheet metal hut. Worse still, as we know Haiti, is being run by gangs who kill at will. Various people ask him why he has not already left and he knows people who have possibly left though whether they managed to do so or were killed on the way he does not know.
When the neighbourhood is set on fire and the fire is spreading from roof to roof, he decides it is time to go. He packs his possessions. – a change of underwear, his teaching certificate and a photo of his mother – and sets off. Why was he leaving? Because he finally had understood that there was no country left and that Haiti no longer existed. God had moved and had not left forwarding address. I was just a teacher of history who had no history to teach.
He had to walk as all the vehicles are carrying armed men or corpses.
He sets off for Jérémie, a distant town that apparently does not have gang rule. He is able to get a bus, but as it approaches as a town, it is stopped by armed men. All the men have to get of fthe bus and the young gangleader says they have to tell him something funny or he will shoot them. And he does.Jonas recites Psalm 23 backwards and the gang leader thinks he is mad. and lets him go. He now realises that there is nowhere safe in Haiti..
JIn érémie he stays with a distant cousin who ask him if he’s plan to spend the rest of his life fleeing.
He decides to go to the Dominican Republic. He tells us a story of a friend who tried to do so and was sold a forged entry permit and lost a lot of money on it. His relative however has a friend there so he could stay with her for awhile.
He sets off towards the frontier and finds that he can cross if he has money. He gives the frontier guard some money and he is given a visa for five days. He has no more money left to bribe a people smuggler to get into a safe place. He does stay briefly with the friend, but eventually she kicks him out. He wanders towards the capital and sees a young Haitian immigrant being hanged purely because he was Haitian and not Dominican enough.
He carries on travelling and gets a job making roads but it only paid in tickets which can be exchanged for food and drink. He does this for a while before moving on.
He gets to the capital and becomes a shoe shiner, but it seems that the Dominicans are not too happy about having their shoes shined by a black person though he does get some business. He struggles living with some other Haitians in a makeshift shelter and sees the Rich tourists enjoying themselves. I struggled to understand how a country could be about a postcard and purgatory. He comments that this country was paradise for the tourists but for the migrants it was paradise with an electric fence and armed guards.
Time to move on, he manages to hustle himself into Brazil. He applies for asylum but is eventually rejected but in the meantime he makes a living acting out the clown and performing many of the trials and tribulations he has suffered. The locals seem to enjoy this.
He is warned by an NGO official that his performances are not approved by the authorities and so off he goes again this time toRecife. From there it is another arduous journey up to Peru and then to the famous Darien Gap.
It is known that theDarien Gap is a hellish place and he sees several deaths and various horrors with eventually makes it through where NGO’s are there to provide minimal help.
As an NGO officer says the Darien Gap does not kill you. It just watches you die.. Ultimately, it is his long since dead grandmother who helps him, coming to him in a dream and encouraging him on.
He struggles on through Central America becoming José Gonzalez as as obviously that name is more acceptable. He finally reaches the Mexican border. Getting into Mexico is difficult. Getting into United States is more difficult and we see hundreds of people at the Mexican US border struggling and often failing to enter the United States.
He has an interview with the US authorities and then has to wait to hear the result. He is rejected but it told that he can try again. The Mexican town of Matamoros where he and many are staying is full of people in a similar situation. He is eventually given some sort of provisional document but he has to film himself every two weeks to let them know that he’i still there, and there is still no guarantee that he will be allowed to enter permanently. He is warned. by his fellow migrants that if he does not get in before Trump becomes president again, he has no hope of getting in.
But there is Canada, and, more particularly, Roxham Road. This is a more or less legal way into Canada but somewhat tricky and it could close at any time. He hustles the money to take the train and bus to Roxham Road.
Canada is not paradise. For a start there is bureaucracy, a lot of it. Moreover, he has to wait a long time to pass through the system and though he is given a small salary it is a struggle to live on it as it has to cover housing as well as everything else else. And then, of course, there are the Canadian winters, They turn out to be not as bad as he thought they would be.
It is not a magical island where documents fall from the trees like autumn leaves. It is a country with its rules, its slow procedures, it’s contradictions but also its opportunities. This country offered me something that I no longer had; the right to breathe without being afraid.. He concludes by saying I am Jonas Dorléon and I am not dead
I found it an excellent novel. Those of us who live in North America or Western Europe will be well aware of the controversial issue of migrants entering our countries illegally. The focus in many countries has been on keeping them out or throwing them out when they do enter. However, most of us probably rarely think of the incredibly arduous journeys they have had to undergo to get to what they see, or at least hope, is a safe haven. While this is most certainly not the only book about illegal immigrants , it does bring home the issue and in that respect I found it most interesting. Whoever wrote it writes very well as we get a colourful story lots of wry asides, philosophical comments and colourful episodes. I can highly. recommend it as a good read. Let us not forget that before the AI scandal broke it had sold very well in France, had been nominated for various prizes and the rights have been sold to at least 25 different countries. It has already appeared in Dutch. In other words, literary professionals assumed it was written by the author and did not suspect AI.
The question arises as to whether AI is capable of writing a good novel. To find out of course I asked AI. Here is what it said.AI can write a complete novel fromAI struggles to write good novels alone
* Memory limits: Large language models sstruggle to track long narrative arcs, often forgetting character development or plot points over tens of thousands of words. and
Oui, une intelligence artificielle peut écrire un roman, mais le résultat demande généralement une importante réécriture humaine pour être de qualité [yes, AI can write a novel but the result generally requires major human rewriting to be of any quality}.
This raises two issues. Firstly the implication is clearly AI did not write this or any other worthwhile novel. However, secondly, there is a distinct possibility that the author used AI to a certain degree to help him write as a novel. Is that wrong? Different people will have different ideas on this. Frankly, I do not know what is right and wrong here. It is clear that the story is his story and a lot of the episodes and other descriptions were written by him, but it does seem that it is more than possible the used AI to write some of the text. Maybe.
I do not need to tell you that the press loves a scandal and this has been picked up by the press as a lovely scandal for their papers/website websites. They may be telling the truth but I’m sure it will come us no surprise you to know that sometimes they do not. Others have pointed out that there is an element of racism here particularly with right wing people involved in AI.
I enjoyed the book. I found it very worthwhile. It certainly opened my eyes to the horrors of migrants seeking. in escaping from the horrors of their own country and try to find an easier life in the West. Till it is proved categorically that this book was written by AI I am going on the supposition that the author wrote all almost of it and I shall leave this review here until it is proved otherwise.
Publishing history
Editions du Boréal