MUSTAPHA MARROUCHI

MY AUNT IS A MAN: ce «je»-là est multiple

AN IMPRESSIVE LITERATURE IN FRENCH is now present in all the many countries that were once French colonies. In some (Québec, Martinique, Guadeloupe, La Nouvelle Calédonie) French is the lingua franca; in Haiti French jostles with Créole. In West Africa and Les Antilles, literature in French coexists with literature in other languages, but Léopold Sedar Senghor, Mobyem Mikanza, Aimé Césaire, Patrick Chamoiseau, and Édouard Glissant, among others, certainly comprise a substantial group of French-language, but non-French, writers. "The same is roughly true of other former French colonies," Edward Said notes, "where the paradox of literature in French but directed against colonial France is still as lively and invigorating as it was when it first appeared one or two generations ago" (Hazoume followed by Fanon and Memmi).  This is also the case in the Arab world, Said goes on to argue, once divided unequally between British and French colonialism. In The Maghreb and/or France, many distinguished Arab writers produce work only in French: Kateb Yacine, Nabil Farès, Rabah Belamri, Assia Djebar, Mehdi Charef, Malek Alloula, Fatima Mernissi, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tahar Djaout, Fethi Ben Slama, Abdelwahab Meddeb, and Rashid Boujedra. "Yet in all these three countries political independence from France brought forth a new literature in Arabic," Said adds, with poetry, fiction, criticism, history, political analysis and memoirs now circulating not only locally but throughout the rest of the Arab world. There has long been a significant Lebanese literature in French, coexisting, if unevenly, with a more impressive Arab production. Some of this Franco-Lebanese literature, for instance the essays of Michel Chiha, had important political consequences, furnishing the Maronite community with a sense of identity in a predominantly Sunni Arab environment. But this is not to detract from the literary merit of other writers: Georges Shehadé, Etel Adnan, Nadia Tueni, Amin Maalouf and the 1995-Goncourt prize winner, Salah Stétié, whose work in French is no less Lebanese or even Arab.

The accent throughout his essay is, however, more on Anglophone than on Francophone literature, with which he deals only schematically.  In the period before political independence, Francophone prose was typically elevated, extravagant, mythopoeic, and laced with surreal fantasy or utopian symbolism. It bore the style of an aspirant revolutionary people, as insecure as it was effervescent. One could hear in this rollicking rhetoric the bluster of the underdog, as Césaire, Memmi, Senghor, and others tried to compensate for their political marginality with verbal brio. If their language was French, then they would have to use it in an estranging way, defiantly asserting their cultural difference. Though some of this early style survived independence, it gradually gave way to the plainer, more disenchanted idiom of Patrick Chamoiseau or the self-parodic minimalism of Rachid Boujedra, so fearful of writing in French à la Gide that he ceased to write in French altogether. (Ng˜ug˜ı did the same with English). What is, however, most distinctive about these literary agents provocateurs’ writing is the peculiar flavor of their prose. It is written in a heady and unsteady French, one infiltrated with the gist and germ of Charabia and Créole respectively.3 Indeed, their rhetorical effulgence stems as much from the everyday idiom of the margins as from the nocturnal narrations of the conteurs. On the other hand, their abundant wordplay and twists of phrase sound (for they are written to be read aloud) fantastically outlandish to French ears. It might be true to say, after Milan Kundera, that French is being "Confiantized," made new by writers whose bilingualism refuses to grant absolute authority to either language.

These writers represent the wide international arm of the defense of the French language, otherwise called Francophonie, which, once proposed with a conviction of the value of French as the language of revolutionary ideals and principles of liberation, has today become the term for an identity to be forged and maintained against U.S. political and cultural expansionism, for a strategic and economic postmodern grouping in which France can hold on to a role as "Maman Fouance," in Chamoiseau’s celebrated formula, at the moment when the last remnants of its empire are torn by the struggle for independence. (FLNKS [Front de Libération nationale kanak socialiste] is a case in point.) While the French want to maintain their presence in La Nouvelle Calédonie (a site for nuclear testing), in France we commonly encounter stereotyping, discrimination, xenophobia, and rejection of exiles and émigrés who made the journey North, and that includes the Francophone Maghrebian writer, who faces problems of definition every day. He or she is described and redescribed, sloganized and falsified, until, for the howling combatants, he or she almost ceases to exist. He or she becomes a sort of myth, an empty vessel into which the world can pour its prejudices, its poison, and its hate. To try to understand this context, especially in France, a country that has yet to come to terms with its shady past and/or present, is to raise a sea of questions: What does it mean to be "Antillean," African, or "Maghrebian" inside France today? How can culture be preserved without becoming ossified? How should Francophone writers in general see the need for change within themselves and their community without seeming to play into the hands of their racial enemies? What are the consequences, both theoretical and practical, for refusing to make any concessions to Western influences? How can the Francophone writer liberate himself or herself and make a claim that renders ambivalent the question of (un)belonging, putting identities to rout? Is it difficult to define oneself in a transnationality nurtured from all directions? Although Tahar Ben Jelloun will serve as my exempli gratia, I shall draw on Abdelkebir Khatibi for another insight—namely, writing in the pluri-langue. In letting these two writers play off each other this way, it is my interpretative aim (in the broadest sense) to make concurrent their worldview, with its ancestral culture—its thousand-year-old tradition, the imposing gods and Orality—weighing upon it.