Category: literary life

Two weeks ago, 44 French-language authors, including Tahar Ben Jelloun, Edouard Glissant, JMG Le Clézio, Amin Maalouf, Alain Mabanckou, Erik Orsenna, and Abdourahman Waberi, signed a manifesto titled “Pour une ‘littérature-monde’ en français,” which was published on the cover of Le Monde des Livres. The writers want a reconsideration of the literary aspect of “francophonie,” in which France sees itself as the hub, while countries from the ex-empire are the spokes.

[L]e centre, ce point depuis lequel était supposée rayonner une littérature franco-française, n’est plus le centre. Le centre jusqu’ici, même si de moins en moins, avait eu cette capacité d’absorption qui contraignait les auteurs venus d’ailleurs à se dépouiller de leurs bagages avant de se fondre dans le creuset de la langue et de son histoire nationale : le centre, nous disent les prix d’automne, est désormais partout, aux quatre coins du monde. Fin de la francophonie. Et naissance d’une littérature-monde en français.

Here’s a rough translation:

The center, that point from which a Francophone-French literature was supposed to shine, is no longer the center. The center, up until now, had an absorption capacity that forced authors who came from somewhere else to give up their belongings before melting in the pot of the language and its national history. The center, the fall prizes tell us, is now everywhere, in the four corners of the world. End of francophonie. And birth of a world literature in French.

This year, all the major French prizes (the Goncourt, the Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française, the Renaudot and the Femina) were awarded to non-native French authors, and so it was perhaps an opportune time to raise the question of a “world literature in French,” one that can live and thrive in the same way as world literature in English. Indeed, it’s quite clear from the document that the authors look to the English-speaking world as one in which it is easier for non-English writers to have their words heard, and their books considered for their merits. The authors write:

Combien d’écrivains de langue française, pris eux aussi entre deux ou plusieurs cultures, se sont interrogés alors sur cette étrange disparité qui les reléguait sur les marges, eux “francophones”, variante exotique tout juste tolérée, tandis que les enfants de l’ex-empire britannique prenaient, en toute légitimité, possession des lettres anglaises ? Fallait-il tenir pour acquis quelque dégénérescence congénitale des héritiers de l’empire colonial français, en comparaison de ceux de l’empire britannique ? Ou bien reconnaître que le problème tenait au milieu littéraire lui-même, à son étrange art poétique tournant comme un derviche tourneur sur lui-même, et à cette vision d’une francophonie sur laquelle une France mère des arts, des armes et des lois continuait de dispenser ses lumières, en bienfaitrice universelle, soucieuse d’apporter la civilisation aux peuples vivant dans les ténèbres ?

And, in English:

How many French-language writers, caught between two or several cultures, have asked themselves about this strange disparity, which relegated them to the margins, as ‘francophones’, a barely tolerated exotic variant, while the children of the ex-British empire were taking, in all legitimacy, possession of English letters? Was one supposed to take for granted a certain congenital degeneration among the heirs of the French colonial empire, by comparison with those of the British empire? Or else recognize that the problem was in the literary milieu itself, in its strange poetic art, turning like a dervish upon itself, and in this vision of a francophonie upon which a France, mother of letters, arms, and laws, continued to dispense its lights, as a universal benefactor, concerned with giving civilization to the peoples living in darkness?

I am not sure that things are so rosy in the world of English-language literature, but they are certainly rosier than in the francophone world. In any case, the manifesto drew a number of reactions. Abdou Diouf, ex-president of Senegal and now secretary-general of the International Organization of Francophonie denounced the 44 authors as “gravediggers of francophonie.” And in Le Figaro, presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, who never misses an opportunity to shut up, jumped into the fray, saying that “francophonie is not a colonial concept.” (One wonders, given his passionate defense, how many native-born Frenchmen identify themselves as ‘francophones.’ We all know it’s a term for The Others.) There is also a lively discussion on Alain Mabanckou’s blog, here, here, here, and here.

As for me, I look upon all of this with a mixture of sympathy and amusement. Born and raised in Morocco, I received a semi-colonial education that valued French over both my native language (Darija/Moroccan Arabic) and the standard form (Fusha/Standard Arabic). Until I went to college, I did all of my creative writing in French. I started to write in English in 1996, while in graduate school. When my first book was published in the United States, it was shelved in the general fiction section, just like any other book by any other American writer. When it appeared in France in January, however, La Fnac had it under Littérature anglophone. Meanwhile, my friends in France were looking for it under Littérature maghrebine. That is how silly labels are. All I can say is that I live in the republic of letters; my book belongs to anyone who wants to read it.

The latest issue of the LRB has a review by Ruth Bernard Yeazell of Hermione Lee’s new biography of Edith Wharton–a book I really want to get my hands on very soon. Here’s a taste:

‘My God, how does one write a Biography?’ In her magnificent study of Virginia Woolf, Lee chose to answer Woolf’s question not so much by writing a sequential narrative from cradle to grave as by offering a series of topical essays, loosely arranged by chronology and artfully composed to highlight the various aspects of her subject’s personal and imaginative history. So Virginia Woolf began with a meditation on ‘Biography’, and later chapters were as likely to address such recurrent themes as ‘Censors’ or ‘Selves’ as more obvious milestones such as ‘Marriage’ or ‘War’. Edith Wharton adopts a roughly similar method: it opens not with Wharton’s birth but with her parents’ unexpectedly witnessing revolution in the Paris of 1848, and its second chapter, ‘Making Up’, is as much a commentary on the evasions of the adult autobiographer as on the young Edith Jones’s love of storytelling. With both novelists, Lee is particularly sensitive to the gap between the life as lived and the writer’s retrospective creation of herself; and unlike many literary biographers, she is at her best when her subject’s own imaginative powers are at their height. Her readings of The House of Mirth, The Custom of the Country and The Age of Innocence – not to mention A Backward Glance – help to persuade one that biography is a means of enhancing literature, not reducing it.

The rest of the review is here.

No reader of Arabic literature in translation would fail to recognize the name of translator Denys Johnson-Davies: He has worked on books by Naguib Mahfouz, Zakaria Tamer, and Tewfiq Al-Hakim, to name just a few. And he also translated Tayib Salih’s masterpiece, Season of Migration to the North. So I was more than a little disappointed when I came across these pearls of wisdom in his introduction to the Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction. On the birth of the Arabic novel, he writes:

But many were the prejudices that had to be overcome. The idea of an author creating characters and making them inhabit worlds of his creation not only was foreign to the Arab Muslim mind but was even regarded as almost unacceptable. Take, for example, the ever-entertaining stories of The Thousand and One Nights. This anonymous work, so esteemed throughout the world as a masterpiece of imaginative literature, remains for most Arabs a work unworthy of serious consideration. Arab men of letters have long looked askance at the extravagances of The Arabian Nights, as the book is better known in the West, finding them suitable only for minds incapable of appreciating other forms of literature, and grudgingly admitting that the stories might have some merit only when the outside world lavished praise on them.

On the universal appeal of Arabic novels:

Many Arab writers have no experience of the outside world or of a foreign language, and their reading of world literature is confined to works translated into Arabic. Thus a reader of Mohamed El-Bisatie’s A Last Glass of Tea will find that every one of its twenty-four stories takes place in villages around Lake Manzala in the Nile Delta. But readers in the West have shown themselves capable of relating to cultures that they come across for the first time in fiction, especially when captured by a master’s hand.

On choosing to present the writers in the anthology by alphabetical order:

I prefer to treat the Arab world as the one cultural unit that it is.

But don’t let these absurd comments discourage you from reading the anthology (which is pretty amazing) or anything he’s translated (particularly Season of Migration.)

I forgot to mention last week how much I enjoyed Richard Wolin’s essay in The Nation on the current malaise about Muslim citizens and immigrants in Europe. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Today there are an estimated 15 million to 17 million Muslims living in Europe. Anyone who wishes to address the theme of “Europe and Islam” immediately runs up against an intractable definitional conundrum. For in Europe, the monolithic religion known as Islam is functionally nonexistent. The national origins of the European Muslim population vary dramatically from country to country. To wit: Whereas the majority of Dutch Muslims hail from Indonesia, Suriname, Morocco and Turkey, most British Muslims emigrated from the Indian subcontinent. Germany’s Muslims are predominantly Turks (Turkey is, of course, a secular republic, honoring the separation of mosque and state), whereas the origins of the French Muslim community may be traced to the Maghreb, or Saharan Africa.

The French Muslim community itself is further subdivided among Arabs, Berbers (from the mountainous Kabyle region of Algeria), Africans and converts, who compose 1 percent of French Muslims. How, then, might one classify a nonobservant Kabyle immigrant who is a French citizen, born in Algeria, educated in the French school system, who speaks Amazigh at home and French at work? Is he/she Berber, Algerian, French or, qua non­observant, even veritably Muslim? Clearly, the vagaries of religion, identity and ethnicity are multifarious, rich and potentially dizzying.

You can read it all here.

The Guardian challenged a whole bunch of writers to come up with the shortest story possible (in the vein of Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Find out what Kate Atkinson, John Banville, David Lodge, Hari Kunzru, George Saunders, and many others came up with.

The National Book Critics Circle awards were announced yesterday in New York, and I was especially pleased to find out that the judges selected Kiran Desai’s excellent The Inheritance of Loss. (That was the novel I voted for, by the way. None of the other books on the ballot I cast made it!) You can see a list of winners in all the categories at the NBCC blog, Critical Mass.