Introduction to the Special Francophone Issue

What is “Francophone ” literature, or la francophonie? The very official “Francophonie ” website run by the French Ministère des Affaires Étrangères¹  informs us that French is one of the few languages spoken all over the world—over 169 million French-speakers, mainly in Africa and Europe, but also in America, Asia and Oceania. (Since France has over 60 million people, that would mean that more than half the French speakers in the world live outside of France.) In North America, 9.6 million people speak French in Canada and 290,000 in Louisiana; in sub-Saharan Africa, 39.5 million; 33.4 million in the Maghreb; in the Middle East, especially Lebanon, 1.5 million; 375,000 in Viet Nam… Another site, Canadian this time,²  tells us that French is an official language for 53 countries: the official language for Benin, Burkina Faso, Congo-Brazzaville, Ivory Coast, Gabon, Guinea, Niger, Senegal, etc. and one of two for Belgium, Burundi, Cameroon, Canada, Djibouti, Mauritania… The figures are undoubtedly inflated and the list of countries misleading (a recent estimate suggests that no more than 5% of the population of Senegal speaks French, for example), but the overall picture is clear and true: people from many, extremely different regions and cultures speak French. Our table of contents reinforces the picture, even if it does reflect the luck of the draw (obviously this issue is by no means an anthology.) This is the Francophone  world, the French-speaking world, la francophonie. Books are written and sometimes published in many of these places:³  that’s Francophone  literature.

But here things become much less clear. “Francophone ” literature is usually taken to mean just what the Call for Translations/Papers for this issue of Metamorphoses suggested: literature written in French outside of France, or—we pushed the envelope just a little—“work by writers and poets living in France, but whose work reflects their post-colonial heritage.” Whereas French literature from France (presumably source, model, mère des arts) is something else.⁴

The concept is not only unclear, it’s suspect. In what sense are the “French” canonic authors Jean-Jacques Rousseau (from Geneva), Henri Michaux and Georges Simenon (both from Belgium), for instance, more French than Calixthe Beyala, Andrée Chedid and Abdourahman Waberi, “Francophone” writers in this issue? A look at our list of contributors shows that four of them (Beyala, Chedid, Sebbar, Waberi) have spent much of their lives in France and at least two of them are in fact French. Yet they are often called “Francophone” writers—something no one would say of the poet Saint-John Perse, for example, who was born in Guadeloupe and spent the first twelve years of his life there. Could the distinction between “Francophone” and “French” have something to do with the relative whiteness of the author’s skin? It is interesting to note that our Call for Translations/Papers did not exclude “work by non-French Europeans,” yet not one single work of this kind was submitted to us. The concept of francophonie is suspect for another reason, too: even a cursory look at the history and function of francophonie reveals a French project to maintain, if not colonial domination, at least cultural and thus political influence (at the very least) and economic penetration in its far-flung former colonies. Considerations like these have led some writers and academics to suggest we scrap the whole notion altogether, and simply talk of “French literatures” in the plural, or “World Literature in French,” or “Francography” rather than francophonie.⁵

But there’s not much point in decreeing the death of a word or prescribing a new one: “Francophone” and “francophonie ” remain in common usage. Moreover, despite their problematic nature, the words designate a concept and a reality that many would not wish to abandon. For French-speaking people in Quebec—and there are close to eight million of them—the notion of a worldwide French-speaking cultural community contained in the word francophonie is a valuable defense against the onslaught of English. The Egyptian film-maker Youssef Chahine feels that way, too: “Francophonie  enables us to organize—all of us, Arabs, Africans and other identities threatened by the steamroller of American cultural industries; for alone we would not be strong enough to defend ourselves.”⁶  Many contemporary North African novelists claim the right to be Arabs and Francophone, against all the nationalist, fundamentalist or pan-Arab ideologies so prevalent in their part of the world. Paradoxically, given their history, today Francophone  writers often see French—or imagine it—as anti-colonial, the language of liberty, free from religious and political taboos, the language of a certain humanism. (Combe 73, 77-81.) Given the vicissitudes of history, many Francophone  writers live outside the country of their birth, but do live where French is spoken: witness Agnant, Beyala, Chedid, Kama Kamanda, Waberi, and Warner-Vieyra in this issue. One way of dealing with exile is to live in a language, to make it your home, as Edmond Jabès suggested by the very title of Je bâtis ma demeure, a book written in his native Egypt by a Francophone  writer who would live the rest of his life in France. The notion of francophonie  is one way of imagining that home. As the Haitian poet René Depestre says, “La langue française est un gîte. . .” (The French language is a shelter, a home.)

Such writers may prize the notion of francophonie or they may reject it, but in any case their view of it will differ considerably from the official one. For one thing, it no longer belongs to France. In Calixthe Beyala’s striking formula, the epigraph to her novel Les Honneurs perdus (part of whose first chapter appears below), “Le Français est francophone mais la francophonie n’est pas française.” (“The French are Francophones, but francophonie is not French.”) It is a view shared by the editors of this issue of Metamorphoses: not only is the work of “Francophone ” writers a part of literature in French, but it enriches and changes that literature and its language. As Depestre put it, in a poem in this issue:
 

From time to time it is right and good
to take the French language
down to the river
and rub her body
with the scented plants
that grow so well upstream
from our dizzying past of maroon slaves

The relationship of the Francophone writer to French is likely to be complex. In the words of the Congolese poet Tchicaya U’Tam’si : “The French language colonizes me, and I colonize it in return. And that finally produces another language.” (Quoted by Soubias 131, our translation here and elsewhere.)

Language is a problem for any writer, and it is often a problem thematized in the work itself. The problem is likely to be still more intense for the Francophone writer. The reason for this is simple, the results are problematic. As Belinda Jack points out, “a seemingly obvious but much ignored donné of the Francophone linguistic and cultural space is that it is at least a bilingual, and more often a multilingual space.” (Jack 15.) Of course no country is entirely monolingual—certainly not contemporary France. But the bilingual or “mulitilingual space” of the Francophone writer is special.

The difference between French on the one hand, the language of the former colonial power and the written language of the Francophone writer, and the writer’s mother tongue on the other—often a dialect or another language which is itself different from the “new” national language—is typically experienced as a painful split, une déchirure. Why, then, do writers whose mother tongue is not French write in that language? One reason is that they were educated in French, from elementary school in the country of their birth all the way, often as not, to university in France. So French becomes the language of writing, literature, culture. Déchirure, a painful tension once again: does this mean these writers scorn the culture of their native land, that they have assumed the colonial attitude? In any case, a far larger reading public can be found in French than in, say, dialectal Arabic, not to mention Malinke. The same holds true for the infrastructure necessary for the publication and distribution of books.

Besides, we can turn the question around: why not write in French? The Algerian novelist Assia Djebar says that she is often asked why she writes in French, emphasizing that if the question is asked, “it is to remind you that you come from somewhere else.” (She was also criticized inside Algeria for not writing in Arabic.) This is linked to the way francophonie  is—too often—defined. “Certainly francophonie has a diverse territory, moving and complex. It is also supposed to have a fixed center, where the ‘real’ French talk, write and argue.” (Djebar 7.)⁷   But the Francophone writer may well be de-centering la francophonie, as Beyala implies in the epigrammatic formula quoted above.

Francophone writers often serve as passeurs, guides or ferrymen between two languages and cultures (or more.) Sometimes this can lead to a pluralizing or splitting of the writing subject, and, as we have suggested, the painful feeling of being torn between two worlds. Yet here too, we see another potential enrichment. As Henri Michaux⁸  wrote in 1938: “we are not made for just one self. We are wrong to cling to it. The prejudice in favor of unity. (. . .)  ME is nothing but a position in equilibrium.” (Michaux x.)

Apparently, there is indeed a prejudice favoring “unity” in many Francophone  writers, but this too is an enriching one, for that very project, the attempt to weld together a split cultural identity, has led to the idea of creating a Francophone  literature and langage in which the writer imagines a new unity. It is striking that authors as distant from each other as Léopold Senghor, Edouard Glissant, Abdelkebir Khatibi, Salah Stetié… should use essentially biological images to represent this new creation, from métissage (Senghor et al) to an “exogamic wedding” where one “marries the Other” (Salah Stetié, in Combe 135.) The notion of métissage is particularly important in the Caribbean. For Depestre, the French language itself is “le métier à métisser” (the mixing loom, a loom for miscegenation)—the title of his book of essays—and part of a poetic redefinition of francophonie: “. . . The destiny of francophonie will be played out at an equal distance from the old Eurocentrism and vengeful third-worldism. . . Now, even as we denounce all ethnocentrisms! we now can throw all our forces of wonder and creation into the loom to mix the things of life and death (le métier à métisser les choses de la vie et de la mort), that is, the French language in our hands, the hands of a poet and novelist.” (Depestre 1998, 18-19) But the concept is not restricted to language, and the notion of “Créolité” proclaimed by three Francophone Caribbean writers (Bernabé, Chamoiseau, Confiant in Éloge de la Créolité, or In Praise of Creoleness) is inseparable from that of métissage, the mixing of races, sensibilities, and languages to produce something new.

Even if the language of many Francophone writers is a French linguistically indistinguishable from that of writers from France—and this is true for the French used by most of the contributors to this issue of Metamorphoses—the sensibility of the Francophone  will be different from that of the “French” writer, says the Québecois Gaston Miron (who has two poems in this issue.) “We speak and write in French and our poetry will always be French poetry,” he proclaims, but goes on to say that “our tellurism is not French and thus neither is our sensibility, the touchstone of poetry.” (Miron 91.) The forms of literature in French change too, or assume new importance, in contact with another sensibility, another culture: for example, the written conte, the tale, is a major genre in modern African Francophone literature (as in Kama Kamanda’s “The Paddles of Fate,” below.)

There are themes common to many writers designated as “Francophone”—at least to the non-European writers who seem to sum up, for American academics, the very meaning of “Francophone.” A short list based exclusively on the writing in this issue would include: the violence of the struggle for decolonization and the post-colonial present (Waberi, Tadjo, and one poem of Kurtovitch); misery and poverty of the post-colonial present (Sebbar, Beyala); attraction and repulsion for the country of immigration and one’s country of birth (Frankétienne, Pineau)—the condition of the exile or immigrant (“la migritude,” which has developed from Césaire and Senghor’s “négritude”); and the power of tradition and myth on the one hand (Kamanda, Kurtovitch) like the cult of the dead (Lahens, Tadjo), and modernity on the other (ironized in Beyala, Sebbar and Frankétienne.) Haiti—the poorest country in the Caribbean, but with the richest literature, as the Guadeloupean Maryse Condé pointed out—is a special case. Haiti won its independence in 1804, so it can hardly be called a post-colonial country; but the poverty of the island, a series of tyrannical dictatorships, and American domination (instead of French) have made its situation similar to that of the post-colonial Francophone countries. Misery, violence and repression are common themes in Haitian writing, too (Agnant, Lahens, Frankétienne.) Finally, there is the theme of métissage, discussed above.