With French long engaged in a losing battle against English around the world, a new way of fighting back has been proposed by a multinational group of authors who write in French: uncouple the language from France and turn French literature into “world literature” written in French.
For guardians of the language of Molière, Voltaire and Victor Hugo, this is tantamount to subversion.
But the 44 signatories of a manifesto published in Le Monde this month are in a rebellious mood. They assert that it is time for the French to stop looking down on francophone authors, as foreigners writing in French are known, because these very novelists — many from former French colonies — hold the key to energizing French literature.
For this, they say, French must be freed from “its exclusive pact” with France. And, as an example worth following, they point to how literature in English has been enriched by Commonwealth and other non-
British writers, among them V. S. Naipaul, Nadine Gordimer, Salman Rushdie, J. M. Coetzee, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ben Okri, Arundhati Roy, Peter Carey and Kiran Desai.
Still, the timing of this new campaign in not accidental.
Last fall, to the astonishment of France’s literary establishment, foreign-born writers won five of the country’s seven major book awards, with the coveted Goncourt going to “Les Bienveillantes” (“The Kindly Ones”) by the New York-born novelist Jonathan Littell, who also won the Académie Française’s prize. Other winners were Alain Mabanckou from Congo, Nancy Huston from Canada and Léonora Miano from Cameroon.
Extract taken from;
In Paris, Language Sparks Culture War by Alan Riding
The New York Times, March 31, 2007