The advent of speech is never achieved once and for all. And although it does not definitively undo interdiction, indigenous speech does open a breach in the colonial edifice. The insistence of indigenous discourses in French, in tandem with the wars for independence, has made it difficult for colonial verbiage to claim to represent the language without being ridiculed. Has interdiction disappeared? I suspect that it hasn’t. Today, in singular fashion, the most clear-cut and persistent methods of interdiction exist foremost in the most widespread forms of censure.
I have shown how real acts of withdrawing speech have occurred. No: you are not writing literature, so you do not exist; and what is more, I cannot hear you. Let us write new lines about the old authors. In exemplary fashion, the school system and the media exert a necrotizing control over any and all speech that breaks with the established order. It is true that in addition to the emancipatory virtues they reiterate, the traditional function of these two worlds is to enforce a kind of censure. Journalism is a democratic multiplication of the discourse about reality, and it is the secret dispensary of propaganda, a trivial way to program utterances. Education delivers individuals from ignorance and spreads the doctrine of constraint. These contradictory postulations can be articulated differently or juxtaposed according to the places, periods, and people involved. Today, the mainstream press in France (and its audiovisual and Internet equivalents) hardly bases its activity on the construction of civic reflection, preferring instead to inform minds. As for public education in France, most of the time its agents resort to coercion (seen as a good in itself), or resign themselves to giving up teaching; even the minister of education oscillates between these two attitudes, often in a way that is out of step with teachers. In this bleak situation, journalism and education, which expect to enjoy the rights that they clearly deserved in the past, may most easily relive their former prestige by deploying their capacity for censure.
As for francophonie, the simple refusal to acknowledge its existence is widely employed in teaching. For its part, Parisian literary journalism does not regularly respond to Haitian or Ivorian publications; on this point, however, we touch on a dysfunction too massive to discuss here. On the other hand, what remains of literature in secondary education erases nearly all literary production from the current or former colonies. I do not exclude the courage of individual teachers. The official guidelines for choosing books today are quite sibylline, allocating the responsibility of determining textual canons to so-called accompanying documents and manuals. Clearly, there is minimal space for the words uttered across a period that spans nearly a century. The latest recommendations from the Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique (National Center of Pedagogical Documentation) give an idea of the best-case scenario for postcolonial francophone literature in institutional teaching.1 Lists of novels are cited as examples, arranged hierarchically from the very suitable to the supplementary (the “but also…” category), then onto foreign literature—and then finally come the “potentially” readable books. In the center of this miniature replica of Dante’s Inferno, Ahmadou Kourouma and Kateb Yacine are in the second circle. As might be expected, most of the postcolonial novelists correspond to the lowest level of instruction. That such books are presented as “potentially” capable of “sustaining the curiosity and interest of the students” suggests to my admittedly rather acerbic mind that these works are more suitable for the less “valuable” students at the Lycée, such as those who are not taking courses of general study. The idea is based solely on documentary evidence. One could recite an entire litany of clichés: the “children of immigrants” recognize themselves in Azouz Begag more than in Proust or Racine (but in what way would a “good Frenchman” naturally have more of a connection to the latter two authors?); francophone texts are easier or closer to realism (but they are read as simple testimonies, and they do not put Frankétienne or Abdelwahab Meddeb on the syllabus), and so on. This deafness to the indigenous text is an offspring of the doctrine of “reduced French,” for which equivalents in book form are now sought. Even when one proposes devoting a number of hours to the connection between “literature” and “otherness,” starting with the conquest of the New World, exoticism, and slavery, only Senghor’s Ethiopiques has the right of passage into the stubborn category of “literary texts.” The other francophone authors will remain on the more accessible level of the “but also” category.
The precarious existence of francophonie in the classroom, however, can at least cite as precedent a legend that was hawked over the course of several centuries—and by the advocates of the language. Let us note that accession to writing or public discourse is often done in the name of some prior silence. Yet as time progresses, it becomes increasingly evident that this silence existed only as an effect of French censure. In this sense, it is logical to present the indigenous speaker as one who breaks with the old order of silence: so long as denial lasts, there is an imposition of silence, and each new voice must make its radical newness heard. However, the recognition of colonial censure almost always carries with it an awkward erasure of those who had previously expressed themselves, who had already broken with prescription. The idea that black francophone speech first emerges in the 1930s remains a tenacious legend. However, to list a few exceptions to this legend, we could cite the following: Bakary Diallo publishes his book in 1926, although Batouala was written in 1921; in Louisiana, people of color were writing in French throughout the nineteenth century; in Haiti, literature, philosophy, and history have existed since the beginning of the Revolution; the Revolution in the Antilles allowed for the emergence of texts and discourses composed by black and mulatto people. As a strategic tool, the mythical anterior silence is useful for “indigenes” who want to point toward the abyss out of which their speech has emerged. This strategy is nonetheless quite dangerous in that it recognizes in advance the absolute efficacy of the master, who would have succeeded in obliterating the previous efforts. A paradoxical collusion thus forms. This is nowhere more obvious than in the newspaper articles that deal with the famous “banlieue problems.” In November 2005, the more “comprehensive” texts on the arsonists did not fail to report statements such as “When someone wields a Molotov cocktail, he is saying ‘Help.’ He does not have the words to express what he is feeling; he only knows how to speak by setting things on fire.”2 These remarks, whose truth is far from certain, reformulate a sociologizing vulgate that has currency among social workers. Such statements doubtless correspond to a sympathetic sentiment, but one that rests on the colonial order of speech. In addition, the media never cease repeating that in the banlieue there exists “the reign of the law of silence.”3 Let us therefore reject the self-interested rebroadcasting of this motif of the colonial situation’s past silence. It is just as likely to denounce mastery as it is to prepare the future absorption of words into the inexorable void.
Education and the press, two contested institutions, have a tendency to preserve worn-out mechanisms. The public field of speech (from politics to barroom discussions) is on the whole susceptible to such a conservative attitude. This does not mean that a partially eradicated colonial culture still exists within France. Well-known solutions are rather rediscovered, repeated in a degraded (and degrading) form. Sometimes their semantic field frays; or, to continue in a theologico-political vein, all that remains from the wound is a stigma. The sign of the colonial passion is now diaphanous for those in the know, and obfuscated for everyone else. There is no excuse for this. When we use words and syntax worn out by others, without seeking to bring about anything new, it is inevitable that our language will become wooden. Locating this danger does not eliminate the risk, and this book will in turn, willingly, submit to criticism. Nevertheless, rather than merging all suspect utterances on principle under the rubric of neocolonialism; rather than demanding a decolonization of minds, on the model of denazification—let us make some distinctions. Sometimes a statement betrays an absence of thought more than it reveals a collective unconscious. It is a moral imperative that each person must affirm herself by speaking (instead of reciting the unsaid of existing powers). Ultimately, we must not kid ourselves about the role of social programming. It exists consubstantially with society. There are degrees of repression, and they should be distinguished. This said, dreaming of a free society serves no purpose; it is dangerous to replace one prescription with another. We must no more hybridize (métisser) thought than decolonize it; it is better to encourage the conditions for renewed reflection, to learn to free ourselves from our inheritance, and then to invent.
For literature to exist, which is to say, if there is to be more than one book with its own distinctive stamp, the poetic task cannot free itself from its defective force, oriented as it is against the rules of the community. The means adopted and the directions pioneered vary among those writers who express themselves from within the colonial phrase. Regarding this subject (as others, such as anti-Semitism, the fascination with the leader, the relation to the animal, etc.) there is one literature that forgets itself, and another that is more pensive. It would be good to move beyond rankings, that old scholarly mania shared by surrealists, those nostalgic for hierarchies, and well-intentioned politicians. Maupassant remakes the speed of literature, he peoples the world with a new kind of demon, and he lets colonial racism pass through him in his travel accounts in the Maghreb. Such a thing occurs, although rarely as it does with Maupassant. If Maupassant takes up a social phraseology that the rest of his book invalidates, such a gesture is not the same as that of Céline, when he appropriates, absolutely, the parlance of hatred in order to affirm himself, at the risk of exiting from the “common good” of the political. Today, literature is not commanded to contribute to the colonial phrase, and one cannot judge it using only this perspective. Entering into the echo chamber, literature has to construct the nature of its own enunciation. I have chosen to end this chapter by evoking two poetic trajectories through the density of (post)colonial language: the work of Pierre Guyotat and that of Hélène Cixous.
Evoking his own biography, Pierre Guyotat locates a mental encounter in Algeria that began in his “fourteenth year” (Explications 134). Even before his service during the war, Algeria was “a haunting fear, just as much as it was poetry” (134). Without reducing the book to a single facet, there is certainly a “matter of Algeria” in Guyotat’s work. I am alluding to the established expression—“matter of Britain” (matière de Bretagne)—used to designate the cycles of Celtic inspiration in medieval texts. Guyotat finds an epic breath in the intense verbal continuity of Algerian deeds. His work is also a homage to the will not to conceal real matter, be it fecal, bloody, sexual. Such a position, linked to the ambition to surpass what is “given” in the text, brings the author of Le livre to no longer call his work “writing, but rather matter” (Livre 9).
“Matter of Algeria” describes this oeuvre, because its sites have seen so much action. Tombeau pour cinq cent mille soldats (Tomb for Five Hundred Thousand Soldiers) appears in 1967 and describes a universe of violence, a mobile military brothel (BMC) in Algeria. In 1984, Le livre (The Book) is an Arab plateau. In many places, particularly in Prostitution (1975) and Progénitures (2000), the texts circle around this unobtainable land, naming its impossible inhabitants. This fantastical and phantasmatic space has marked even the reception of this body of work; this impression is far from absurd, and it has been partially influenced by successive interdictions linked to the Algerian War.4
In Guyotat’s most recent work as of the date of this writing, Progénitures (2000), the bouic (or “brothel”) still employs Arabs, and the geography of immigration is spoken of (Vénissieux in the banlieue of Lyon), as is the geography of the Maghreb (the High Plateau). Some words invoke Algeria otherwise. These are the first names (Bachir, Ali) and common nouns (Arab, crouille5), Arabic words translated in a short glossary (chichouah, houri), others without a gloss (haïk, hallal; cleb or zob). Guyotat does not obliterate the closeness of French and Maghrebian Arabic; rather, he integrates colonial vocabulary. Most importantly, the alteration of the language often intersects with indigenous orality, reconstructing its pronunciation and making use of its accent for its neology. Counterfeiting the Araby’s language is a habit of songwriters and comedic singers who were, in general, quite frank about their racism. During the 1930s, Léon Montagné, under the pseudonym Aïcha, sang a “comic Arab song” with the title “We Did the Nouba.” The “we” refers to a group of Arabs getting drunk on anisette.6 At the very beginning of the 1990s (yes, that recently), French entertainer Vincent Lagaf’, appeared on television screens, with an impressive amount of stamina, wearing a djellaba and veil, singing the tale of “Zoubida” with a colorful accent.7 In both of the above cases, the actor gives a deliberately bad performance, since one need not even have talent or any technical skill whatsoever to “mimic the wog” (contrefaire le Bougnoule). With self-irony, Lagaf’ remarks at the very moment of the chorus, “Now that’s a song!”—as a way of insisting once again on the intrinsic worthlessness of such a sketch. The dispossession of speech thus takes place through the outlandish reproduction of typification and through the schematization of imitation that renders the original featureless and lacking in singularity. Nor is it insignificant that both these ridiculous forgeries of a parlance end in the same way, with the Arabs getting arrested by the police. The theft of a tone, an accent, a lexicon, a syntax—these stigmata of “Araby” speech—participate in the “operations to maintain order”8 exercised through public force. The language police and the colonial order work in tandem here.
Pierre Guyotat makes room for this imitation in his song in this case; and, independently of the character, “monsieur” becomes “mssio” or “mssiou,” “Vénissieux” becomes “Vinissioux,” “petite” “ptet.” Yet these convergences are borrowed from the voice of the despised, among other sources, which Guyotat wants to make resound in the very body of the Frenchman. The preface to Le livre announces: “The prostituted bodies are scattered within the foundations of History in order to contaminate them” (9). “The nonstate whore” and “sexual slavery” (Guyotat, Explications 11–12) refer to “this obligation of sexuality,” which is an instance of “haunting” (41) that crosses multiple levels of exploitation. In the diction of prostitution, Guyotat thus includes the Arab, robbed, dominated, immigrated.
This book is the great novel of the tongue, in all its states or nonstates, and it relentlessly features writing that is torn from the conventions of speech. Faced with the hundreds of pages of Progénitures, the reader hesitates. Criticism will not have the last word here in a few lines. For my purposes, let me just illustrate a small fragment between two dashes; I hasten to add that thousands of other passages would perhaps work just as well.
—th’word’th’ideal’Progenitor’, thee triple husband, mah Great—
Cashier, inside the verses our’Inspired one to be cradled
whore, mud, doorjamb, chian, shishma, assassin,
third freed, maestr’d’brothels, transit, auction, vetos, we’d stain, wom’n,
Moon, Sun, Gawd!—
—l’verb’l’Progenitur’idéal, te triple epoux, me Grand’—
Caissièr’, dedans les versets notr’Insufflé s’y bercer
putain, crott’, chiambranl’, chian, chichmah, assassin,
tiers affranchi, mâtr’d’bouics, transit, enchèr’, vetos, tacherions, femm’,
Lun’, Soleil, Diou!—(Progénitures 24)
The graphical element of the text serves to broadcast voices, where pronunciation is painstakingly transcribed to echo current elisions, and also to mark where the text tends to deviate from contemporary urban usage. Rural or archaic accents (mâtr for maître [master], Diou for Dieu [God], -chi- for -ch-) are transmitted, like the indigenous modifications that I was pointing out earlier; they are associated with the closing of the French e (loss of the accent aigu). In this heady evocation of the human brothel, the book’s title puts down roots in the language, in its self-exhibition in the form of “verses,” and thus reestablishes a theology. The “inspired one” (Insufflé) might be the writer, the Creator, or the French language, caught in the new trinity of Lun’, Soleil, Diou (Moon, Sun, Gawd). The accumulated nouns resonate with each other in the juxtaposition of their different registers. The sequence “chiambranl’, chian, chichmah, assassin, tiers affranchi” is based on successive phonic deformations. “Chambranle” (door frame, mantelpiece) restored to the older form, “chiambranle,” contains “chian.” Into this neighborhood of archaicized French words, the Arabic word “chichmah” is inserted,9 awakening the etymon of “hashish.” Thegangs of plundering thieves in stoned ecstasy imagined by the West resurface here. The expression “third freed” (tiers affranchi), two words associated through sibilance in French, retains before the name of the master “a space of slavery” (un espace esclavagiste) that has not been “reduced” (Le livre 9) to a single circumstance of history. The verse, self-designated, is the rhythmic form adequate to a linguistic sacredness that makes itself felt in an otherworld of ordinary syntax, full of active infinitives, accumulated intensities, and a continuous breath that is nearly untenable.
Here and there, Guyotat evokes the pasts of language and rearranges them. The work does not consume the matter of Algeria but rather consummates it, in a relational, colonial history. Guyotat generates an active critique of the sociohistorical states of the French language. Despite the radical nature of his poetic choices, he does not aim to leave the space of French. On the contrary, he wants, for example, to “reintroduce rhythm into our language without inventing another language” (Explications 167). The “external points of view” on the language, including that of Arabic, must be adopted, “but inside of the language” (127). It is not for nothing that Guyotat has for several years been teaching the history of the French language to students at the University of Paris VIII Vincennes-Saint-Denis.10 He remakes French in all of its contradictions (of registers, periods, territory), but as a unitary project. It is “in itself” that the language must welcome different points of view; and French is valuable for France, which must attend to “the organization of diversity” (Guyotat, “Voter Chirac”). Even if it means displeasing his fans, Guyotat repeats that one must not “endlessly ‘badmouth’ France” (“Voter Chirac”). This is not a case of a disjunction between poetics and politics. On the contrary, Guyotat is an intransigent partisan of the Republic, for whom France is the French language, and whose unity guarantees France’s internal diversity. When the author claims—in order to celebrate the fact—that France did not “fail at integration” (“Voter Chirac”), I believe that Guyotat is referring more to the event of his own work than voicing an economic or sociological analysis. In an ambiguous move, this event both transforms and repatriates the exteriority at its very heart. The extraneous Arabic gains access to the refuge of a reformed language. Colonial prohibitions are in this way integrated into a speech that annihilates the force of their silence. At the same time, their differential necessity and the linguistic unanimity of French are extended. Stigma of stigmata, Guyotat’s text offers us one of the most audacious contemporary French works, a work that deprives censure and reconstitutes that which gave it meaning (the theologico-political). The pleasure no longer resides in the maintenance—at all costs—of colonial possession; rather, it is born from the evocation of all the stages of France (and of French) in its discursive subjectivation. Guyotat’s language tries to inaugurate another époque for the French language, which undoes the colonialism of “old France” (“Voter Chirac”) and reenacts the greatness of a landless language. In this regard, Guyotat is a classicist, replacing modernity with an eternity of variation. Colonial interdiction is overridden, even as its diction gets recognized in the reinvention of French through French.
Another kind of stigma can be found in the work of Hélène Cixous, and this is a stigma that carries with it other consequences. Like Guyotat, Cixous is marked by Algerian history without being altogether fastened within this space of writing. Especially in the last decade or so, Cixous has made a return to Algeria through the means of parautobiographical writing. I risk the barbarism of this word in order to describe the fictional space Cixous aims to embed in every citadel of the self. For her, the “I” is not closed, and literature is one of the manners of its dispersal. The narrator of works such as Les rêveries de la femme sauvage (Reveries of the Wild Woman) is almost her, existing at her side, in her surroundings, in her direction, and beyond—all positions contained in the Greek word para (and to a lesser degree in its French cognates). Les rêveries tells the story of a woman who remembers her life as a Jewish child and later as an adolescent in Oran and Algiers during World War II and its aftermath. Each of Cixous’s novels crafts its own poetics and habits; the inventions change in order to generate the specific language of the text. The exhibition of the defiance of sexual division (répartition sexuelle) is likewise to be found in all her work. Here, however, the play between the masculine definite article le and the feminine la takes on a supplementary meaning; in particular, when writing about the voile, the veil. Aïcha, the servant, who wears le voile (Les rêveries 90), becomes, through a slippage of the definite article, the great female navigator who travels “à la voile au petit port de la cuisine” (90)—who “sails into the little harbor of the kitchen” (52).11 The text is rich in such acts of collusion, accumulating references to the sea (especially to les barques, or small boats). Aïcha, the Arab servant, becomes in her turn the mère (mother) of a language spoken in French, giving birth to the book itself—a reflection of the narrator’s mother who runs an obstetrics clinic. Toward the end of her memorial visit in Algeria, the “I” narrates yet another veil story, which she witnessed as a child: a young woman whose veil gets caught in a merry-go-round, so that her body gets cut in two by the shock (144–46). The woman who watches the accident both remains herself and immediately transforms into the victim: “I have within me a veiled girl cut in two the deadly veil cut because I am a girl the victim’s witness, cut off from the victim” (82/146). The disappearance of punctuation, as well as the use of anacoluthon, forms the performative contradiction of this cut expressed by a single voice. The experience is unbearable. It reflects the fact of living death, of being other—as in the exchange between the “young veiled girl” and the I, “one would call it Jewish” (145). This memory becomes “veiled” (146) like the deceased, like the wheel of the merry-go-round. The splitting of the body is ultimately lived by a narrator whose condition is always “inseparable” from Algeria. In the response she gives to the social idiom, literary language takes up this Arab “veil” in order to make the internal strangeness of the tongue heard, although nearly inaudible. “Veil” is the term that since the 1990s has regularly been used in the media and political discourse to designate the recalcitrant Muslim. At the height of the din, a few years after the publication of Reveries of a Wild Woman, between April 2003 and mid-March 2005—between Sarkozy’s declarations to the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF) and the centenary of the French laïcité law—more than 120 articles were devoted to the veil and other Islamic headscarves in the three major daily national newspapers in France (Le Figaro, Le Monde, and Libération). More than half the texts contain the word “veil” in the title instead of another term: foulard (headscarf), signe religieux (religious sign), burqa, laïcité. If here, “veil” becomes synonymous with “nonassimilable,” with the dark depths of postcolonial immigration,12 then Hélène Cixous attempts another usage of the term, where “veil” generates the text, which is shared with the protagonists of the imperial scene. She employs the resources of the language, of each language, to designate foreignness through the utterance. The place made for others’ words does not, in itself, coincide with the end of the oppressive parlance. Cixous’s novel did not prevent the journalistic parroting of 2003. Yet it would be pointless to think that the renunciation of colonial discourse will take place without recourse to poetry. In any event, Guyotat and Cixous, with their singularities and their different perspectives, construct works opening onto the impossible post hoc of the colony.