Just when I was starting to get used to this gorgeous weather, I have to head for the frigid East next week. Should be cool, though. Planning on seeing Sina “Herr Doktor” Mohammadi
BCN’s pretty quiet today. I’ve been delving into my thesis a little bit: and have been pondering these paragraphs, which was quoted in a friend of mine’s thesis from Senegal:
However, Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop, in his article “Quand la plume trahit ta bouche” (“When Your Pen Betrays Your Mouth”), describes a much more relevant and significant problem: that of language. He explains his decision to write in Wolof for the first time after having written in French for years. He writes, “Je ne parle jamais franais dans la vie quotidienne. Dans la société sénégalaise où je vis, cela nÕaurait absolument aucun sens. Le franais est pour moi une langue de cérémonie, ma langue du dimanche, en quelque sorte” (“I never speak French in everyday life. In the Senegalese society in which I live, that would have absolutely no sense. For me, French is a ceremonial language, my Sunday language, if you will”). He also remarks that when the African author writes in French, “le fait que les mot se refusent à lui rend souvent sa démarche maladroite. Parole dÕemprunt, donc empruntée, parsemée de trous de mémoire. Ce dernier point est capital : Il permet peut-être de comprendre pourquoi nos Ïuvres, même quand elles essaient de jouer su le registre de lÕhumour, ont bien du mal à ne pas tre ressenties comme graves et sérieuses” (“the fact that the words evade him often renders his work awkward. Borrowed words sprinkled with holes in the memory. This last point is capital: It perhaps allows one to understand why our works, even when they try to play on the register of humor, have a hard time not being felt as grave and serious”).
The problem of writing in a colonial language that Diop brings up here is perhaps the most important reason that the student writing is of serious tone and theme. As I have already remarked, the students rarely wrote about the personal and at the same time, the most successful pieces were concerned with their daily lives. However, Diop makes it clear that one cannot really recall in writing that which takes place in another language. Language is linked to memory and as the students were writing in either French or English, and not their first languages (Wolof, Pulaar, Sereer, etc.), they certainly had a hard time writing something true. Rather, they donned their “Sunday languages” and wrote fiction in the truest senseÑstories and poems that were entirely invented.
I’ve been thinking about how important language is — and one of the major problems why the Internet can’t catch on is that 40% of the population is literate in French, for most their second or third language.
During my interview with Oumar Sankharé, Senegalese author and professor at UGB and Unversité Cheikh Anta Diop of Historical French Grammar, I discovered that high school and university curriculums were specifically designed to exclude contemporary works. When I inquired as to why a curriculum would intentionally be so narrow, Professor Sankharé said that the study of contemporary writers would give students already struggling with French, a second or third language, more problems because they would pick up “bad habits”Ñlike slang words, vulgar words, words not accepted by lÕAcademie Française, and informal grammatical constructions. With so little access to books, students would have no means by which to obtain contemporary works in French even if they knew they existed, if they were not taught in school. In addition, more than half of the students who wrote constrained poetry were second-year French students, a year during which students study MallarmŽ, a poet who takes form very seriously, even if seemed rebellious in his 19th century context.
This is just something that I’ve been thinking about lately, and also with my side conversations with
