Festival de la Francophonie 2011

Living in DC can be great fun: it's a city where international happenings occur sans cesse, all throughout the year. March and April were months during which one could enjoy the kinds of francophone treats – films, music, performances, literary salons, storytelling – which otherwise, one would have to travel far and wide to attend. I made it to only a few of them… The festival celebrates the French-speaking world present on all continents, and as Hubert Haddad so rightly reminded us: Les français sont francophones, mais la francophonie n'est pas française, meaning that the French language and culture is not the reserve of France, in fact, French speakers from France represent only 40% of French speakers worldwide!

I attended the opening reception at the Belgian Embassy where I was delighted to meet the francophone contingency from Lafayette, Louisiana, a place where I have deep roots (on my mother's side - another blogpost about that later). The next week, I spent an evening listening to Hubert Haddad, franco-tunisian writer, at a literary salon where he was interviewed by Sarah Diligenti-Pickup. Unfortunately, I missed the one with Yannick Lahens, from Haïti. A few days later, I was thrilled to experience a live music concert by Les Nubians, those two Grammy nominated international singers and recording artists who just happen to be sisters.





It was, however, the evening of La Nuit du conte that I did not want to miss. Four storytellers both captivated and enraptured the audience at La Maison Française: Mimi Barthélémy with stories from the West Indies, Bienvenu Bokian from West Africa, Myriame El Yamani from Acadia, Quebec, and Maghreb, and Barry Jean Ancelet from Louisiana. It was the Louisiana storyteller who caught my attention. I wanted to hear my compatriot tell folktales in French. I wondered if they would be the same I had heard growing up in Louisiana. His voice, his tone, and the stories, tales, and legends from the Cajun world all brought me back to where I come from.
I haven't lived in Louisiana for over 35 years, but I feel closer to it now that I ever have. Vive la francophonie! 

No Need to "Pardon My French"

The expression "Pardon my French," which I have never liked, should be replaced with "Admire my French!" Someone uses some sort of profanity, and in a show of false embarrassment or pretended regret at having used such language, asks to be forgiven. Why would anyone want to apologize for using one of the world's most eloquent languages, and I might add, a very difficult one to master. Is it because French language speakers are considered more libertine, more risqué in their use of language, and that consequently, if one swears, one was only being a bit French, since the equivalent word or expression, were it to be used among French speakers, would not raise an eyebrow? Perhaps French speakers are more permissive, more tolerant, more naughty? I wonder if we are all just a bit envious.

I was lately reminded of the expression by an excellent article that appeared in the New York Times written by Michael Kimmelman's and entitled "Pardon My French," only here, the expression wittily suits the author's purposes. Kimmelman is razor sharp in his theory of how the French language will carry on in the future, even prosper, thanks to populations of peoples outside the Hexagon, explaining that France's proprietory relationship to the French language cannot continue, and that the French must get a grip on reality, ie, he writes, "French is now spoken mostly by people who aren't French. More than 50 percent of them are African. French speakers are more likely to be Haitians and Canadians, Algerians and Senegalese, immigrants from Africa and Southeast Asia and the Caribbean who have settled in France, bringing their native cultures with them."

Kimmelman goes a step further in raising the question, "So what does French culture signify these days when there are some 200 million French speakers in the world, but only 65 million are actually French?" He relates the story of Andrei Makine, a Russian-born novelist who has not only written novels in French for the past three decades, has been awarded France's highest literary honors for his works. Writing in French has allowed Makine to belong to a culture which is not that of his mother tongue. And Kimmelman reminds us that although France lays claim to non-French born French-language writers such as Beckett (Irish), Ionesco (Roumanian), and Kundera (Czech), it virtually ignores what comes out of the Carribbean or North Africa.

Albert Camus once said, Ma patrie, c'est la langue française. "The French language is my homeland." After more than four decades of an ongoing love affair with the French language, now there's an expression I can live with.