Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves by Natalie Edwards

Abstract

Reviewed by: Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves by Natalie Edwards Araceli Hernández-Laroche Edwards, Natalie. Multilingual Life Writing by French and Francophone Women: Translingual Selves. Routledge, 2021. ISBN 978-0-367-15032-7. Pp. 184. Much has been written about the relationship between power and language. Cardinal Richelieu understood the power of standardizing the French language and literature. His legacy lives through l’Académie française, established in 1635. However, what or who are we excluding when our assumptions about French literature are grounded on unexamined monolingual perspectives? One of the ambitious aims of Natalie Edwards’s pioneering work is “challenging the monolingual paradigm of French literature” (15). Edwards successfully shifts our monolingual focus by exploring contemporary female writers who demonstrate the vibrancy of polyglot eruptions, relationships, hybridity, borrowings, and co-creations through the more intimate genre of life writing in French. Influenced by recent theorizations on multilingual learners by scholars from bilingual education, linguistics, and other disciplines, such as Ofelia García on translanguaging, Edwards challenges us to probe our archive of French literary understandings in more asset-based directions: “[O]ne of the main proponents of translanguaging underscores the ability of bilinguals to transform the two languages they inhabit, suggesting that the term ‘conceives of language relationships in more dynamic terms’” (16–17). Edwards urges us to engage with French literary productions from a more linguistically inclusive perspective as she explores the translanguaging of six contemporary multilingual authors who highlight power dynamics, gender, war legacies, colonial history and postcolonial environmental conditions, indigenous struggles, the porousness of national borders, and the voluntary and forced migrations of so many lived experiences, complicating hybrid identities. The title of Lydie Salvayre’s historical fiction, Pas pleurer, is in itself an example of the way in which Spanish syntax (No llorar) exerts an influence on the spoken French of a character with Alzheimer’s disease, especially when recounting the trauma of the Spanish Civil War after decades of living in France. Translanguaging in Salvayre’s text “restores the stories of the forgotten, the overlooked, the illiterate and the linguistically ‘weak’ to the public domain” (48), Edwards convincingly argues. Kim Thúy’s work, described as a récit de soi based on Vietnamese immigration in an already multilingual Québec, adds French to the more common Anglophone representations of Vietnamese refugees in literary and cultural works. Texts such as Mãn suggest that “the French language can be viewed differently, as a product of other linguistic encounters over time, and that it will continue to be adapted by individuals for their own communicative purposes” (69). Similarly insightful are the explorations of Indigenous or Creole influences and negotiated or impossible translations in the fiction of Catherine Rey’s Francophone Australia, Gisèle Pineau’s Caribbean translanguaging, and Chantal Spitz’s solidarity with the [End Page 260] Tahitian language and eco-struggles within French dominance. Hélène Cixous’s linguistic repertoire is less explored in scholarship but not in Edwards’s analysis of her polyglot childhood in French Algeria, which was immersed in French, Spanish, Arabic, Yiddish, German, and English. Monolingual environments seldom exist. Diverse linguistic appreciation unearths cross-cultural infusions layering any local and globalized setting. French multilingual women writers not only decenter France as a literary center, they also successfully move readers beyond monolingualism. [End Page 261] Araceli Hernández-Laroche University of South Carolina Upstate Copyright © 2022 American Association of Teachers of French