Translingual and Transcultural Patterns in Francophone Literature of the Maghreb

Abstract

IntroductionA GREAT DEAL OF ATTENTION has been devoted recently to the political, cultural, and literary implications of global commerce, notably to multiculturalism and translingualism. The latter is inherent in the very concept of the former, and the theoretical aspects of translingual activity have inspired many interesting critical comments. The study of transculturality and translingualism has, since the early 1990s, exploded into a major field of critical inquiry. This is largely a result of the decline and fall of colonialism and the ascent of economic, political, and cultural globalism. In considering the phenomenon, one must keep in mind the fundamental distinction between a bi- or multilingual author trying to write monolingually in his or her native language or in an adopted language, and a bi- or multilingual text. The latter would logically be produced by someone is multilingual but could, of course, be composed by an essentially monolingual author possessing a smattering of other languages or even randomly mixed from various sources through a robotic cut-and-paste technique, or by importing into the text xenoglossic phonemes whose specific meaning is alien to all save the 'inspired' writer or 'speaker of tongues'.In this essay, I propose to analyse the aesthetic significance of the arsenal of cognitive and linguistic devices at the disposal of multilingual authors of the Maghreb - with the exception of a few celebrated code-switchers turned away from French to embrace Arabic, such as Kateb Yacine, Abdellatif Laâbi, and Rachid Boudjedra - may generally be assigned to the category of what Steven G. Kellman labels monolingual translinguals, or authors who have written in only a single language but one other than their native one.1 Kellman further distinguishes between monolingual translinguals and ambilinguals, write competently in more than one language. Nor should we confuse the multilingual author - is in control of two or more languages but primarily writes in them one at a time - with the multilingual text, which may display multiple cultural and linguistic elements in a single text. The language a multilingual writer uses will, in some way, reveal traces of his or her birth culture as well as the culture encoded in the adopted language; multilingual readers will also enjoy expanded benefits from reading a text in which they can detect those allophonic nuances.2There are certain areas in the world where cultures have long met and tended to barter, battle, blend, and assimilate. Two such areas where history seems to pulsate beneath one's feet are Turkey and Northern Africa, especially the Maghreb (also spelt Maghrib), consisting mainly of Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. For millennia, Northwest Africa has been at the intersection of the North-South axis of European-African commerce and Roman and Andalusian conquest, on the one hand, and the East-West axis of the Punic and Ottoman adventures, and the expansion of the Islamic religious and cultural diasporas of the eighth and eleventh centuries, on the other.3In modem times, the major event impacting on the Maghreb has been the end of French colonialism and the establishment of postcolonial independent regimes in the countries of the region. The period leading up to the struggle for independence and the years during and following these liberation movements witnessed a flowering of self-confidence and with it a flowering of 'home-grown' culture, including a significant literature in French, followed by emerging literatures in Arabic and several Berber dialects.Colonial vs Postcolonial Use of LanguageIn the Maghreb, the acquisition of language competence on the level needed to create literary works in the acquired language was to a degree the inevitable by-product of France's conscientious pursual of her two-pronged colonial policy of fostering 'assimilation' and a 'civilizing mission'. This policy entailed, among other things, the establishment of a school system that imposed tiie learning of the allophone language (French) and discouraged - sometimes by means of disciplinary action and petty punishment - the use of native languages (in this instance, the Arabic dialect and Berber). …