The trans-Mediterranean navette: Assia Djebar and the Dictionnaire des mots français d'origine arabe

Abstract

ABSTRACT  Salah Guemriche's Dictionnaire des mots français d’origine arabe (2007) gathers French words that originally come from Arabic, putting them in the context of French literature, illustrating how Arabic has had a presence in French literature through various histories. Reading Assia Djebar's preface to this dictionary reveals a navette, or shuttle, between not only the linguistic sites of French and Arabic, but also a particularly trans-Mediterranean geographic space. The navette as a reading strategy allows for a reading of the dictionary that can travel on, and between, texts and locations. Djebar's preface is compelling not only for its content, but also for its position as a narrative coming before that of the bilingual dictionary. Her membership in the Académie française renders her an expert in French who is at once inside and outside multiple languages and nation-states. She offers up the bilingual tome as a hopeful site where “mots-passerelles” (“bridge-words”) are in constant movement or shuttling, and maintain the tension on the in-between spaces in, and of, the Mediterranean.

Keywords:

• Djebar
• Guemriche
• Dictionary
• Mediterranean
• Francophonie
• Arabic

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Ewa P. Ziarek, Patrick Crowley, Cécile Decousu, and Christine Montané for feedback on earlier versions of this article, and the IRCHSS for research support.

Notes

Notes

1 All translations are my own except where otherwise referenced.

2 Spivak is criticized by some feminists and postcolonial critics for her over-reliance on or fidelity to deconstruction. Dispensing with old genealogies with an eye toward displacing the patronymic, both Spivak and Djebar attempt to gather different ghosts and render archives anew, otherwise, though their methods are not always legible to one another.

3 Rapaël Confiant writes (perhaps in ironic vein?) of the utopic hope for “a worldwide francophone Académie” (“une Académie francophone mondiale”) which would publish a “Dictionnaire du français mondial” including all of the languages French touches and is altered by (Koch).

4 This pseudonym is read as “liberation” by two book reviewers in The New York Times, where Djebar is caught between parentheses with an Orientalist twist, as they pun on the veil: “(The pseudonym, adopted as a veil of discretion for a woman publishing in a Muslim society, now shields her family in Algeria from reprisals)” (Camhi). And once again in another moment of enclosure: “(she changed her name from Fatima-Zohra Imalayene in order not to upset [her father] when she began writing)” (Blume). The pseudonym is the “veil,” a “shield” to defend oneself, and the use of parentheses in both of these descriptions is another distancing or veiling mechanism.

5 The dictionary also contains French words with etymological origins in Turkish and Farsi, but Guemriche notes in an interview with Patrice Martin that there was not enough room on the cover to include this information (Martin).

6 Another reading of Fatima is invoked in Djebar's Loin de Médine, which Spivak treats in “Ghostwriting.”

7 The connection between a pedagogy for the future and Djebar signing off on the dictionary connects to Derrida's notion of the signature in “Signature Event Context”: “By definition, a written signature implies the actual or empirical nonpresence of the signer. But, it will be said, it also marks and retains his [sic] having-been present in a past now, which will remain a future now, and therefore in a now in general, in the transcendental form of nowness (maintenance). This general maintenance is somehow inscribed, stapled to present punctuality, always evident and always singular, in the form of the signature” (328). Djebar's signature marks a “now” in the past, and points to a hopeful future.

8 I have distinguished between “mother's tongue” (langue de lait) and “mother tongue” (langue maternelle) in my translation, since Djebar uses two different terms. If Djebar is using the terms to suggest they are not synonyms, perhaps she is signaling the difference between Berber as coming from her “mother's tongue” (playing on “milk teeth”), while “mother tongue” would be connected to Arabic, signaling the desires of nationalist projects where both nation and tongue are feminized. I thank Patrick Crowley for highlighting this possible distinction. Djebar's treatment of Arabic in this dictionary preface works against Anne Norton's (2011) contention that for Djebar (as well as for Hélène Cixous) Arabic is “disavowed” (Norton).