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102 Chapter 5 Interdiction within Diction We have seen all the uncertainties and limits concerning linguistic transmission; we will now examine how a modification in the practice of French becomes fused with all these uncertainties. The ultimate goal of these changes is the canceling out of the speech of the colonized. The phrase remade syntax. Because language is henceforth charged with a power that identifies it with the colonial nation, French can only be granted on the condition that it make itself impregnable. Without which, possession would cease. This ambition to control the speaker through language eventually fails as unexpected literary and discursive events emerge. The trap is nonetheless perilous, and nothing indicates that it might be sprung once and for all. On the contrary, those of us who speak French continue to have trouble hearing ourselves talk. The indigenes receive a place in the language that is granted to them. If they become French and make their Frenchness heard, they risk becoming themselves spokespeople for an ethnic and political assignment that their naturalization opposed. The colonial accent can ultimately color everyone’s speech, beyond the question of real or imaginary origins. A network of utterances and syntagmas colonize language. This resemblance between the French language and France’s historical fate does not make the language sick or intrinsically bad, since a language is perceived only in its production. On the other hand, ready-made language endows itself with a layer of intimacy, with a colonial INTERDICTION WITHIN DICTION 103 xenophobia. This makes the transcendence of ritual parlance through effective language an essential and urgent task. As it happened,beginning with the early decades of the twentieth century,the means of censuring language doubled in the colonial reinterpretation of the words of the colonized. Since the internal immunity of the dominator’s French alone was not up to the task,the colonial powers will try to erase the very discursive reality that escapes them. Handbook of Colonial Usage As with any dynamic involving foreignness and conquest, the words of the other are inserted in the vocabulary and regularly assume a pejorative value. Didn’t the pain and the vin of the Bretons (bara and gwin) give us baragouin, “gibberish”? Between the end of the nineteenth century and the decades that followed, the negativity of the word fatma begins to spread (a generally pejorative adaptation of the Arabic female name Fatima—used much like “chick” in colloquial American English—fatma is usually but not exclusively used to refer to women of actual or perceived Arab descent), along with gourbi (“rathole” or “hovel”) and bled (“country,” “countryside,” or “region ”). These loanwords from Arabic are quite distinct from the medieval adaptations, such as zéro, chiffre (figure), alchimie, and hasard (chance). Bamboula , taken from the languages of sub-Saharan Africa during the eighteenth century (in the restricted sense of “drum”),passes into colonial discourse and becomes synonymous with “festive excess,” “orgy,” and then simply Nègre. Both Tombouctou and Timbuktu will come to mean “nowhere.” This lexicon creates a supplementary effect through combination. I cite a short passage from Céline’s Death on the Installment Plan (Mort à crédit), in which the narrator goes to a fortune-teller: We came to a booth . . . the last woman [moukère] in the place, a grandmother, was rolling up her hangings. . . . She was dressed like a houri. . . . She rolled up her oriental carpets. . . . She was yawning tremendously . . . enough to dislocate her jaw. . . . Wah! Wah! she grunted out through the night. . . . The Fatima [fatma] motions me to come up, to step into her shack [gourbi]. . . . The old bag [la moukère], she turns it over, she looks at my hand. (213) On arrive devant une estrade, c’était la dernière moukère, une grand’mère qui décrochait ses teintures . . . elle était nippée en houri. . . . Elle roulait ses tapis d’Orient. . . . Elle baillait énormément, à se décrocher la mâchoire. . . . Ouah! Ouah! qu’elle grognait à travers la nuit. . . . La fatma, elle me fait signe de venir, de monter dans son 104 GIVING LANGUAGES, TAKING SPEECH gourbi. . . . Elle me prend la main, la moukère, elle me la retourne, elle me regarde dedans, les paumes. (259) The seer condenses the figures of the gypsy (saltimbanque, “acrobat”), “the Oriental,” and the fatma (259). Céline multiplies the clichés, leaps over them somehow, and lands amid an accumulation of racist colonial vocabulary that seems to beget itself naturally (moukère leads to houri, which...

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