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

As Natalie Edwards herself notes, life-writing has ‘long been concerned with the exclusivity of Western approaches to selfhood’ (p. 117), and her book earnestly writes against this tradition to examine the multilinguistic matrices and hybrid identities of six women authors. Edwards’s corpus, which spans a vast geography, closely examines the interactions of other languages with French: Spanish in Lydie Salvayre, Vietnamese and English in Kim Thúy, Australian English in Catherine Rey, Creole in Gisèle Pineau, Tahitian in Chantal Spitz, and German in Hélène Cixous. She examines how these authors ‘translanguage’, a term which denotes ‘a dynamic, productive dialogue that emphasizes the practices of the contemporary multilingual individual’ (p. 54). Whilst the effects and aims of each of these authors vary, the common thread is that ‘the personal is political’ (p. 163), made manifest through the act of translanguaging. Salvayre’s translanguaging, Edwards advances, captures a subjectivity developed through two languages; in Rey’s work, Australian English supplements her native French for better self-expression. Translanguaging is seen as an act of defiance in Pineau and Spitz, bearing witness to historic and linguistic colonial violence. For both Cixous and Thúy, translanguaging is positioned as an act of recuperation and reconciliation with a painful past. Edwards’s thesis gestures towards a generative and emancipatory form of women’s writing, where her authors unshackle themselves from an often oppressive or limiting monolingualism. She shows how the authors refuse the subordination of their once oppressed, private, or affective languages, interpolating them to sit not only alongside French, but above French (literally in the case of Thúy, whose chapter titles appear in Vietnamese). Notably, Edwards’s reading of Spitz shows how translanguaging challenges any easeful ‘cohabitation’ of French and Tahitian — which are like ‘water and oil’ (p. 191) — thus linguistically performing the lingering irreconcilability between the two languages and cultures, issuing from the (neo-)colonial violence experienced in French Polynesia. She pays close attention to how these authors translate, footnote, or leave untranslated the ‘interruptions’ of their other languages into their writing, unearthing the polemical effects when languages bleed into one another unapologetically. Any responsibility for readerly (dis)comfort is often shifted away from the author, as the act of translanguaging demands a more generous hermeneutics on the part of the non-multilingual reader, who must become comfortable with ‘unfamiliarity’ (p. 167). Edwards’s nuanced approach also avoids ‘white reading’, offering parallel interpretations which acknowledge those readers who share the author’s multilingualism. Occasionally, the reader might lament the somewhat muted way in which the more intersectional polemic is developed within certain chapters, where Edwards’s meticulous linguistic analysis dominates the focus. In Salvayre, there may have been scope to advance a more explicit proto-feminist reading of her translanguaging, akin to that in the chapter on Cixous. Notwithstanding these reservations, the decolonizing ambition of this work should be praised and is, for the most part, highly successful. Edwards’s conclusion powerfully captures the importance of translanguaging in an increasingly plurilingual and mobile world; moreover, it is a practice which is intersectional in its scope and inter-disciplinary in its application, thus perhaps hailing a new paradigm for women’s life-writing research.