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119 Chapter 6 Today: Stigmata and Veils The advent of speech is never achieved once and for all. And although it does not definitively undo interdiction, indigenous speech does open a breach in the colonial edifice. The insistence of indigenous discourses in French, in tandem with the wars for independence, has made it difficult for colonial verbiage to claim to represent the language without being ridiculed. Has interdiction disappeared? I suspect that it hasn’t. Today,in singular fashion,the most clear-cut and persistent methods of interdiction exist foremost in the most widespread forms of censure. Education, the Press I have shown how real acts of withdrawing speech have occurred. No: you are not writing literature, so you do not exist; and what is more, I cannot hear you. Let us write new lines about the old authors. In exemplary fashion, the school system and the media exert a necrotizing control over any and all speech that breaks with the established order. It is true that in addition to the emancipatory virtues they reiterate, the traditional function of these two worlds is to enforce a kind of censure. Journalism is a democratic multiplication of the discourse about reality, and it is the secret dispensary of propaganda , a trivial way to program utterances. Education delivers individuals from ignorance and spreads the doctrine of constraint. These contradictory 120 GIVING LANGUAGES, TAKING SPEECH postulations can be articulated differently or juxtaposed according to the places, periods, and people involved. Today, the mainstream press in France (and its audiovisual and Internet equivalents) hardly bases its activity on the construction of civic reflection, preferring instead to inform minds. As for public education in France, most of the time its agents resort to coercion (seen as a good in itself), or resign themselves to giving up teaching; even the minister of education oscillates between these two attitudes, often in a way that is out of step with teachers. In this bleak situation, journalism and education, which expect to enjoy the rights that they clearly deserved in the past, may most easily relive their former prestige by deploying their capacity for censure. As for francophonie, the simple refusal to acknowledge its existence is widely employed in teaching. For its part, Parisian literary journalism does not regularly respond to Haitian or Ivorian publications; on this point, however , we touch on a dysfunction too massive to discuss here. On the other hand, what remains of literature in secondary education erases nearly all literary production from the current or former colonies. I do not exclude the courage of individual teachers. The official guidelines for choosing books today are quite sibylline, allocating the responsibility of determining textual canons to so-called accompanying documents and manuals. Clearly, there is minimal space for the words uttered across a period that spans nearly a century. The latest recommendations from the Centre National de Documentation Pédagogique (National Center of Pedagogical Documentation) give an idea of the best-case scenario for postcolonial francophone literature in institutional teaching.1 Lists of novels are cited as examples, arranged hierarchically from the very suitable to the supplementary (the “but also . . .” category), then onto foreign literature—and then finally come the “potentially ” readable books. In the center of this miniature replica of Dante’s Inferno, Ahmadou Kourouma and Kateb Yacine are in the second circle. As might be expected, most of the postcolonial novelists correspond to the lowest level of instruction. That such books are presented as “potentially”capable of “sustaining the curiosity and interest of the students”suggests to my admittedly rather acerbic mind that these works are more suitable for the less “valuable” students at the Lycée, such as those who are not taking courses of general study. The idea is based solely on documentary evidence. One could recite an entire litany of clichés: the “children of immigrants” recognize themselves in Azouz Begag more than in Proust or Racine (but in what way would a “good Frenchman”naturally have more of a connection to the latter two authors?); francophone texts are easier or closer to realism (but they are read as simple testimonies, and they do not put Frankétienne or Abdelwahab TODAY: STIGMATA AND VEILS 121 Meddeb on the syllabus), and so on. This deafness to the indigenous text is an offspring of the doctrine of “reduced French,” for which equivalents in book form are now sought. Even when one proposes devoting a number of hours to the connection between “literature” and “otherness,” starting...

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