Boualem Sansal has been touring high schools in France for more than 20 years. Twenty years since he was invited to speak to students about his profession as a writer and his native Algeria. At 75, the author, several of whose novels are still banned in Algeria, probably knows France and its youth better than many French people.
“Every year,” he says, “I see the level of French drop. I come back to the same high school a few years later and I’m on another planet. In the last one I passed by, I had not started to speak when someone asked me: “Hey, sir, sir, are you celebrating Ramadan?” And then, the teachers are often from the viscous left who play ignorant so as not to be rejected. They act popular as if they came from the neighborhood. It’s horrible. »
It’s because he can’t take it anymore and to sound a cry of alarm that he is publishing these days French, let’s talk about it! (Editions du Cerf). In this pamphlet full of verve and scathing humor, Boualem Sansal draws the sad assessment of a language in decline assailed on all sides by the globish of the media and political elites, the wech wech of the suburbs and the so-called “inclusive” language of the bobos and academics.
“Until recently, we talked about language in a positive way,” he says. It was considered a common good. Then, the French raised their foot and abandoned their language to the invisible hand of the market. When you let nature take its course, things go in all directions and there are always eccentric people who invent anything. »
A soul, a spirit, a story
Among these inventions, he says, are “ wech wech”, a word formed from the interjection “what” (wech in Arabic) through which young people from the suburbs call out to each other on everything. “It’s a language that we don’t understand any more in France than in Algeria, because these young people are neither French nor Algerian. They live among themselves and are even hated in Algeria, because they don’t know how to behave and flirt with girls. » As if speaking French well would have become a handicap, he said.
Then, there is this “inclusive” language which “in reality excludes everyone who does not speak it. They want to forbid us from saying “mademoiselle” or “men” and impose “those and those” on us. But it’s today’s Precious Ridiculous! » Sansal reminds us that the word “virility” is strangely… feminine! “When we don’t know and we don’t know the history of the language, we invent anything. »
Language is the cornerstone of the national symbolic edifice, insists the writer. His findings are far from rosy, because, he says, “countries that have no language or have betrayed theirs have no future. If language declines, thought necessarily follows. Language is a soul, a spirit, a history, a geography, a culture, a vision of the world, values. It’s a whole. It’s not just a lexicon and grammatical rules. It’s not like learning cobol or basic. The brain doesn’t work like that.”
A “lost chameleon”
The writer, who describes himself as a “lost chameleon”, grew up in the heart of a linguistic anthill. Born French in Algeria, he attended the Ecole de la République. “Our parents were among those privileged natives who were already urbanized. Even my grandparents were French-speaking and completely assimilated. When independence came, we were faced with the question of who we were and what language to speak. »
At the beginning, the former colonies retained French. They even considered it their “spoils of war”, to use the words of the poet Kateb Yacine. Not to mention, explains Sansal, that if they chose another language, it would be civil war. Because, if we spoke French in the cities, we spoke Algerian Arabic in the countryside, classical Arabic in the mosque, and Russian, even, in the army. Not counting Berber.
But, for Arab-Muslims, French was the language of the colonizer, says Sansal. “For pan-Arabists, it was intended to be replaced by Arabic. But which Arab? Dialectal Arabic? Modern Arabic, which is Esperanto created in the 1920s by the Syrians? Behind them came the Islamists, for whom language, race, territory did not exist, there was only the large community of Muslims. » The writer likes to remind us that Arabic is also a language of colonization. And this for fourteen centuries. Algeria produced senators, generals and five Roman emperors. The remains of ancient Rome are everywhere in Algeria
It was in the 1980s that everything changed. “From 1980,” says Sansal, “the proponents of pan-Arabism and pan-Islamism formed an alliance and took power. They chased us away. Now they are fighting to eradicate French. This is completely unrealistic, because you cannot uproot a language that is so anchored in society. But his space has become limited. French is completely absent from politics and administration, but still the language of technical education. At the polytechnic school and technical institutes, I always taught in French. But, from year to year, my students’ level of French fell. For mathematics, it was okay, but the cultural level was zero. This is true in all Arab countries. »
For Boualem Sansal, French has always been and remains this language of freedom in which he could read all the authors of the world. He remembers that time when the three major high schools in Algeria were ranked immediately after the Louis-le-Grand and Henri-IV high schools. Until the 1980s, the Algerian ferry had a very good reputation. “Today,” he said, “you are told to repeat your studies from the 6the. » Sansal also believes that it was a mistake to suppress the teaching of Latin and Greek, which are the roots of our language.
“We are tearing down the walls”
“I say it to the French, I said it to Chirac, to Sarkozy and to Macron: France is falling apart everywhere. French is becoming shriveled. In the scientific world, we only express ourselves in English. » Besides, the writer is not fooled. He knows well that he is invited to France to say things that the French do not dare say or even think. “They locked themselves into this colonialist guilt. It’s cowardly on every level. It’s scary. We’re tearing down the walls. »
Does this mean that there is nothing more to do? The one who received the Grand Prix de la Francophonie in 2013 is rightly banking on the Francophonie, even if he admits, in passing, that he finds Canadians (and Belgians) a little too “right-thinking”. “If you are not capable of defending the French language, we, the French speakers, will do it,” he told the French. To do this, he calls for the creation of a French-speaking academy. He of course welcomed the appointment of the Lebanese Amin Maalouf to the permanent secretariat of the French Academy, but “we could open the Academy to French speakers on a massive scale,” he said.
He also believes that French should become the main language of the European Union. “In Europe, the United Kingdom is gone. Europe must have a common language. Why wouldn’t it be French? In Europe, we are still Francophiles, as in Eastern countries, in Greece and a few others. We could create programs to help diplomats and fight to make French the language of the European Union. Otherwise, Germany will win. It’s playable. »
At the end of our meeting, Boualem Sansal was preparing to sign two copies of his book. The first to the new Prime Minister Michel Barnier. The second to the new Minister of the Interior Bruno Retailleau. “It might give them some ideas…”