By closing the book Noopiming, by Anichinabe author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, it is still unclear whether the characters in the book are female or male. Over the pages, it is the non-gender pronoun “iel”, which has just entered the dictionary The Robert, which defines the characters, whether they are called Lucy, Sabe or Mindimooyenh.
Arianne Des Rochers, the translator of this work first written in English, did not wait for the approval of the Robert to make the “iel” appear in the text. In fact, the indefinite pronoun she uses echoes the neutral nonbinary singular pronoun ” they “That the author uses in the original version, which can replace the” Hey ” where the ” she ” in English.
In an interview, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explains that it is, among other things, in reference to the Anichinabemowin language that she chose to use non-gender pronouns throughout her last book.
“In our language, we don’t have gender pronouns. If you want to assign a genre to someone, it has to be done on purpose. In our culture, there is no gender restriction, for example between masculine and feminine. There are more than two genres. I wanted to evoke this reality of the Anichinabemowin language. In English, the way to do that was with the use of the pronoun “they”, ”she says, adding that herself is defined in life by a feminine pronoun (she).
A double mind
In an article byCanadian Encyclopedia on two-spiritedness (two-spiritedness in English, and niizh manidoowag in Anichinabémowin), Michelle Filice explains that it is a term which, among the Aboriginals, refers to people “having a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit”. Activist Albert McLeod used the term in 1990 to refer to the indigenous LGBTQ community.
“Two-Spirit is commonly used to refer to gender identity and chosen traditional role and dress,” writes M.me Filice.
In her previous works, author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson had already used the singular pronoun ” they », But to a lesser extent, explains its translator, Arianne Des Rochers.
“The reason the previous two translations don’t use this process is simply because Leanne’s writing has evolved over the course of her books (and so the translations evolve too),” she says. In Mapping Decolonial Love and We always get lost by accident, the majority of the characters are gendered at “Hey” or to “she”; we had then translated accordingly, that was not a problem. However, some characters were not gendered, this is the case in particular of Lucy, a character who appears in We get lost, and we had found more subtle ways of not gendering this character (by bypassing certain formulations, for example). I believe that the pronoun “iel” occurs once or twice in We get lost, if I’m not mistaken, but it’s true that it’s really not to the same degree as in Noopiming, where it becomes a central aspect of the story. “
Faced with the use of the “they” in the singular, the translator had to show imagination to respect the spirit of the text.
“In translation, if we remain within the resources of normative / standard French, we would have had to decide and translate by“ il ”or“ elle ”, which goes completely against what happens in the original text. (Besides, how exactly could I have decided on the gender of the characters? Nothing in the original text gave me a clue to that.) So it’s for the sake of respecting the non-gender aspect. , non-binary, queer, of Leanne’s writing that the pronoun “iel” and inclusive writing have imposed themselves, ”she continues.
Animated or inanimate genre
In fact, the feminine and the masculine, omnipresent in the French language, do not have a similar place in several indigenous languages, where we rather classify beings and things according to whether they are “animate” or “inanimate”. .
“The genus ‘animated’ includes names for humans, animals and other living organisms, such as trees and several kinds of shrubs,” writes linguist Lynn Drapeau in her Grammar of the Innu language, published by the Presses of the University of Quebec. A “box”, a “bucket” or a “suitcase” are for their part names of inanimate genus.
She specifies that “the gender of nouns has repercussions on the whole of the grammar of the language”.
In translation, if we stay within the resources of normative / standard French, we would have had to decide and translate by “he” or “she”, which goes completely against what happens in the original text.
In a text published in the journal Native American research in Quebec in 1983, the ethnologist José Mailhot noted for his part that this particularity of indigenous languages did not prevent a certain sexism from infiltrating them.
“Just because they do not have a masculine or feminine grammatical gender, the Algonquian languages have fewer mechanisms to encode the idea of gender inequality. Nevertheless, they are not devoid of sexist terms ”, she wrote in a text entitled“ Sexist terms in Algonquian languages ”.
She noted, for example, that in the Plains Cree and Eastern Cree languages, the verb meaning “to be a man” means “to be brave”. Likewise, in Innu as in James Bay Cree, bragging is associated with the male sex, she writes.
“Of course, it is not the terms themselves that are sexist, but the use made of them by speakers in a given society. It is therefore not a question of what the terms denote, but of what they connote ”, specifies the ethnologist.
Restore representation
Beyond the reference to the Anichinabemowin language, the author Leanne Betasamosake Simpson also wanted, with Noopiming, open the possibility of identifying readers to all its characters.
“She wants as many people as possible to be able to identify with and see themselves in her characters, but especially young queer people. There is indeed a glaring absence of non-binary or queer representation in the literature, in the sense that one can only identify with female or male characters. These gendered characters can tend to convey stereotypes or a certain idea of masculinity or femininity, so in a certain sense, that limits the imagination too, ”explains translator Arianne Des Rochers.
With Catherine Lalonde