At home in Togo, Radjoul Mouhamadou spoke his mother’s language, Anoufoh, and his father’s, Hausa. However, he considers French as “one of his mother tongues”. For him, French, the one sanctioned by the French Academy, is a surrogate mother, or the elder sister, of other languages, including Quebec, from which she never stops giving birth.
This is somewhat the point he defends in his essay, Creolizing the Québécois, published by Somme tout. For him, the oral language of Quebec deserves the status of a language in its own right and must assume itself as such. Hasn’t French already been described as being a “Latin Creole”, as Bernard Cerquiglini and Alain Rey like to say, and closer to us, Jean-Benoît Nadeau?
Our invisible books
A master’s student in international studies at Laval University, Radjoul Mouhamadou is also a bookseller. Arrived in Quebec in 2016, he fell in love with it, and particularly appreciates its spoken language, which he likes to dissect and reinterpret in his own way. For example, he likes the expression “in my own book”, where he finds the “ultimate conviction of an undemonstrable reference to an imaginary book that does not exist in any library”, he writes. “This way of writing invisible books like we build castles in Spain tells us about the place of oral literature in the collective imagination of Quebec. »
Since his arrival in Quebec, he claims to hear in the language spoken here “something like a language in the making”, or in gestation, he said in an interview. He quotes Édouard Glissant who also said about the Quebec language that it was “a Creole that seeks daylight”.
Now, to want to fix the tongue, to mummify it in some way, is to refuse its living nature. He prefers the mixed language, mixed with words from indigenous languages or from immigration. “The old language must break down so that carrus in Latin, become char in Québécois or because in English,” he says. And it is in the same spirit that he rejects the notion of nation, which he considers today as archaic. “We live after the nation,” he said in an interview. “We must invent the political form of the future. »
Unhealthy nostalgia
“The country is a place of becoming, the nation is a territory of being. » Francophone and Francophile as he is, he goes so far as to say that the defeat of New France at the hands of the English may have been altogether a good thing, « an evil in disguise ». This saved Quebecers from drowning in unhealthy nostalgia for lost greatness, such as the Make America Great Againof Donald Trump, or, perhaps, nostalgia for the Soviet empire of Vladimir Putin?
“Reluctantly, the French-speaking countries form, vis-à-vis the cultural and linguistic metropolis of France, an international of shrunken cultures, diglotte countries and replenished men. »
“I have a healthy horror of grammarians and academicians, those sinister jailers who go to great lengths to scrutinize written languages, by stabilizing words on a sacred grove, and erecting altars to immolate barbarism. »
Because there is no pure language, just as there is no pure country, he believes. He also likes to quote Jacques Cartier, who wrote quite simply, when arriving in our lands: “people live here”.
Born in a country, and a continent, where French is not threatened, Radjoul Mouhamadou does not immediately put on the boots of Quebecers who are worried here about the future of their language.
“Quebec, practiced exclusively in North America in the province of Quebec, could hypothetically disappear, he acknowledges in his book. It is therefore appropriate to separate the destiny of Quebec from the future of the French language, especially since the gap of misunderstanding is widening between the two variants. This preservation of the Québécois must go hand in hand with the united defense of the Canadian Francophonie, without omitting the indigenous languages,” he wrote.
But for him, linguistic concern is more specific to users of written languages. “It’s a narcissism specific to writing cultures that like to play at scaring themselves. This extinction anxiety is akin to “hypochondriac mania,” he says. He adds: “What explains the absence of anxiety about the extinction of languages among nomadic and all-literate peoples? »
However, in Montreal, he admits, the battle for French is already lost. “Montreal is a world-city, that is to say a linguistic laboratory that escapes the atavistic territory of Quebec ethnolinguistic nationalism, in the narrowest sense,” he writes. In this context, Montreal cannot become a linguistic territory, he concludes.
And then ? he seems to say. Words are “migratory birds”, why imprison them?
For a great lover of oral languages, Radjoul Mouhamadou seems to have fun with those he writes. And we suspect that he will impress himself in the pages of the books of the bookstore À la liberté, where he works, in Quebec.