I am neither a linguist, nor a grammarian, nor a sociologist, and yet it is I who chose to place my contribution to the dossier on languages under the sign — seemingly very specialized — of diglossia. And so it is neither as a linguist nor as an academic of any kind that I have insisted on approaching this subject. It is as a man who remembers, that is to say, as a melancholy writer. It is rare, indeed, for a writer who turns back along his road to glimpse the jewels of his life not to be melancholy. Historical realism, I know, threatens to transform the treasure-hunter that I am into a discoverer of wrecks. No matter; I take the risk.
There are words, just so, which when they cross your path give you the feeling of being self-evident and clear. One suspects their general meaning, in spite of or even because of their slightly learned air, and then, once the door is opened…
Diglossia, for example. Of course, the prefix “di,” implying the notion of double, joined to the Greek root “glôssa,” made the meaning perfectly obvious: it was a matter of two languages. But, how shall I put it, that self-evidence was too simple; it did not reflect the astonishing linguistic bath in which my childhood had splashed about. I searched, I questioned those around me — in short, I opened the Grand Robert, the seven-volume edition of 1973. I did not find the word diglossie there. I fell back on the more modest, though still encyclopedic, Grand Dictionnaire Hachette of 1994, and there I was able to read:
“Diglossie: n. f. The condition of a human group or of a person who practices two languages of differing sociocultural levels. The diglossia of Arabs who use literary Arabic and spoken Arabic. The diglossia of the Breton who speaks French outside and Breton at home.”
But my own diglossia found no reckoning in this brief definition. Two languages, yes, and yet the same one. Two languages, spoken in turn, and sometimes at the same time. Two languages separated and mingled in the same mouth like the different elements of a delectable dish, two languages that even happened to cross their syntaxes. Two different languages that would wed each other to form a third? What was that? Pilfering? Borrowings? Ah! I was once again obliged to take note of this evident truth: the minority concept is never simple in society. But when that concept is named Jewishness, then we enter into a grandiose complexifying of beings and of things. Two languages side by side that form a third! And who, then, spoke three languages at once? My big dictionary was out of its depth! My own diglossia was a triglossia.
I remember.
These three words, with which Georges Perec introduced his recomposition of a swallowed-up time and universe, also come back to my mouth. To my tongue, Jacques Lacan would have suggested — Lacan who, being precise, knew of what and with what he spoke.
I remember: three words of the French language to say that another language, an amiable and smiling tenant, had come to dwell in the house, without disturbing it while all the same disturbing it. Or else, perhaps it was the reverse, French the tenant of Arabic? No, no, I must be mistaken. French was vested with the power of the written, of instruction, of the sacrosanct culture dispensed by what the English call “the establishment”; French had in its favor that it was the official language of the state apparatus. It was therefore revalued by the school, by justice, by the news in the papers, on the radio or on television. It was French that consented to taste, with the tip of its tongue, the tongue of the street, the tongue of jokes and quarrels, the tongue of swear words and of cooking, the tongue of thundering anger or of whispered tenderness. In short, two languages like two neighbors across the landing, one of whom had more income, more means than the other, and would flaunt it with a certain ostentation. Two languages used in different places and at different moments. But used.
So I remember.
My mother had set down on the table, covered with an oilcloth printed with little red and blue flowers, or checkered, I no longer recall, the scalding stewpot in which the tomato soup, garnished with vermicelli and fragrant fresh mint, was steaming marvelously, and already deliciously. I say already, because the eye, outpacing the tongue, knows how to taste and savor too. Today, to speak in the middle of Paris of a soup steaming deliciously on the table does not at all conjure the images that the ten-year-old child I was had before his eyes. Here again, I mean to speak of verbal images. In France, to write “a soup steams deliciously on the table” will set off a whole series of commonplaces, running from the thick and reassuring peasant soup taken in the middle of the great farm hall in large bowls of blue faïence, to the urban family soup gathering around the round table, beneath the evening light of the lamp, a family of four, the father, the mother, the son, and the daughter. And there is a napkin for each, and the spoons chime prettily on the porcelain of the matching plates. I exaggerate deliberately so as to reach that imagerie d’Épinal (the naïve popular prints) which remains for me the noble form of the commonplace.
The soup of which I speak… come now, grant me the right to transgress monstrously the venerable French grammar, and let me say: the soup that I speak — not out of some gratuitous folkloric affectation, but to express the fact, which inhabits me today, that this soup had entered into my language of that time perhaps even before it had passed over my tongue. The soup that I speak, then, when it appeared on the table, inscribed in my mind not the word “soup,” but the word “djaerè,” which I attempt, as best I can, to transcribe phonetically with Latin letters. And the word “djaerè,” for me, contained tomatoes, of course, but also mint, but also little green and red things whose name I did not know and which perfumed my soul, but also warmth to combat that cold come down from the High Plateaus, but also those winters that were enemies of our uncertain houses, but also my whole city of stone and deep gorge, more given to the scorchings of the Algerian August than to the rigors of the Decembers it nonetheless knew well.
“Pass me your plate, my son!”
My mother had not really uttered those words. She had said roughly… No, I am cheating; she had said exactly:
“Arténé s’ranetec, my son!” — a sentence in which the words “pass me your plate” had been said in Arabic, and the words “my son” in French. But I had heard (and of course that means at once “listened to” and “understood”): “Pass me your plate, my son!” — exactly, in a single language, the language of my childhood. For me, it was as if my mother had spoken only in Arabic. For me, it was as if my mother had spoken only in French. And the child that I was did not even dream of disentangling one language from the other. Better still, I did not even realize that two languages had been used, had been woven together by this illiterate woman whom I preferred to qualify, more discreetly, as unlettered, and for whom, given her melancholy and her bitterness at being unable to attain true knowledge (so she believed, for in reality she confused knowledge with instruction), for whom, I say, I had invented in my heart of hearts the neologism “ellettriste.”
So I remember.
It was market day on the place Négrier. Do not laugh, it really was the name of that square, even if, today, I am no longer quite sure of the slaver’s spelling of the word. I was accompanying my mother to help her carry her basket loaded with all her purchases. The square hummed with those crisscrossing calls, those bursts of laughter, those injunctions, those invitations, which drew the customer toward the many-colored stalls. The women went by slowly, some of them heavily, between the mounds of fruits and vegetables.
“Haya, lardjouz, approche! Aye dji tchouf mes tomates!” Here again, the child that I was did not dream of “hearing” French rather than Arabic. For me the words were quite naturally intertwined like the heaps of oranges or tomatoes on the stalls I was passing.
Today, in order to be “heard,” I am obliged to translate: “Come on, grandmother, come closer! Come see my tomatoes!”
Why am I obliged to translate? In the first place, because I am attempting to write this language of my childhood, when, fifty years ago, it was only spoken; and so it is no accident that I used the word “heard” rather than “understood.” Besides, is not speaking the master-word for any language whatever? I must therefore write it, I say, to set it before the eyes of all those who can no longer hear it. In the second place, I am obliged to translate because I am attempting to maintain a listening for this language. An attempt, of course, as derisory as it is desperate, since listening obviously implies the listener. Now, where my diglossia is concerned, there is something like a loss, like an objective hemorrhage — because historical — of listeners. I would like to try to analyze the etiology and the nature of this hemorrhage. For a language to remain alive, it is necessary, and sometimes it suffices, that it be spoken by all the social strata of a society — better, by all the age groups of that society. Now, what happened, and what is happening, to this language of my childhood? The two human groups that contributed to forging it have separated, exactly as spouses separate in a divorce. This is not the place to spell out the causes of that divorce. And yet… The Algerian War, the inescapable product of a historical situation set in place in the very middle of the nineteenth century, become an obsolete political situation by the middle of the twentieth, the war broke over my country, over my childhood, over my memory, over my friends, mowing down whole swaths — unequal though they were — of the population. The dead of a war are not only men, women, or children. There are also those dead one does not bury, dead without corpses, if I may say so: words. For words die too. They die of being no longer exchanged, of having left their neighborhood, their house, or their clothes. They do it modestly, they do not want to disturb, and soon they no longer disturb. Quite simply, they took all their time to die.
French is still spoken in Algeria, it is written, it is read, but, how shall I put it, History has so arranged things that it is little by little becoming a foreign language for that country. A language foreign to that country. The recent proclamation of Arabization — that is, of the use of Arabic as the sole language in the Administration, the Press, Education, and so on — was nonetheless felt as a thunderclap among the country’s population. This decree cannot, I am sure, have observed and ratified a state of fact. It does no more than install, for the needs of a political logistics, a linguistic monolithism whose fruits, fatally, can only be a semantic and cultural impoverishment.
So I remember.
Aziz. He was one of my schoolfellows at the lycée, a boy as gifted as he was lazy, who would later become one of my best Algerian friends. I remember the story of a resounding slap he received. To appreciate the anecdote that follows, one must know that Aziz’s father was a notable, a wealthy bachagha — a small landowner invested with a portion of colonial power — and who, on that account, revered everything that in his eyes belonged to French culture. So here is my friend Aziz coming home from the lycée with a disastrous grade obtained in what at the time (we are in 1946 or 1947) was called a French composition. His father asks him what he has done. Aziz, no doubt thinking to mask or soften the gravity of his failure by using the language of the street, replies:
“Ou Allah, ya Baba, manquèt’ha complètement!” (By God, my father, I missed it completely!) Whereupon the old bachagha slaps him with all his might, declaring:
“This slap is not because you failed your composition; it is because you did not announce it to me in proper French!”
It is not only for its folkloric humor that I report here this anecdote that has crossed half a century of my memory. It is because it allows me to show in what an incredible way French and Arabic could mingle at the time. Indeed, in the sentence “Ou Allah, ya Baba, manquèt’ha complètement!” the words Ou Allah, ya Baba are Arabic and mean quite simply: by God, my father! But the French reader will have vaguely heard, in the words that follow, manquèt’ha, a resonance, a French root. Of course, this is the French verb “manquer” (to miss), which my friend Aziz had unconsciously conjugated by using Arabic grammar and by attaching to it, as a direct object, the Arabic pronoun “ha,” a pronoun referring to the word “composition.” So here are two languages so intimately mingled that not only have their words been modified at the semantic level, but the syntax of the one has violated the spelling of the other to give it a wholly new child: manquèt’ha.
So I remember.
It is an early summer morning. One of those marvelous early mornings when everything is new — the light, the slight sounds of the city waking, the thoughts that come to you — one of those early Algerian mornings when it is entirely normal to be awake at five o’clock or half past five, and already the smell of the little black coffee is singing through the house. A murmur, all the same. It is my father, wrapped in his taleth (prayer shawl), his arm bound up in his tefillin (phylacteries), who has begun his morning prayer. I hear my mother’s respectful silence. I mean, I hear the chime of the little spoon against the porcelain of the cup. My father must by now have finished his prayer; he unwinds his little black straps, folds away his weary taleth, while my mother speaks to him. She speaks to him in Arabic, that Arabic whose pronunciation, and sometimes whose vocabulary, are not those of the Arabs of the city. Now and then a Hebrew word slips into her speech, a word my mother does not in the least know to be Hebrew. I am not speaking, of course, of the words that come directly from religion, such as Adonaï or Yéroushalaïm (Jerusalem). Those she knows well to belong to the Torah (which she pronounces “Tchorra”); she knows well that they belong to that language with its thousand little letters as bushy as undergrowth, to which she has no access either. But the Hebrew word brahra (prayer), for example — I am sure, even today, that she used it as a word belonging quite simply to the Arabic language. She speaks, then, my mother, she speaks in this Judeo-Arabic whose dentals are softened, flattened, as if there too the Jews wanted to take the drama out of the things of life, rounding off the angles of vocables too rough, even inverting the genders where the possessive pronouns are concerned, which, curiously, gives a feminine “ta” where a masculine “ton” would have been required. But of course it is impossible for me to give a true account of these inversions by using their French translation. It is a language in which the Jews make gross errors of syntax, but they are, how shall I put it, errors that belong to them, as if they wanted to inscribe their specificity in these lapses, these stumblings; and it would be, I believe, desirable that a psychoanalytic study be made of the wounds, willful or not, inflicted upon these host languages by Jewish culture. It is not innocently that I have used the words lapses and stumblings.
Just as with the Hebrew words, French words sometimes introduce themselves, as if without her knowing, into my mother’s speech. These are then words of a deformed French, as if adapted to the Arabic language, and I came to understand, later, that I could say: as if adopted by the Arabic language. She will say, for example: liom, lèouled y roho fel chkola bel l’manteau, ken el berd. I translate: today, the children (must) go to school with their coat, it is cold. In this sentence, the word chkola is nothing other than the word “école” (school) deformed by the Arabic pronunciation and, in a way, integrated into the Arabic language. On the other hand, the word “manteau” (coat), perfectly French, is fitted out with the Arabic prefix bel l’, which means “with the.” There it is — my triglossia is in place.
Three languages at one go! And in an illiterate woman, what is more! It is true that I must qualify my assertion. It was not, of course, a matter of three distinct languages, wholly autonomous with respect to one another. It was a matter of linguistic children, born of those marriages issuing from the chafings, the dissensions, the loves and the hatreds that make up the fabric of daily life, in a country where — O wonder! — society was neither monolithic nor univocal. Richness, then.
Indeed, what I call my diglossia was, I realize today, a veritable natural resource. In the proper sense, the language (the languages) of my childhood was (were) a living language, a language of life, in the sense that one crossed paths with it (them) in the street or inside the houses, without needing the vehicle of the book or of the pen. It was a familiar person, a friend who gave you a warm embrace as readily as a practical piece of advice, a tool worn smooth in the right places, there where the hand of the greatest number had left its traces. But it was above all a footbridge between two languages that cohabited without really speaking to each other, as it happens that certain neighbors in the same building ignore one another while taking the same staircase or the same elevator. The lycée student that I was, confronted with Greek or Latin translation exercises, had thus very quickly grasped the difference between dead languages and living languages. My mother, who only stammered French, nevertheless had access to the general meaning of that language. It sufficed for us, when we spoke to her, to slip surreptitiously into the sentence two or three Arabic words that lit up its relative obscurity for her. The reverse, of course, was just as frequent. It was not rare, for example, for a shopkeeper to express himself entirely in Arabic, while letting drag, here and there, in his speech, French vocables all the more comprehensible because they were, as we have just seen, either declined or conjugated according to Arabic syntax. This richness, made as much of adoptions as of adaptations, is found, I know, in many languages across this vast world. The words sandwich or bistro attest to it as regards the presence of English or Russian in the French language. Words go off, travel, lose their way, find one another again, but in the meantime they have dressed themselves in the clothes met along the road. They have taken on another form, as one takes a wife in life, and not always for life. The richness of any language resides in this mortar, this melting pot in which it matters little that a minority language exists alongside a majority language, provided that it be spoken. Only, there it is: the minority language dies all the faster as there are fewer and fewer people who speak it. My mother’s language is dead, because it lost the territory where it flourished. A footbridge-language, a hybrid language, it died of having mislaid the principal protagonist to whom it was addressed. This language, exclusively spoken, was, in the proper sense, a language within earshot, a language therefore — one must indeed come to realize it — reduced to the physical perimeter of those who used it. It was bound to disappear as much with those who spoke it as with those who heard it.
It remains that my mother bequeathed to me, through this very disappearance, an immense truth that has founded my whole life. This truth I read later, oh! so much later (and sometimes too late), from the pen of a great philosopher, and why should I refrain from associating my mother’s name with that of Heidegger? Somewhere, Heidegger wrote in words what my mother the “ellettriste” taught me by existing: “language is the house of being.”
It was neither ridicule nor cardiac pathology that killed my mother. It was History.