(The action begins in Tunis. The characters forming the family circle and living under the same roof are the grandmother, Taïta (1881-1955); her two daughters, Suzette (1911-1986) and Paulette (1918-2012); her son-in-law, Mouche (1897-1977); her three granddaughters, Simone (1931-2000), Lucette (1936-) and Monique (1939-).
My mother tongue is French; my grandmother tongue, no. “Grand-maman,” as we, the girls, first called her, spoke Arabic. And since she lived, until her very last day, beside my mother, we, the girls still, constantly heard Arabic spoken around us. Taïta had attended primary school and so had learned to read and write in French. She had perhaps reached the level of the Certificat d’études primaires, without, however, sitting the examination. Of this schooling, there remained the memory of some fable of La Fontaine, which she recited before us, blushing, smiling, as a child’s feat. She made regular use of French. In the afternoon, when she had accomplished all her tasks and laid down her apron, she would sit, put on her glasses and, the daily paper in hand, follow three sections in it. First, the hour of sunset, the date of the Jewish calendar, that of the common calendar, from which followed decisions, actions, as important as the extinction of the lights on Friday at the approach of the Shabbat, and the bath, the shampoo, the longer-than-usual washing that preceded it; or else the monthly visit to the cemetery, or the preparation of a ritual. It was then more a matter of finding, printed in the newspaper, the verification of what she already knew by heart, by mental calculation, than of seeking some unheard-of information. The weather bulletin formed the second section, decisive on the eves of the great wash, that is to say Wednesday, when she would go up at first light to the terrace, laden with the heavy linen of the week gone by, taking out of the wash-house basins and washing coppers, firing up the kerosene primus, boiling enormous volumes of water for the sheets and towels, soaping the linen, scrubbing it on wooden boards striated with parallel grooves cut on the bias, wringing it, rinsing it once, twice, three times, unfurling it with a sharp snap of both hands, and finally hanging it on the lines stretched across the terrace. She would return from this battle, of which she held the command, but which she waged with a wash-woman — that is what she was called — Fatma, who brought her news of the other clients and lavished advice when it was needed; she would return, then, in the late morning, sweating, breathless and satisfied. Her sheets, her tablecloths, were the whitest in the whole neighborhood.
Grand-maman used the daily paper to consult, third section, the announcements column, a fundamental source of information about the events affecting the people of her milieu. La Presse was rather the daily of the Jews, La Dépêche tunisienne that of the French. The announcements column reflected this distribution. And if it announced the death of a person of her acquaintance, or related to, or close to a person of her acquaintance, she had to prepare for a visit of condolence. She also wrote French, in the careful hand learned at school. She had, in fact, two brothers settled in Marseille, with whom she exchanged a sporadic correspondence. I would pay dearly to have before my eyes the letters received from Marseille or sent from Tunis. They have disappeared, and contacts with the family of these two early emigrants were broken off with my grandmother’s death. I do not even know the first name of these great-uncles. One of them was perhaps named Élie, Élie Zeïtoun. I know only that, after the war, we learned of the death in deportation of a first cousin of my mother (the daughter of one of these two Marseille uncles) and of her family. Married, she bore the name of her husband, Benveniste. I was able to verify it at the Mémorial de la Shoah, where they appear for the year 1943. When the news of their death reached us in Tunis, I remained fascinated by a photograph of very small format, its edge cut in irregular zigzags, which showed in gray and white a young woman, her face turned toward her child whom she held by the hand. This image had for me something incomprehensible. How was it possible that the two cousins appearing in the photograph, minuscule and yet almost palpable, had disappeared? That I could no longer see them except in this barely distinct form? The photograph, left behind in Tunis, has remained engraved in my memory, and the little granddaughter dazzled by the light — for the subjects to be photographed were exposed facing the sun, and for so long that tears ended up blurring their vision — looks at me still with her crinkled eyes, and, as yesterday, wrings my heart.
Taïta thus had a command of written French, not of the spoken language, which she nevertheless understood very well. She expressed herself in Arabic and only in Arabic. One day when my mother was away, someone had rung at our door, a woman, French, of whom I have kept no other memory. Grandmother had opened, was standing on the threshold, we behind observing the scene. The stranger no doubt posed a question; grandmother answered her in French. The exchange was amiable, brief, and the door closed again. When grandmother turned around, one could still see that she had blushed. She asked us timidly whether she had expressed herself correctly; our answer reassured her.
Another daily use of French consisted in introducing Arabized vocables such as bardishu (overcoat), bisklet (bicycle), tumubil (automobile), babur (steamboat), or tram (for the corresponding vehicle, and never mind that the word in this instance came from English) into the Judeo-Arabic that grandmother spoke. Most of the other borrowings were made from Italian. I could draw up here a whole catalogue of the words heard long ago (baniu, sbitâr, sbishiriya, buntu, bil gustu, fazulia, maqrûna, djilât, bashkutu, etc.), but I leave the task to the linguists. I was to discover much later our Arabic speech’s debt to Spanish and Portuguese. We were unaware that certain of our ways of doing things, certain of our dishes, bore an Iberian mark that had remained indelible, the inheritance of the Jews and Muslims expelled from the Peninsula between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. I invite the Tunisian Jewish reader to seek toward Portugal and Spain rather than Italy the ancestor of the guisada, of the bulu, of orgeat and other delights, and to furnish us with the best recipe for them.
Grandmother addressed her daughters, her son-in-law, my father, us, in Arabic, and they answered her in kind, not us. Between my father and my mother, between the latter and her sister, French alternated with Arabic. My father preferred Arabic, which somewhat irritated my mother, for whom this usage was, firstly, vulgar, and, secondly, did not set us a good example. She said nothing of it, but one could sense it. Everything that was ’arbi was judged inferior; any individual described as m’arbi was deprived of good manners. For us, my sisters and me, French took precedence over Arabic, which we nevertheless understood, and knew how to use when necessary with those who practiced no other language. Without being my mother tongue, Arabic was thus a family and familiar language. As the years passed, our parents and the members of their generation drew away from it and even renounced it almost completely once settled in Paris. Almost, for strong impressions, the expression of horror or of the greatest tenderness, could only be said in Arabic; the proverbs too, which summed up a situation better than a long speech. Recourse to Arabic also served to communicate a discreet observation when one was surrounded by a French-speaking audience and did not wish to be understood. And yet! In the spring of 1977, I undertook to collect the oral archives of the Tunisian Jews settled in France. I soon broadened the project to the whole of the Jews of the Mediterranean rim whom circumstances always different and always similar had led, one day or another, to settle in France. Then I drew Nathan Wachtel into the same investigation, and it was now Ashkenazim, now Sephardim, as they were beginning to be called then, that the two of us interrogated. In the spring of 1977, I went to join a family gathering where my parents were to meet cousins. Traveling by metro toward the place of the meeting, a big bag housing my cumbersome tape recorder, I wondered whether the conversation would unfold in French or in Arabic. When I arrived at my destination, the oratorical jousts were already engaged, everyone recounting anecdotes about the past, broken by bursts of laughter, by comments or piquant details, in a fine cacophony. An intense complicity bound, delighted, all these people. The answer to the question that had arisen in the metro? Not the slightest ambiguity: everything was happening in Arabic, the language of their remembered past, the language of affectivity, the language of the happiness supposed to have preceded all exile.
Of all this group of eleven or twelve people merrily carrying on in Arabic, only one would have known how to write it: my father, who had learned it at the school of the Alliance israélite universelle and had had to use it in the calligraphies that sometimes decorated his earthenware tiles. He also got by in Italian. Sicilians and Neapolitans were numerous in Tunisia, long more numerous than the French. They occupied strong positions in construction, and more generally in various productive trades, positions of entrepreneurs, of foremen, of artisans and skilled workers, while unskilled jobs fell to the Tunisian Muslims. So my father often had dealings with Italian workers. He himself employed several. The row of modest dwellings flanking the factory long housed Italian families, who grew a vine around the front door and dried their fresh pasta on sticks stretched between two chairs set on the threshold. My mother also understood Italian, and for the same reasons. One had to be able to deal with the dressmaker, the Signora, to whom she long entrusted the making of all our clothes. I suppose, too, that having attended the primary school of La Goulette, she had had Sicilian schoolmates, for the old port was peopled with Sicilians.
In short, one grew up hearing Italian spoken around oneself, one understood it if one did not speak it, one read it if one did not know how to write it. Without having learned Italian at the lycée, I was able to savor the Italian literature that reached us with the volumes of the Einaudi editions, with their elegant dust jacket on which, against a white ground, a square of vivid colors stood out, the reproduction of a contemporary painting. It was a schoolmate and friend who first introduced them into our circle, the novels of Pavese, Vittorini, Cassola accompanying the neorealist films of the postwar years. At the lycée, I also learned three dead languages, Latin, English and German. They existed on paper — translations into and out of the language, declensions, extracts from literary texts — that served neither for conversation nor for the frequentation of contemporary literatures.
I resume: French is my mother tongue, Arabic my grandmother tongue, Italian is background music. French, but the French of the colony, an imported language that had lost part of its baggage along the way. I was to measure its frightful poverty when I heard the students who, like me, attended the Sorbonne, between 1955 and 1960, express themselves. On contact with them, I had the impression that, in truth, an abyss separated us. They had a clear diction, an inexhaustible lexicon, a rigorous grammar. They found the words needed to carry a sentence through to the end, without interjection or ellipses. They could think aloud while I stammered between reflection and emotion. It took me more than twenty years to cross the abyss.
Our language long kept, perhaps always, the weakness of an acquired language, not quite foreign, but borrowed from its rightful holders, and discolored, impoverished, by this transfer. Thus my mother, her sister Paulette, had memorized formulas heard I wonder where, which recurred often in conversation and right up to the end of their lives, as if their speech were strewn with quotations. “What a horror is yours!” my mother would exclaim, in a shrill voice that was not of her usual timbre, when something shocked her. “The king was no cousin of mine!” my aunt would toss out to conclude the account of an episode in which she had played the fine role. Once settled in France, Paulette worked in Parisian firms and she then borrowed from her colleagues popular expressions that exasperated me: “thingumajig and what-have-you” would round off a sentence for which the exact words failed her. “That or combing the giraffe…” And my exasperation exasperated my daughter — “All right, enough, not everyone has been to the Sorbonne!” — when what irritated me was not (only) the vulgarity of these formulas or their repetition, but the recourse, again and always, to the borrowing, our incapacity to play freely with all the words of the vocabulary. As if French consisted of a closed repertory of ready-made expressions. Paulette, that said, amazed me more than once. Her loyalty to the television programs, her reading — yes, her reading, for in her old age she took to reading the novels that Monique and I chose for her — introduced into her language technical or poetic words that left me dumbstruck. She would then smile a satisfied smile when, having uttered them, she saw their effect in my eyes.
The languages spoken by me and around me jostle one another in other memories. I come back to it, for things, far from being fixed, changed constantly and each of us appropriated the languages in his own way. Back to Arabic: I hear and understand spoken Arabic from my tenderest childhood, and can have recourse to it when needed. (And let no one come and say that our speech was a matter of kitchen Arabic, fit only for communicating with the common folk. We had all the words to say anguish and relief, insolence and wisdom, patience and irritation, solitude and exile. Only the poverty of the religious vocabulary strikes me. Faith, piety, rigorous observance of the rituals, all came down to one expression, “to fear God.” Yes, to be afraid of Him. It was fear, in our childhood, that was to govern our conduct.) It must be added that the Arabic I hear takes two forms, that of the Jews, who have their own accent and regularly interchange ch/s, j/z, and so on, and that of the Muslims, whose “Tunisian speech,” to which no one consents to grant the status of national language, is different from so-called classical Arabic, even in the modernized form that reaches us by radio. Are you still with me? I sum up: the spoken Arabic of my Jewish milieu (1) is different from the Muslim Arabic speech (2), itself different from both classical Arabic (3) and modern standard Arabic (4). Needless to say, I am deaf to these last two varieties until the moment when, around the age of 16-17, I am awakened to the independence movement. I am then a lycée student, in the Première class and then the final year, and, made worldly by schoolmates who, before me, joined the Communist Party, I become in my turn a member of this party which at once represents the secular current of the anti-colonial movement, while the Néo-Destour is the party of the Muslims, and forms an effervescent intellectual milieu, without equivalent in the rest of society. The party is as totalitarian as all the others, but no matter, the immediate project, the calling into question of the colonial regime, makes me blind to the sinister practices of actually existing communism. Late 1952-early 1953, here I am, then, engaged in the movement of liberation. I must say that the reading of the Manifesto of the Communist Party was for me a dazzlement. I see myself still. Access to the sitting room and the dining room was forbidden, because we had just “wiped the floor,” that is to say washed the tiling with great quantities of water. So I had fallen back on the only other room, my parents’ bedroom. There, seated on the floor, my back against their big bed, beneath a bright ray of sunlight that came in through the balcony, I read and reread the resounding sentences of the Manifesto. It took me nearly twenty years to recover from that moment of grace. In the meantime, my conversion dictated that I learn the language of those it was a question of liberating. So I took private Arabic lessons, and, mingling with Muslim lycée students or militants, I set about correcting my Jewish accent so as to adopt the so-called Arab accent. Wasted effort, my interlocutors observing my efforts with a condescending smile. Yet I made progress, that is undeniable. Then, once in Paris, I enrolled at the Langues O, for one year only, the frequenting of buildings scattered between the rue de Lille (Langues O), the Sorbonne (street of the same name, for the history teaching), the rue Saint-Jacques (for the geography teaching) proving acrobatic. In the end, it was the intensive practice of the archives and the reading, at first slow and arduous, then easier, of printed documents, that brought me from the use of spoken Arabic to an acceptable degree — for the conduct of my research in history — of knowledge of written Arabic. Phew!
The linguists will tell you that a common language connects the members of a community to one another, that to speak one’s language is to be immediately furnished with a certificate of affiliation. The differentiated uses of the language by the members of adjoining groups exacerbate this role. In the colonial Tunisia of my childhood and youth, French was the language of the colonizer, it was the property of the French of France. We practiced another form of it, with its own syntax and its own accent. The Tunisian Muslims — who were then called the Arabs — yet another. And even two, for the Tunisian women did not roll their r’s, the Tunisian men did. Accent, idiomatic expressions, syntax, followed their own course, instantly recognizable. And so on for the rest, for the people of Italian origin, or Maltese, or whatever else. Each one thus recognized his own and the others and regulated his exchanges according to these signals. All this shimmering would have been most pleasant if it had unfolded within a broad horizon open to the four winds, in a democratic and egalitarian society.
People want to make us believe today that this utopia existed. Tunis lays claim to a past in which the values of tolerance and openness prevailed; the Jews of Tunisia tell themselves publicly that harmony reigned among members of the different religious groups, who joined in one another’s festivals, or took meals in one another’s homes. A pious lie, since the religious prescriptions forbade eating at the same table, and the spatial segregation forbade joining in the rituals of the members of another group. If these exchanges took place, they were the exception rather than the rule; and they became possible after Independence, when the Tunisians regained their dignity and no longer had to conceal their own culture.
In truth, the languages, like, moreover, all the practices and values, were organized into a strongly hierarchized system. The French of the French sat at the summit of our Tower of Babel; the French of the others, imperfect, settled lower down; and the various other tongues tumbled below. Or within, as a means of recognizing one’s own, of remaining oneself and among one’s own. Distinction — in the sense of good taste, good manners and good breeding — demanded the stifling of these voices, the effacement of our distinctive signs, even if this would seal, in time, the extinction of our group.
I was about to forget another component of the family music, Hebrew. A significant omission, which I repair here just after having spoken of the extinction of our group, of assimilation in short, of dissolution into the French society that received us after our emigration? Yet that is not what is at issue. Hebrew was the unintelligible language used for the religious rituals, and by Jews of the male sex exclusively. My father alone could read it, and he did so aloud. He intoned very regularly and in order the weekly prayer of the Shabbat — on Friday evening — and the prayers of the great celebrations. The prayer book served rather as a prompter, for it was enough for my father to reread the first words of a prayer to recover its cantillation and recite it to the end. It was as if he had learned to read by the whole-word method, identifying groups of words without deciphering them one by one. I believe he would not have known how to read texts in Hebrew other than those of his breviary. When he found himself in the company of other Jews, all followed exactly the same melody and pronounced Hebrew in the same way. If one wants to grasp what a tradition is, here that of the Jews of Tunisia, I will report a memory that goes back to the 1960s. My parents were at Malakoff for the celebration of Kippur, the only occasion for which my father went to the synagogue. But there was none in the vicinity. I suggested he spend the night at my place, in the Gobelins neighborhood in Paris, from which he could go on foot to a synagogue I had spotted. He accepted the invitation, but came back from the evening service deeply disappointed. The synagogue had been taken over by Jews from Algeria, who recited the prayers in a different mode from the one to which he was accustomed. Disconcerted, he refused to rejoin the congregation the next day, preferring to fast and meditate in solitude. It is no doubt of these specific colorings, which touched our speech, our ritual practices, our recipes of savoir-vivre, that our cultural tradition was made. It separated us not only from our Muslim or Christian neighbors, it also differentiated us from the other Jews of North Africa, and a fortiori from the Jews of Europe. The fact remains that the language of religion was reserved for men. The women of our family unfailingly prepared everything the rituals required, but, faithful to the role assigned to them, they did not learn Hebrew. They recognized the prayers by ear, memorized them and mumbled them without understanding their meaning. The Passover Haggadah was nonetheless trilingual. My father read aloud its sections in Hebrew first, then in Judeo-Arabic (the Hebrew text, translated into vernacular Arabic and transcribed in Hebrew letters), and we followed in silence the translation into French. It happened that we asked questions. Nothing more appropriate for a ritual that consists precisely in the transmission of a history, the going-out from Egypt, from generation to generation. And it is not the narrative of this episode that ensures this transmission, but an infinite play of questions and answers furnished by the rabbis of old. Our own questions remained invariably without answer, or received invariably this one: “Because that’s how it is.” It is true that the reading of the Haggadah had as its aim to arrive by the shortest path at the consumption of the Passover meal, whose aromas had long since pervaded the whole apartment, and which had demanded hours of preparation, with its twenty-six herbs and vegetables, the meat of the lamb sacrificed the day before, the sausage each of whose ingredients had been meticulously chopped by hand.
How can one be astonished that this fearsome God, this opaque language, these obscure rituals became foreign to us (and that, of all this, only the maternal inheritance is preserved, the recipe for the dishes that accompanied each of the celebrations)? How can one resist the fascination of French, which owed its superiority first of all to its status as language of the colonizer, but also deserved it because it was, unlike the other languages spoken around us, that of literature, and even of literatures? It offered us access, beyond the school texts, to “great” French literature, but also to the translations of Russian, American or other works. If the loss of the language of our fathers was an amputation, the acquisition of French did more than cicatrize it. It opened onto a vaster horizon. It was up to us to go and see.
For as long as we lived in Tunis, we passed through all these changes without for an instant losing the feeling of a great stability, of a solid continuity. The Arabic we spoke had managed, over the centuries, to absorb Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian, French words, plus a few pinches of Hebrew. It had been capable of ceaselessly renewing itself. It was engulfed beneath the shock of French, and fell silent with its last speakers when we crossed the Mediterranean. I find myself dreaming. If we, Jews of Tunisia, had stayed in Tunisia after independence, when the Arabic language regained its rank, would we not have, once again, adapted our speech to the new situation? We would have had then two creole languages within our reach, the post-colonial French that lives its life in Tunisia, and an updated Judeo-Arabic speech. The Arabization imposed in the administration and in teaching would also have led us to master modern Arabic. None of this came to pass. Did our speech need a place, a soil, to remain a living language? Not sure… The descendants of the Jews driven from the Iberian Peninsula continued to practice the Spanish language for centuries after the expulsion, and without any further contact with the country of their ancestors. We did not. Everything urged us to abandon our downgraded speech, issued from a downgraded language. The success of our integration into French society was at this price.
Colonial French was itself too a dialect far removed from the academic language. A large part of its expressions were unfit for writing. Its music was rebellious to all transcription, its grammar an insult to school grammar. Even today, the language I speak with my own remains different from the one I use outside the family circle. And as my memories rise to consciousness, they bring back with them turns of phrase that would seem strange to today’s reader. May I be forgiven for evoking here a writer by trade, whose talent I alas do not possess. In the preface to Kanthapura, the Indian novelist Raja Rao explains himself on the language to which he has recourse.
Telling was not easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. I use the word “alien,” yet English is not really an alien language to us. It is the language of our intellectual make-up — like Sanskrit or Persian was before — but not of our emotional make-up. We are all instinctively bilingual, many of us writing in our own language and in English. We cannot write like the English. We cannot write only as Indians… Our method of expression therefore has to be a dialect which will some day prove to be as distinctive and colourful as the Irish or the American. Time alone will justify it.
And further on:
We, in India, think quickly, we talk quickly, and when we move we move quickly. There must be something in the sun of India that makes us rush and tumble and run on.
We too spoke quickly, so quickly that the words did not keep up, and our eloquence lay rather in the gaze, in the gestures, in the voice and its intonations. Of our colonial dialect, we did not make a literary language. We had to swallow it down, like spoken Arabic, and keep only its family and intimate use. Except when a slip betrays us, and brings a surprised, amused smile to our French interlocutors.
I have forgotten what I felt when, returned to Tunis after my studies at the Sorbonne, I was preparing my first lessons for my lycée pupils. But I remember having found, in the memoirs of Simone de Beauvoir, the exact description of my anxieties of that time, so much so that, to recover them, it would suffice for me to reread the Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter). No doubt I have a predilection for autobiographies? My memories always answer the memories of others. A conversation always engages between them and me. They even yield me the floor. It is, however, the relations of certain of them to one language, or to two, that hold me and that have remained with me in memory. They speak now of the colonial experience, now of that of members of a religious minority who do not practice, or practice poorly, the national language of the country where they live: “Now we’re going to cut off his tongue,” recalls Elias Canetti. I do not speak my father’s language, writes Leïla Sebbar. “I have only one language and it is not mine,” murmurs Jacques Derrida. “It is hopeless,” he says again. Arabic is an “orphaned” language, “exiled,” for Anny Dayan-Rosenman; French a “stepmother language” for Assia Djebar, “spoils of war” for Kateb Yacine, while Abdelkebir Khatibi speaks of “colonial expropriation,” all three with a hostile inflection. They all say better than I do something I would like to say. And also, that the swallowed-down, abolished language hurts me, as pain survives the amputation of a limb. But the anesthesia comes with French. Without it, the breath fails. And the sight, and the hearing, and the voluptuousness of the sounds I hear, of the words I read, of the sentences that run on: in French, the language of the other and the only one through which I breathe. My own. My own?