My Derrida-Khatibi essay now appeared in Mirai No.458. It's title is "Maghreb Boys Learning French." As I was writing, the name of another writer from a distant shore, the same side with Derrida and Khatibi, was flickering in my mind. Helene Cixous. I could easily change the title of my essay to "Maghreb Boys and Girls Learning French." Then my friend Doug Slaymaker (U of Kentucky) reminded me of a book, The Helene Cixous Reader, and the preface she wrote for it.
Doug read it as he was traveling from Lexington to Missoula with Yoko Tawada last March. Now I read it and it fills me with courage. Un courage exophone, si l'on peut dire...
Cixous writes:
Language englobes us and inspires us and launches us beyond ourselves, it is ours and we are its, it is our master and our mistress. And even if it seems to be native or national, it happily remains foreign to those who write. Writing consists first of all in hearing language speak itself to our ears, as if it were the first time. (xix)
We think we speak the English, or French, of today. But our English or French language of today is of yesterday and elsewhere. The miracle is that language has not been cut from its archaic roots----even if we do not remember, our language remembers, and what we say began to be said three thousand years ago. (xx)
When I write, language remembers without my knowing or indeed with my knowing, remembers the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, the whole of literature, each book. (xxi)
In my essay I wrote that "the logic of exophony is that of a borrower, not that of an owner." We borrow, not really knowing what we borrow. Each word is already a practical mnemotechnics. This is the kind of logic that every writer discovers, sooner or later. But didn't the Maghreb boys and girls born in the 1930s especially become aware of this fact at an early age? That's what I surmise and I think it's got to be true.
