Paris and the Marginalized Author: Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile

321 Pages·2018·2.31 MB·English

by  Valerie K. Orlando

Paris and the Marginalized Author
After the Empire:
The Francophone World and
Postcolonial France
SERIES EDITOR
Valérie K. Orlando, University of Maryland
ADVISORY BOARD
Robert Bernasconi, Memphis University; Claire H. Griffiths,
University of Chester, UK; Alec Hargreaves, Florida State
University; Chima Korieh, Rowan University; Mildred Mortimer,
University of Colorado, Boulder; Obioma Nnaemeka, Indiana
University; Alison Rice, University of Notre Dame; Kamal Salhi,
University of Leeds; Tracy D. Sharpley-Whiting, Vanderbilt
University; Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Tulane University
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Paris and the Marginalized Author
Treachery, Alienation,
Queerness, and Exile
Edited by
Valérie K. Orlando
and Pamela A. Pears
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Copyright © 2019 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
Chapter 12: Excerpts from conversation with Louis-Philippe Dalembert reprinted by
permission of Dalembert.
Chapter 13: Excerpts from interview with Bernardo Toro reprinted by permission of
Toro.
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Acknowledgments
In January 2016, in Austin, Texas, I was at the Modern
Language Association’s annual convention, and had planned to
see my longtime friend and colleague, Valérie K. Orlando. She
invited me to meet with her friend and colleague whom I did not
know personally at the time, Denis M. Provencher. Our dinner
together that evening proved to be serendipity at its best. We
began talking about our current projects: it was my good
fortune to be preparing a course for my upper level
undergraduates, inspired by Tyler Stovall’s book, Paris Noir.
Although I merely wanted to ask for their input and suggestions
on readings and approaches to the topic, our conversation led
to the proposal of a session at the MLA convention the following
year in Philadelphia. We titled our session, “Treacherous
Parisian Men: Linking Queerness and Alienation in Writing from
France, the Maghreb, and the United States.” It was after we
presented our work in Philadelphia in 2017 that Lexington’s
dedicated acquisitions editor, Lindsey Porambo Falk, asked if we
would be interested in publishing an edited volume on the topic
of Paris and the marginalized author. Thank you, as always,
Lindsey, for being a champion of this kind of work and for
seeing the value in literary and cultural studies.
Working on this volume and with this group of scholars has
been a true pleasure. My coeditor and dear friend, Valérie, is a
dream collaborator. She is organized, terrifyingly efficient,
insightful, funny, and inspiring. I am incredibly grateful to know
her and to have had the honor of working with her. I am also
thankful to each one of our contributors. Some of them have
been my friends for years; some I know only through their
excellent work in the field; and still others are new to the
profession, providing a much-needed fresh perspective on the
topics at hand. All of them have provided compelling chapters
and thought-provoking arguments on what it means to write as
a treacherous, queer, alienated, or exiled writer in Paris. Thank
you, Denis, for steering us in this direction from the very
you, Denis, for steering us in this direction from the very
beginning and for sharing your expertise in queer theory as
Valérie and I were framing our proposal.
Finally, central to this volume is Paris, my most favorite city
on the planet. Both its glamour and its seedy underbelly play an
important role for the marginalized writers in the pages that
follow. As Victor Hugo said: “He who contemplates the depths of
Paris is seized with vertigo. Nothing is more fantastic. Nothing is
more tragic. Nothing is more sublime.”

—Pamela A. Pears

I, too, would like to thank my wonderful friend and colleague
of so many years now, Pamela A. Pears. There are few people
with whom I have been able to work so well and have had so
much pleasure in doing so. Pam’s collegiality and her insanely
organized and systematic way of dealing with mounting work,
hurdles, and a zillion little details required when compiling a
volume such as this were invaluable to seeing the project
through. I also thank our wonderful contributors and
collaborators, many of whom we have known since graduate
school. It has been fulfilling and gratifying to see all of our
careers grow into what they have become, allowing us to share
such intellectually invigorating conversations over time,
geography, and through multiple academic lenses and ways of
seeing our world in French. I also thank Lindsey Porambo Falk
with whom I have worked for many years now. Her intuition and
ability to find the most amazing works in the field of
Francophone/French studies have contributed to a series that is
now world-renowned and includes some of the most prominent
scholars in the field.
Therefore, without further ado, it is with great pleasure that
Pamela and I present this edited volume that we hope will
appeal to readers from multiple backgrounds, academic foci and
experience.

—Valérie K. Orlando
Chapter Introduction
Paris and the Marginalized Author
Valérie K. Orlando and Pamela A. Pears
Treachery, Alienation, Queerness, and Exile
This volume explores what it is that has brought
marginalized and often exiled writers, seen as treacherous,
alienated, or queer by their societies and nations together by
way of Paris. Spanning from the interwar period of the late
1920s to the present millennium, the chapters contained in this
volume consider many seminal questions that have influenced
and continue to shape the realm of exiled writers who have
sought refuge in Paris in order to write. For example, during the
late 1940s and early 1950s, Saint-Germain-des-Prés in the heart
of Paris, was the center of a thriving artistic and literary
community. Richard Wright, James Baldwin in the company of
Jean Genet, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Pablo
Picasso, among others, sought out literary inspiration in cafés
such as Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots as well as
nightclubs and bars of seedy Parisian enclaves. These spaces
allowed authors like Baldwin to openly explore both his literary
craft and his sexuality. Baldwin’s exploration of self, identity,
and place in a country where he lived from 1948 to his death in
1987, enabled him to find refuge from the racism and
homophobia of twentieth-century America. Life in France aided
Baldwin in coming to terms with a constant nagging feeling that
he “had no place in the world.”[1] Years later, meeting Baldwin
for the first time, Algerian-Berber Nabile Farès, exiled from his
country of origin, the postcolonial nation of Algeria, would echo
these same sentiments about being alienated from home, living
in an exile that while affording a certain freedom of thought, did
not facilitate finding a permanent place, or “position” in the
world.
It is by way of Paris, too, that Jean Genet begins to develop
and explore his own sense of race. Frieda Ekotto argues that
Genet, though a white Frenchman, is “one of the most
important thinkers of Négritude—the literary and aesthetic
movement of the 1920s and 1930s that began in Paris . . .”[2]
Genet’s examination of race appears as early as his first novel,
Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs [Our Lady of Flowers], which was
clandestinely printed in 1943. Subsequently, he frequented the
same French intellectual crowd as Richard Wright, who, in 1951,
recommended to New Story Magazine that they accept for
publication excerpts from Our Lady of Flowers, which in the end,
they did. The two men shared a sense of what it meant to be
marginalized in Paris—one in literal exile, the other in literary
exile. In 1958, Genet published Les nègres [The Blacks] which
was famously presented in Bernard Frechtman’s English
translation at St. Mark’s Playhouse in New York in 1961. While
published reviews of the play were mixed, theater-going crowds
flocked to the production. It was likely thanks to The Blacks that
the Black Panther Party came to know of Genet’s work, and
realized that his aesthetic vision of revolution dovetailed with
theirs. They, in turn, sent envoys to Paris, seeking his support.
Genet not only agreed to support them, but went a step further,
traveling illegally to the United States and embarked upon a
public-speaking tour with them in 1970.
Additionally, the volume’s chapters seek to define alienation
and marginalization as not solely subscribing to any single
denominator—sexual preference, gender, or nationality—but
rather as shared modes of being that allow authors to explore
what it is to write from abroad in a place that is foreign yet
freed of the constrictions of one’s home space. Parisian exile
engenders a state of being in which writers can look within as
well as outside boundaries of origin, nationality, sexuality, and
ethnicity in order to scrutinize our common humanity.[3]
The Parisian space of the expatriate is a location where men
and women who, although coming from different backgrounds,
find commonality in the lived experience of their exile. Female
authors such as Algerian-French Leila Sebbar also living in Paris,
like Nabile Farès, explores the alienation she feels due to her
inability to really know her Algerian past. In most of her novels,
particularly Je ne parle pas la langue de mon père [2003; I do
not speak my father’s language], Sebbar expresses the
conflicted position in the world she constantly experiences as
half French and Algerian, separated from her father by a
language she cannot speak and an Algerian past that remains
opaque. In a similar manner, Canadian born Nancy Huston,
moving to Paris in her college years, remarks in many of her
works how Paris allowed her to explore the realities of her
native Canada as a country conflicted by many divisions
stemming from language use (English versus French) and ethnic
origin (British versus French). In sum, these women’s novels and
essays demonstrate that extraction from the home space allows
for a certain insight the writer can only gain by being away from
his or her nation of birth. In her celebrated novel, Lettres
parisiennes: Autopsie de l’exil [1985; Parisian Letters: Autopsy
of Exile], coauthored with Leila Sebbar, Huston looks into her
Self as she explores her connections with other writers and
events of her time. The work has been aptly described as a tour
de force written over the course of more than a year. It is an
epistolary novel by “two women who wrote each other in
French, from Paris to Paris. The first comes from Canada, the
other, from Algeria. In Paris, as foreigners in exile, they chose to
work, to love, to have children. They are neither here nor there.
Their country is the verb. They seek a sense of belonging that
will enable them to realize their destiny: that of writer.”[4]
More recently, African American Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of
the bestselling Between the World and Me (2015), reflected on
the legacy of James Baldwin in his work as he also noted that
moving to Paris for a year allowed him to explore American
black identity in ways that being at home did not. This echoes
what Baldwin himself said in his 1961 essay, “The New Lost
Generation”: “I think my exile saved my life, for it inexorably
confirmed something which Americans appear to have great
difficulty accepting . . . a man is not a man until he’s able and
willing to accept his own vision of the world.”[5]
In a sense, all these authors capture in their sentiments
about the City of Light what Alvan F. Sanborn (1866–1966),