Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Francophone?

Having described the poet Abdellatif Laâbi as a "Morrocan francophone poet" I found this statement by him in an interview in Double Change magazine

"I don't really like the term 'Francophone.' Aside from the fact that it's politically charged, the term is reductive. It's a means of confining very diverse literary experiences, each of which are distinct, into a singular issue with language."

Laâbi argues that Maghrebian, African, and Caribbean literature in French has parallels with writers like Milan Kundera (Czech, writing in French) and Salman Rushdie (Indian-origin, writing in English), and that they constitute a new kind of literature emerging from the peripheries.

The whole enlightening interview can be found here.

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