ALVINA RUPRECHT
Christiane P. Makward and Judith G. Miller have undertaken a painstaking and meticulous labour of translation, edition and analysis: eight new translations of plays by women from the "Francophonie." The volume includes works by Hélène Cixous, Michèle Foucher, Andrée Chedid and Chantal Chawaf who have done their creative work in the Hexagone, as well as S. Corinna Bille from Switzerland, Ina Césaire from Martinique, Antonine Maillet from Acadia and Denise Boucher from Quebec. One might wonder about the absence of Jovette Marchessault (Quebec), or Maryse Condé and Gerty Dambury (Guadeloupe), but anthologies are inevitably about choices and the editors do explain why the plays in question are important contributions to the growing body of francophone theatre by women. Each play is accompanied by detailed notes and preceded by four pages of contextualisation which includes biographical background, remarks on the performance process, the history of the stage production, an analysis of the play as well as indications of the scenography and staging. These translations are presented not only as literary texts but also as potential performance pieces. Also important are the explanations of particular cultural references often useful in the cross-cultural process of translation. This is especially true in Island Memories: Maman N. and Maman F. by Ina Césaire where the notes address the problem of the "untranslatable" by describing the socio-cultural connotations of certain words in Martinican creole.
The main emphasis, however, is on showing how each text has contributed to the evolution of the representation of women through theatre as well as to the way specific forms of "écriture feminine" manifest themselves in some of these plays. Antonine Maillet (The Rabble) builds new mythologies (77), Hélène Cixous (The Name of Oedipus, Song of the Forbidden Body) questions categories of sexuality (250), while the plays of Andrée Chedid and Chantal Chawaf reveal the imaging of the "New Woman" who will emerge from a psychophysiological transfiguration.
While I agree that the positioning of women characters within these theatrical texts is obviously innovative and important from a thematic point of view, I am less comfortable with the book's emphasis on many of these forms of theatre being uniquely or specifically related to women. I feel the editors need to acknowledge that certain strategies of representation also retain strong reference points to older European forms (Piscator, Brecht). For example, the theatrical equivalent of "écriture feminine" would seem, in my own mind, to be linked to the naturalized body that is the locus of Artaudian ritual performance strategies. There are also references to the story-telling rituals of the Caribbean which are not particular to women's performance although the testimonial nature of the stories, the telling of one's own story, is more prevalent in theatre by women.
However, the book does more than just feature textual analysis. The editors also contribute strongly to a current debate on renewed notions of "Francophonie" where questions of difference and post-colonial identities intersect. Traditionally seen as a group of former colonies basking in the light of the mother country, sharing the same language but swimming in a murky culture perceived as an inferior extension of that of France, "Francophonie" was always constructed within a hierarchy of power that tended to obfuscate difference: historical, ethnic, cultural and racial. This book questions that image, and this is extremely important. In her "Introduction," Miller shows how each play is the product of multiple relations and forms of cultural representation, which differ in each of the geographical regions concerned. Within these many categories of "difference," shifting sexual identities easily fit into the same paradigm. For example, we see the female subject represented as the antithesis of the woman in the patriarchal family model. We also see the postmodern subject position of Queer Studies that deconstructs binary sexual categories, creating the possibility of multiple and fluid identities. Within the area of French Studies, the variations and permutations emerging from the realm of gender identities is one of the categories that can be included in the great realm of differences surfacing in Post-Colonial Studies which are currently contributing to the breaking down of a homogeneous and Eurocentered "Francophonie".
The book's attempt to link gender categories to the paradigm of difference and thus contribute to redefining the notion of "Francophonie" is both timely and useful. However, we see that Judith Miller's nineteen-page "Introduction" is also engaged in a perilous exercise. A synthesis of the whole history of women and theatre in the French speaking world must rely at times on reductive statements that eliminate nuance. Comments on Quebec theatre are good examples of this problem. Referring to the Québéçoise writers' "ten year struggle for cultural and political emancipation from dominant anglophone Canada" (3), the author speaks as though the independence movement were only ten years old whereas women singers and artists have been involved in its questions for much longer. The use of joual by women playwrights in no way defines the specificity of their theatre, since a great many playwrights have used joual as strategies of resistance since 1968 (Les Belles-Soeurs by Michel Tremblay). As well, theatrical forms of joual do not correspond to the real street language and each writer, including Marie Laberge (9), recreates his/her own literary form of joual to correspond to the rhythmic needs of his/her own text.
The same remarks could be made about the relationships between English Canada, France and these Québéçoise. The hostility displayed toward certain forms of so-called "standard" French, the parodic mimicry of those who speak "pointu," and even the female stereotypes emanating from the Catholic Church in much of this theatre indicate an extremely problematic relationship with France which is just as important as, but very different from, the hostility felt in relation to English Canada.
Obviously, Miller did not have the space to deal with these very important questions, but what she does do is indicate avenues of further research. This critical anthology is well-documented, the translations are excellent and it is without any doubt an important contribution to a field of francophone theatre research, which has been sadly neglected by theatre specialists.