Franco-Americans together in quest > Speaker stresses value of knowing, preserving own cultural identity

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BAR HARBOR — Franco-Americans’ search for their cultural identity is like the Knights of the Round Table’s quest for the Holy Grail, according to Acadian author and playwright Antonine Maillet.

“The quest was the answer,” said Maillet, who through her written works and public speaking has become an internationally recognized voice of the Acadian people. “Happiness is not to possess something, it’s to hunt it.”

Maillet, who has won international acclaim for her extensive publications, delivered the keynote address during a colloquium involving an estimated 200 scholars and Francophones from the United States, Canada and France.

“Cultural Identity in French America: Legacy, Evolution, and the Challenges of Renewal” debuted Wednesday night and will continue through Sunday. Most of the events are being held at the Atlantic Oakes Hotel and Conference Center in Bar Harbor.

Participants and presenters came from 15 states, five Canadian provinces and French universities in Angers, Orleans, Nantes and LeMans.

“My friends, I have a big problem — a language problem,” Maillet said at the start of her speech. “I have to choose between English, French and Acadian

With the blessing of colloquium organizers, Maillet used all three. The anecdotes at the beginning and end of her talk were in English, but she delivered the core of her address in her native tongue.

Cultural identity is something that Franco-Americans have carried from one generation to the next, much like DNA fingerprinting, Maillet said.

She spoke of how her own career as a writer might go back to three ancestors — three brothers who were masons in France and whose tools (mallets, “maillets” in French) formed the basis of her family name in 1250.

As the first three Maillets tapped away at stone to create structures, she as a writer taps away at words to bring life to the people she creates in her imagination.

She told Franco-Americans to get over the inferiority complex some have over their particular version of French.

The version of French spoken in North America has deep connections to the French spoken in France four centuries ago, she said. It has retained words, phrases and expressions that long ago evolved out of use in France.

“An Acadian, a Franco-American or a Quebecer who loses his language, loses his identity,” she noted. Had her ancestors lost their language, she might very well be Antonine Meyers or Antonine Hammer today. In that case, “What’s left of me?” she asked.

She compared Franco-Americans’ struggle to preserve their cultural identity to that of the salmon which must swim against the current in order to ensure the survival of its species.

The “current” that Franco-Americans face is English, the language of communication and technology. So widely is it used that Franco-Americans must make sure that they use French to write, to create, if their culture is to go on.

In the question period that followed, Maillet grappled with the sometimes thorny question, “What about Francos who don’t speak French?”

“It’s important for you to know that you remain Franco-American even if you lose the language,” Maillet told the young woman who raised the issue. “The very fact that you ask the question is the answer. Maybe you did lose it, which means that you don’t want to lose it.”

She warned, however, that language is an essential element of any culture, and to lose it entirely would have dire consequences. “Language gives the memory. It’s history,” Maillet said.

Though Maillet may be diminutive in stature — she stood atop a milk crate while delivering her address — she is a giant among North American French-language writers.

A native of Bouctouche, New Brunswick, Maillet has a number of novels, plays and translations to her credit, including “La Saguine,” a play about a fictional Acadian washerwoman whose tart commentaries on the Acadian perspective on life have made her a French-Canadian folk heroine.

Maillet, however, is perhaps best known for her historical novel “Pelagie-la-Charette,” based on the 1755 expulsion of the Acadian people from their homeland in what today is coastal Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada. The brutal expulsion by the English people is considered by some an ethnic cleansing.

In 1979, Maillet was presented the prestigious Prix Goncourt — France’s equivalent to the Pulitzer Prize — for that novel, the only person outside of France to receive that honor. She received the Chalmers Canadian Play Award in 1980.

Maillet’s 33rd book, due out in September, tied in well with the colloquium’s theme. Titled “Le Chemin St. Jacques” (“The Milky Way”), the novel tells the story of an Acadian woman’s childhood in French-speaking Canada and her subsequent search for her roots in France.

In introducing Maillet, UM French Professor Raymond Pelletier called Maillet “a friend and a confidante. We call on her and she responds.”

He said that Maillet’s 1981 visit to the Orono campus spurred increasing numbers of UM Francos to speak and write in their native tongue.

“She’s our guru,” said Sen. Judy Paradis of Frenchville, a colloquium participant. She said Maillet inspired her and others who took part in the first Acadian Congress, which drew 220,000 people of Acadian descent to New Brunswick in 1994. “We came together to show that the expulsion didn’t work.”

This is not your typical colloquium, notes Jim Bishop, conference coordinator and assistant director of academic programs for the University of Maine’s Franco-American Center, because it is a blend of Franco-Americans working to keep their traditions alive and scholars.

“We will hear not only from the researchers, but from the people who serve as the living source of that research,” Bishop said.

“It’s been great. It’s been incredible so far,” said Gregoire Chabot, a writer who practices his craft in North American French — and whose play “Un Jacques Cartier Errant” (“Jacque Cartier Discovers America”) will be staged in the College of the Atlantic auditorium at 7 tonight.

“It’s the energy that’s going on,” noted Chabot, who grew up in Waterville and now lives in Massachusetts. “I hate to sound like a `New Age’ person, (but) the only way to describe it is as a very strong current. And it’s happening with people from Quebec and France.”