French literature is not only Paris. Some of the most important books published in French in the last hundred years come from Martinique, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Haiti, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Montréal and Innu communities in Québec. Reading them is the best way to hear the many Frenches you met earlier in this unit used with full artistic control. Watch one question throughout this lesson: how does an author's background shape the language of the book? A Malinké speaker bends French syntax, a Montréal playwright puts working-class joual on stage, an Acadian novelist writes the speech of her region, and a Vietnamese-born writer chooses a title that means one thing in French and another in Vietnamese. Every fact in this lesson is a fact you can cite; the goal is to know a few writers well rather than many names vaguely.
Négritude: reclaiming a word
In the 1930s, three students from French colonies met in Paris: Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Léopold Sédar Senghor from Senegal and Léon-Gontran Damas from French Guiana. France's colonial schools had taught them that "civilisation" was French and European. In the student journal L'Étudiant noir, which they helped launch in the mid-1930s, they began to answer back. Césaire coined the word négritude: taking an insult based on the word nègre and turning it into a proud affirmation of Black identity, history and cultures. Their movement shaped poetry, politics and the decolonisation debates that followed.
| Writer | Life | Key facts |
|---|---|---|
| Aimé Césaire | 1913–2008, born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique | Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), a long poem first published in a Paris review in 1939 and revised in later editions. Mayor of Fort-de-France from 1945 to 2001. |
| Léopold Sédar Senghor | 1906–2001, born in Senegal | Poet and first president of independent Senegal (1960–1980). In 1983 he became the first African elected to the Académie française. |
Haiti and West Africa: Laferrière, Bâ, Kourouma
| Writer | Work | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Dany Laferrière (born 1953), Port-au-Prince, Haiti; moved to Montréal in 1976 | L'Énigme du retour (The Return), 2009 | A narrator much like the author returns to Haiti, 33 years after leaving it, when his father dies in exile in New York; it won the Prix Médicis in 2009. In December 2013 he was elected to the Académie française, the first Haitian and the first Québécois elected. Much of his work moves between Haiti and Montréal. |
| Mariama Bâ (1929–1981), Senegal | Une si longue lettre (So Long a Letter), 1979 | A novel written as a long letter: a recently widowed woman writes to her closest friend about marriage, polygamy, grief and independence. It won the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa in 1980. |
| Ahmadou Kourouma (1927–2003), Côte d'Ivoire | Les Soleils des indépendances (The Suns of Independence), 1968 | A satire of politics after independence. Rejected by French publishers, it was first published in Montréal, by the Presses de l'Université de Montréal. |
| Allah n'est pas obligé (Allah Is Not Obliged), 2000 | Narrated by Birahima, a boy who becomes a child soldier in the wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone. It won the Prix Renaudot in 2000. |
French Canada
| Writer | Work | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| Gabrielle Roy (1909–1983), born in Saint-Boniface, Manitoba | Bonheur d'occasion (The Tin Flute), 1945 | A novel about a working-class family in the Saint-Henri district of Montréal during the Second World War. In 1947 it won the Prix Femina in France, the first time a Canadian won that prize. |
| Antonine Maillet (1929–2025), born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick | La Sagouine, 1971; Pélagie-la-Charrette, 1979 | La Sagouine gives the stage to an Acadian cleaning woman speaking the French of her region. Pélagie-la-Charrette, about Acadians returning home after the Deportation, won the Prix Goncourt in 1979: the first time the prize went to a Canadian writer. |
| Michel Tremblay (born 1942), Montréal | Les Belles-sœurs, first staged in 1968 | Fifteen working-class women gather to paste trading stamps into booklets. Written in joual, the working-class French of Montréal, the play caused a storm in 1968 and is often called a turning point in Québec theatre. |
| Kim Thúy (born 1968), Saigon, Vietnam | Ru, 2009 | She arrived in Québec at the age of 10 as one of the "boat people" refugees in 1979. Ru won the Governor General's Literary Award for French-language fiction in 2010. The title works in both her languages: in French, ru is an old word for a small stream, and figuratively a flow (of tears, of money); in Vietnamese, it means a lullaby. |
Innu voices
- An Antane Kapesh (1926–2004), an Innu writer and activist from the Schefferville area, published Je suis une maudite sauvagesse / Eukuan nin matshimanitu innu-iskueu in 1976, in a bilingual Innu and French edition. The autobiographical book deals with the loss of hunting territory, residential schools and police violence; its title takes up, in the first person, an insult aimed at Innu women. She wrote it in Innu-aimun, and José Mailhot's French translation was printed on the facing pages. It is often described as the first literary work in an Indigenous language to be published and sold through ordinary commercial channels in Québec.
- Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, an Innu poet, slam artist and activist from Pessamit on the North Shore of the St. Lawrence, published her first collection, N'entre pas dans mon âme avec tes chaussures (Do Not Enter My Soul in Your Shoes), in 2012.
- Both writers put Innu-aimun (the Innu language) beside or inside French, a language that arrived with colonisation. Kapesh wrote in Innu-aimun, and her facing-page edition literally gives the two languages equal space; Kanapé Fontaine writes in French and lets Innu words and images into it. When you read Indigenous writers in French, notice which words stay in the Indigenous language, and why.
A legend: la chasse-galerie
Legends belong to oral tradition, but many were written down in the nineteenth century. The best-known Québec version of la chasse-galerie was published by the journalist Honoré Beaugrand in the Montréal newspaper La Patrie in December 1891. The story: on New Year's Eve, lumberjacks stuck in a camp far from home make a pact with the devil so that their canoe will fly them through the night sky to see their sweethearts. The conditions: they must not say the name of God and must not touch a church steeple, or they will lose their souls. Retold here in French: Le soir du jour de l'An, des bûcherons isolés dans un chantier décident de rentrer chez eux. Ils concluent un pacte avec le diable, et leur canot s'envole au-dessus de la forêt. (On New Year's Eve, lumberjacks isolated in a logging camp decide to go home. They make a pact with the devil, and their canoe flies off above the forest.) Notice the présent de narration, the present tense used to retell a story vividly.
Talking about a literary text
| French | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| un roman, un recueil (de poèmes, de nouvelles) | a novel, a collection (of poems, of short stories) | Ce recueil réunit quarante poèmes. |
| une pièce de théâtre, un monologue | a play, a monologue | La pièce se déroule dans une cuisine. |
| un roman épistolaire | a novel in letters | Une si longue lettre est un roman épistolaire. |
| une autobiographie, l'autofiction | an autobiography, autofiction (fiction drawn closely from the author's life) | Ru mêle souvenirs et fiction. |
| le narrateur, la narratrice; le personnage | the narrator; the character | Le narrateur, Birahima, a une dizaine d'années. |
| l'auteur, l'autrice (also l'auteure in Canada) | the author | L'autrice dénonce l'injustice faite aux femmes. |