Writing in French as another language (1)

I had the pleasure of collaborating with the team at Sorbonne University Abu Dhabi on the organization of the first part of the international conference Écrire en français langue autre au XXIe siècle [Writing in French as Another Language in the 21st Century]. The event brought together scholars, students, and writers to reflect on the aesthetic, linguistic, and political stakes of writing in French as another language today.

During the session, I presented a paper entitled “Écrire en français par défaut : vers une poétique de la perte dans Shuni (2019) de Naomi Fontaine” [“Writing in French by Default: Toward a Poetics of Loss in Naomi Fontaine’s Shuni (2019)”]. My presentation focused on Naomi Fontaine’s epistolary novel Shuni. Ce que tu dois savoir, Julie, published in 2019. I examined how the text turns writing in French into a space marked by loss, transmission, memory, and fragile dialogue between Indigenous experience and the colonial language. The day formed part of a broader reflection on multilingualism, contemporary Francophone literature, and the meanings of writing in French beyond France in the twenty-first century.