With one fictional stroke, Antonine Maillet gave Acadia its voice

Article content

Writers come in all shapes and sizes and take up all kinds of places and spaces. Antonine Maillet’s physical space was elfin. A tiny, fine-boned woman with a cap of boyish hair, she could be imagined flying into a Disney movie as Tinker Bell.

We first met way back in the 1970s when we both had plays on at the National Arts Centre. She was by then already a star, and as I was a young writer just starting out, she treated me with a certain noblesse oblige. Our paths crossed again from time to time. She was always gracious, and I remained star-struck all my life — for the place she took up in the Acadian community was Shakespearian.

Article content

Shakespeare appropriated the oral history of England and re-set the language in print. Antonine Maillet did the same thing for Acadian French. She took the stories, the culture and old Acadian French and re-cast them in print in a way that had never been done before.

Since her recent passing, there are many references to her winning France’s much coveted Goncourt Prize, the first non-European to do so for her novel about the Acadian exile: Pelagie La Charette. It’s a good book but enjoyed nothing like the success of her one woman play La Sagouine. La Sagouine (The Washerwoman), brought to life on stage by Viola Léger, reflects on her life in the rich language of a French which goes right back to Molière.

When it was launched in 1971, La Sagouine was an enormous success; it played all over the francophone world and became a hit as a book in its written form. It remains a unique and powerful evocation of not just one character but an entire people. In giving an old washerwoman a public voice, Maillet gave all of Acadie a voice.

The two great poems of Acadie, Longfellow’s Evangeline and La Sagouine are equally important but very different. Longfellow’s Evangeline wrenched the Acadian exile from being just another refugee story and gave it an important place in the history of North America. Maillet’s La Sagouine was a prose-poem and couldn’t be more different.

Article content

It was not romantic. It was not bucolic.It was not filled with youthful hope. La Sagouine was old, gritty, practical, philosophical more than romantic. It was how Acadians had lived and survived on the run for more than a century after losing their lands and homes. It wasn’t the events of the exile that caught people’s throat as Longfellow’s poem did. It was the play’s simple humanity that made it a hit everywhere Viola Léger played the role of the washerwoman.

Happily, every language, every culture has many fine writers we can celebrate, but the number who have had the talent and the historical moment to codify an entire language and expand human sensibility at the same time is exclusive territory. There’s been only one William Shakespeare and there’s only one Antonine Maillet. She wrote more than 40 books and in doing so brought a whole culture into the light of the written word. She published everything from lighthearted tours of modern Acadie with books for tourists like Acadie for Almost Nothing to reflections on the universality of story-telling with books like LaFontaine et la Comédie des Animaux.

Article content

Maillet was a teacher as well as an author and there was an educational thread to everything she did, both at home and abroad. With her books, she connected the small, old stream of Acadien French to the broader current of francophone literature.  La Sagouine is now studied by French-speaking Acadians themselves to better understand the language before it and the culture itself began to shift towards “le français metropolitain” of today.

The Acadian village re-creation, Le Pays de la Sagouine in Bouctouche, N.B. attracts thousands of visitors each summer and is another testament to the power of Maillet’s writing. Her legacy, like Shakespeare’s, is not going anywhere. She will be remembered with affection and admiration for as long as the written word has an important place in our lives.

Former Ottawa city councillor Clive Doucet is the author of Notes from Exile: On Being Acadian, Lost and Found in Acadie and other books.

Article content