Review — La Sagouine

They don’t use fancy words, only those passed “from yap to trap.” Their bastardized language, and the world it reflects, seems shameful when the outside world looks in.

This is the life described by La Sagouine, the illiterate washerwoman who is the narrator of Antonine Maillet’s novel — a life of selling sex and mopping floors, marrying your first cousin, and birthing twelve children, standing in the back of the church aware of your animal smell, wearing hand-me-down hats from the rich whose dirt you take home in your bucket. How could she begin to portray the beauty of those first geese flying in spring? “It’s like your whole life is gathered up in your veins, and all of a sudden you can’t tell the gulls’ cries from your neighbours calling out to each other. It’s like all your memories come flooding in on you all at once just from seeing them geese come back at the start of spring.”

The book takes the form of a monologue, a fleeting oral tale set down on paper. La Sagouine became a crucial text in Acadian literature when it was first published in 1971. Now it has been given new voice in a translation by Wayne Grady. The original English translation by Luis de Céspedes, published in 1979, retains the cragginess of the language, but the sentences get snagged by the written expression of Acadian dialect. Grady’s translation flows more smoothly, capturing the urgency of the character’s unschooled thoughts.

As this elderly woman contemplates her life, she is aware that her culture is both different and dying. In the chapter entitled “Census,” government officials try to box the Acadians into categories. “We got nothing for them to censor, them census-takers . . . We got no land of our own, we can’t say what religion we are, we don’t know what our nationality is. We don’t think we have one.”

They do, though, in part because Maillet has created that category — that essential written identity — through this vital book.