What does an accent mean? Or what does it say? How is an accent articulated in literature? Where is it articulated? When you read Jack Kerouac’s French-language writing, you can’t say that it isn’t in French, because you do need to understand French in order to read it. At the same time, it’s pretty far-removed from standard written French. La vie est d’Hommage is a book you practically have to read out loud. It’s almost like returning to the Middle Ages, you know, in the sense that you have to read it out loud in order to really get it. When I read it in my head, I do understand, but, really, you have to hear it. That way, you can read it out the right way. And then you’re able to find a rhythm that isn’t the rhythm of writing. It’s the rhythm of speech.

Well, you’re always somewhere in that rift, really. You’re always in the spoken word. I think all writing is a form of speech, really. Well, an impersonal form of speech, because there isn’t necessarily a flesh-and-blood person speaking. You know, it speaks. But when you have writing that doesn’t line up with proper French, or writing that you have to read out loud because it’s closer to orality, then you’re getting into the realm of the political. It becomes a gesture of revolt within the writing itself. That’s what Kerouac does. He said somewhere that, for him, writing in French was a revolt against literature.

Well, that kind of does speak to the contact, of what you’re actually physically doing. You can’t really read La vie est d’Hommage, but you can speak it, I think. “Robert, t’eta tit. Mais tu waite encore plus gros.” When you read “tu waite”, you think he’s talking about the English word wait. But that’s not it. It’s tu (v)as êt(re). You have to read Kerouac in French like you read Michif in English phonetics. You have to find your ancestral accent to really understand what it’s saying, to be able to read in a way that sounds meaningful, that is meaningful. You have to read orally. Well, in other words, you have to speak it.

For me, to really read Kerouac, I have to become my grandma Giroux, in her kitchen. In a warmer context, it would’ve had a dirt floor. She would cook in a cast-iron pan, and put it away without ever washing it (smiles). I have to be in that kind of vibe. That kind of talk. And for me, it’s not exotic at all. It’s very, very real.

What does it mean to write orally? Or to write in a language that’s unwritable? That is the question, really. We’re smack-dab in the middle of the question of what literature is. What does it mean to write in an unwritable language? And who can write it? Is it even possible? Is it readable? Who might want to read it?

Yes. It’s a question of undermining the idea that literature is universal, basically. That doesn’t mean that that we have exclusively private literatures. Though Kerouac in French is a little private, I think. We’re in the realm of the idiomatic. But that of course means that it’s placeable. It happens in a certain place. It’s a body that does a certain thing, in a certain place, at a certain time. That’s what I call speech. And it’s expressivity, too. Playing with literature, orally engaging with it, with an accent. The accent kind of encompasses everything we’ve been discussing, the geographical place, the place of the body. It gives rise to a sort of bold delirium, taking literature as your own, owning it, where you are, defined by your own limits. You put your signature on it, you sign it, and maybe over-sign it sometimes too, in a way.

Well, birds of a feather certainly can stick together, if they feel like it. In other words, you make something exist. And if we get back to the value thing, you make something exist that shouldn’t exist. But I don’t mean it as a lament, like “woe is us, those of us with accents, we are so downtrodden!” It’s a matter of perspective, standard French speakers have an accent too. Yeah, I don’t really care. I’m coming at it from an artmaking perspective. It’s about the materials you choose to work with. For me, in messy writing, and weird-sounding language, there’s ways of making writing into a material thing, and ways of making art into something expressive, in an impersonal way. At the same time, Kerouac’s language is the language of poverty. It’s nobody’s language. My grandmother is nobody. It’ll always be nobody’s language, and that’s all there is to it, really.

The underling, for me, is anyone who doesn’t have access to citizenship, in the etymological sense of the word, access to the city. In the sense that you don’t talk like that in public. It’s inaudible. There are codes you need to learn in order to access public language, spoken language that has power. For me, underling language is everything that sneaks in under that particular radar. It’s the language that you get punished for using, symbolically speaking, if you use it at the wrong time and place. And, if you’re from an underling culture, you learn this pretty quick… underling cultures are underling because they’re oral cultures, too. Before going to school, the French language I was surrounded with was basically oral and illiterate. In my family, the language evolved, and was normalized in the context of ubiquitous media, shift of social class, and all that. But for the first four or five years of my life, I learned and lived in a language without books. And of course there’s a connection between an underling and being illiterate. I don’t mean it in a resentful way, in the sense that the language of poverty excludes you from citizenship, from access to the city. It’s more in the sense of a different symbolic wellspring, another way of relating, other paths within meaning that take form within our own stories, and our own languages. You know, here, we suffer from diglossia, in relation to spoken language, illiterate language, you might say. There’s a huge difference between how I write, how I speak in a university class, how I speak with educated friends, how I speak with my parents, how I speak with my neighbour who dropped out of school when he was 12, how I speak with my grandmother, whose vocabulary is from the Middle Ages… I use all these different kinds of speech. This wide world of weird speech is a world full of nuance too, really.

That was the mission of the book, yes. To try to place it all within the context of the Americas, in a sincere way. Really, to ask what you need to do in a given decolonial context is to ask where you are. Who are you? Where are you? How can you transform your experience into a kind of knowledge? I’m paraphrasing Patricia Monture’s words here. I tried to take this question very seriously, by really acknowledging the colonial context. We can’t just answer this question in some whimsical way: “I can be whoever I want, I can invent myself, identity is fluid” and all that. That’s not the question. It’s about who you are, whether you like it or not. And so you have to say “Québécois”, for you and me, anyway. We have to own that, whether we want to or not. Out of a sense of responsibility. Historical, human, and territorial responsibility. So, anyway, I started to think about what all that really means. To be honest, it’s really not fun at all. Not only do I have to recognize that I belong to a colonial culture, and to whiteness, and that I’m white, but also that it’s a loser kind of whiteness, because the Québécois is kind of a failed white person. In the sense that the French-Canadian initially wanted to be a valiant colonizer, but failed at colonization, and thus harbours some kind of deep resentment at not being as good at as their British counterpart. You kind of have to own that baggage, and decide where you go from there. I decided that I would go at it through the question of language, because that’s our own particular fetish. We kind of hold it up like a banner, for better or for worse, saying, well, you know, us, we speak French in America.

Yes, we defend our language. That’s where it happens. So the question becomes how can we be more sincere in our relationship to our language, and to be at peace with it. It’s interesting, because it is a truly minor language. We really are crazy to speak French in America! I think it’s great. We could never become true dominators, it’s impossible. And I do think these are interesting conditions for a stateless kind of thought. So, I decided that’s what I wanted to aim for. To find the beauty in the fact that we speak French in America. So we can really look at ourselves, and accept the fact that we’re settlers, and know our place. And where can we go from there? What do we have to offer from our kind of shitty condition as colonized colonizers? You know, as failed white people, so to speak, with “colonizer envy”, or something like that. We would ideally want to be English, but keep speaking French. And so we carry those contradictions within us, we’re hybridized. Not in the genetic sense, we’re not Indigenous, we can’t claim that. But we’ve lived here for four centuries, for the most part without political, literary, and economic institutions. Who were we, and what did we have to offer, and what do we still have to offer? What still lives on within us? We do have a language that has evolved over time in a specific place, a language of the land. A language that has given rise to other languages. A hybrid language, mixed with other languages. And our language roots us in the geography of this continent. This language doesn’t confine us to the Province of Quebec of 1763. Our language opens up towards all kinds of things. And when you start to look at the early chronicles of the voyageurs, and the lives of the Métis, and everyone that came out of the Saint Lawrence Valley… they went everywhere. The fact is that if we get away from an ethnic affair, like “descendants of the French race of the St. Lawrence Valley”, we start to accept all these attachments, these mixtures, these detachments, these vagabondages, these mistakes, etc., etc., etc.

Ways of living, ways of life, and the kinds of memory and freedom they imply: no more borders, and no more states. It’s all very infrapolitical, really. So, I would posit that we are a stateless people. And, back in the day, we followed Indigenous approaches to territory, in a way, at least at low intensity, so to speak. Before we went up to James Bay, we hadn’t done much in the way of modern colonialism. Well, it’s complicated, but let’s say that in terms of embracing the colonial State, the national use of lands, and all that, it came very late in the game… so, these approaches do still exist, in a sedimented form, in our imaginations, with the mental, symbolic, and physical resources that come with statelessness, or thinking in a stateless way. We had to do things this way for such a long time… And it doesn’t imply being just the little French-Canadian, it means embracing all of America. And rightfully so. It’s okay to embrace America if you don’t want to create a State, and develop everything, and become industrialized. You know, it’s a whole world of encounters that opens up to you. That’s another way of putting it. A world of chance, of coincidence, of discovery, a world of intimacy and humbleness.

La généalogie du déracinement aims to retrace the history of the colonial superstructure that has been imposed on the land, and that has given rise to the production of cars, factories, and the rest, all plugged into nuclear reactors. I look at all that through the lens of the colonial regime. What is the landscape of the colonial regime when the underling is invisible, disqualified, and devalued? Because the underling isn’t productive, the underling doesn’t produce value. Not in the Adam Smith sense, anyway. You can’t survive in a context like that. And the knowledge that’s carried by underling languages doesn’t allow it, and the friends you can make in underling languages can’t help you get rich. It’s a zero-profit zone, so to speak. The underling can only wallow, economically speaking. And so, the whole colonial project works against that, to destroy it, to destroy the ability to survive and thrive with what you can just find around you, on the land. It doesn’t necessarily do it actively, though empires do of course crush certain groups to achieve their goals, in an indirect and “objective” way, like “we’re going to have to flood this valley because a new hydroelectric dam is absolutely essential”. So, in a way, all the life in the water, it doesn’t matter, it has to be destroyed. It’s all articulated together. For postcolonial life to thrive, the underling must be crushed, displaced, pulverized, swept away. It’s what the British called the “clearing of estates”, in their glory years (smirks). You clean up the land, get rid of potential friction, obstacles, detritus, people that hunt and make trouble, etc. And so, when I talk about postcolonial settlement, I’m trying to move towards those magical linguistic forces where the magic of the State operates, and where it can be broken down, too. It’s really a space of magic, of witchcraft.

How is it that we believe in the State? How does that particular mysticism come into being? How is it that we identify with the State? How is it that we think of ourselves as States? How is it that we think of the State as something dangerous and important? How is it that we believe in Terror? I draw a lot of inspiration from Michael Taussig’s work. It’s this sort of colonial fiction that has the ability to colonize the popular culture native to a place, the infrapolitical, underling culture, and, by drawing from its own magical forces, it constructs a mysticism of the State.

In the last chapter of the book, I give a few examples of how orality plays out in our particular underling language. And of how we might be able to destroy the State, just by talking to each other. That’s another thing talking to each other in America is. I do think we can destroy the State, just by talking to each other. Because languages the State can’t understand are necessarily languages of conspiring and plotting. In oral traditions, there are stories, narratives, memories of political violence, memories that are excluded from citizenship. So, it’s a real mixture, a kind of new substance that enables us to critique the State in a way that’s experienced and visceral, and that is true, because it works bottom-up, from the ground level on up, and not the other way around. In this world, there’s no constituted power, and there’s no State. But there is power, and it’s a much more mobile kind of power.

It’s a sort of performativity that plays out in orality itself. I really believe in magic materialism, and I think that mastering oral language, and all its symbolic resources, is absolutely essential. You know, with an eye to ruining the State, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, to constantly chip away at its legitimacy, from below, with strength from below. Liberation always has to be a pedagogy of the people, us, and it has to be rooted in how we talk. And, simply by listening, we find out just how many stories there are to be recounted, and to be heard.