Franco-Irish Literary Festival 2011

The 2011 Franco-Irish Literary Festival took place in various locations in Dublin on the 8th, 9th and 10th of April 2011. It is an annual event that brings together all sorts of creative people such as writers, poets, film makers and their audience to discuss a specific theme.

The theme of this year's festival was generations. The organisers invited writers from Ireland, France and elsewhere, who have covered an aspect of the theme in their work, be it poetry, novels, plays, films or whatever, to discuss how they treated the theme with a panel of their peers. As usual there were some big names invited to speak at the festival and it was great to hear them live and to have an opportunity to ask them questions.



Two of the speakers on Saturday 9 April were particularly interesting.

The first was Eric Fottorino who was introduced as having been a 'grand reporter' for the French newspaper Le Monde. He spoke about his own family background which he has written about in his book Questions à mon père . The book deals with the fact that he was not raised by his biological father (who was a Moroccan Jew) and that he only met him in later life. As the title suggests, the book is a series of questions that Fottorino put to his biological father and the answers he received. He asked him what it means to be a Jew and his father replied that to be a Jew means to be scared or worried, avoir peur in French.

I thought about this for a minute and remembered that when I heard the French writer, Azouz Begag, speaking in University College Cork on the previous day, he said that for him, to be a Muslim in France today also means to be scared or worried. I suppose fear or worry means different things to different people, but it is interesting that the both of them feel fearful, even though they are very different. Could it have something to do with the fact that they both come from minority groups in France, I don't know, but I just thought it was interesting that two such different people would use the same language to describe their place in French society.

Secondly, Virginie Linhart who is a French documentary film maker spoke about growing up with two parents who wanted nothing more than to spread Maoism throughout France and the world. Both parents played a big part in what has become known as Mai '68, when students and factory workers all over France went on strike to demanded major cultural and societal change. Her parents got jobs in factories to organise the workers and spread the Maoist gospel. Her dad worked in a Renault factory, while her mother worked in an industrial meat factory.

Virginie Linhart said that she recently made a documentary featuring the children of many of the leaders of Mai '68. She found it difficult to sell the documentary to television stations, she said, and was told that audiences are not very interested in those events anymore. She said that the children of the strike leaders, who are adults now, are not involved in politics of any kind. To explain their volte-face, she likened their rejection of all things political to the children of alcoholics, who abstain from alcohol because they see what effect it had on their parents. Her parents went on to work as a sociologist and biophysicist, seemingly leaving their Maoist beliefs far behind them.

I really enjoyed the festival and I hope to attend again next year.



The 1st photo shows Geneviève Brisac, the moderator and then Caitriona O'Reilly and Carlo Gébler.

The 2nd photo shows Eric Fottorino, Julia Franck, the moderator and Véronique Ovaldé and Siobhan Parkinson.

The 3rd photo shows Virginie Linhart together with the two moderators.

'Taking Risks' - Azouz Begag in UCC

The French writer, sociologist and sometimes politician, Azouz Begag was in University College Cork on Friday 8 April 2011. He was invited to Cork to launch France, Ireland and Rebellion, Proceedings of the 5th AFIS Conference, (2011), a book based on conference papers from the AFIS (Association of Franco Irish Studies) conference that was held in 2009.

In the morning, Mr Begag read excerpts from some of his work and later delivered a lecture on immigration. He said that this was his third visit to Ireland and his first to Cork. He began by saying that when he thinks of Ireland he thinks of his father, who had travelled from Algeria to France in search of work. He said that the Irish (like the Algerians) who travelled abroad to look for work went with the myth that they would return home in their luggage and that this gave them strength to travel and sustained them when outside of Ireland or Algeria.

I had read his book about his life growing up in a shanty town in Lyon and his book about being the Minister for Equal Opportunities in Dominique de Villepin's goverment. In Un Mouton dans la baignoire , Begag describes how stressful political life can be and how a rift grew between him and Nicolas Sarkozy over something that was said and misinterpreted. He has written fiction and non-fiction and he said that he was inspired to become a writer when he realised that his father couldn't sign his own name.

The power of LANGUAGE
From listening to Mr Begag speaking in Cork, I learned that he sees language as a valuable weapon in life. Immigrants can use it like a passport to help them to advance themselves in the country in which they're living. He said that verlan, the slang that many young people use in France is more of handicap to them than anything else. It acts like a barrier that locks them up and keeps them segregated from the mainstream.

I called this post Taking risks, because Mr Begag said that he likes it when people who are learning a foreign language take risks with language and try to speak the foreign language even if they are not very very good at it. It shows that they have courage and are willing to take risks, and don't mind looking foolish, as we invariably feel when we try to communicate in a language that isn't our mother tongue.

The picture shows Mr Begag reading from his book Le Gone du Chaba in the O'Rahilly Building in UCC. The book deals with his life growing up in a shanty town in the outskirts of Lyon. He describes the deprivation that he and his poor family experienced and his integration into the French society through the education system. He said that the book is still very relevant today, 24 years after it was published, because of the profound sociological lessons to be learned from it.

ADEFFI Post Graduate Symposium in UCC

The ADEFFI (l'Association des Études françaises et francophones en Irlande)
Post Graduate Symposium took place in University College Cork on Saturday 2 April 2011. It provided post graduate students from universities and colleges in Ireland who are involved in the area of French studies to come together and present their work before their peers.

I was one of the co organisers of the symposium and I also presented a paper on the day. My paper dealt with the friendship between the journalist, painter and poet AE, or George Russell to give him his real name and Simone Téry (one of the French journalists whose work I am examining as part of my PhD). Ten post graduate students, including students from University College Cork, Trinity College Dublin, two students from universities in the UK and a student from a French university presented papers on the day. The wide range of topics covered included Beckett, Baudelaire, Nerval, Perec, Rwanda's genocide in the 1990s and French involvement in Rhodesia's push for independence in the 1980s.

The picture at the top of the post is of some of the symposium participants in the UCC campus.