Antonine Maillet: Pélagie-la-Charrette (1979)

Pélagie-la-Charrette is the seventh novel by Antonine Maillet, and the first by a non-European to win the Prix Goncourt. After the removal of the Acadians from Canada by the British in 1755, Pélagie-la-Charrette is a fictional recreation of the return from the South of the USA to Acadia by Pélagie, family and followers in 1770. It has been translated into English as Pélagie: The Return to Acadie, although I find it difficult to imagine how the many Acadian expressions used in the original could have been translated.

This then is the story of Pélagie LeBlanc (called Pélagie-la-Charrette) and fellow Acadians' ten-year journey to Grand- Pré (Nova Scotia), with a cart pulled by oxen. On the way they move from Charleston (North Carolina), through Baltimore (Maryland), Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), Boston (Massachusetts), Salem (also MA), to their final stop.

On the way they have picked up other travellers, including a black slave whom they treat with a respect he has never known, bury some people, steal just to survive, and nearly starve. Other principal characters are Bélonie-le-Vieux, who starts out as a ninenty-year-old, and who is the story teller of this essentially oral culture, and Célina the healer and midwife.

There is much 'doubling' in the tale, as in the case of twins, the two Jeannes, the ghost cart of death following the cart bearing the living, and the flashes forward to relatives towards the end of the 19th century. Pélagie's beloved captain Beausoleil also follows in his ship, meeting her at ports of call. There are sad moments, as when a child has to be buried, and humorous ones, such as Pierre à Pitre's thefts and imprisonment in Baltimore, and throughout there is a polyvocality, a Rabelaisian joy, an obvious delight at the re-establishment of a home for the Acadians.

My other post on Antonine Maillet:

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Antonine Maillet: La Sagouine

Antonine Maillet: La Sagouine 1970; repr. Bibliothèque québécoise 1990

This is a collection of sixteen speeches (this being in fact a one-person play) written by Antonine Maillet from New Brunswick, a mainly French-speaking province in Canada. Maillet, who won the Goncourt in 1979 for her novel Pélagie-la-Charette, is Acadian and this play is written in Arcadian and inspired by a certain Sarah Cormier. The woman on the cover is Viola Léger, famous for her theatrical interpretations of the play. Maillet was born in Bouctouche, where there is now a park called Le Pays de la Sagouine: La Sagouine is a seventy-two-year-old uneducated domestic filled with an age-old wisdom.

 I read a commentary from a girl who used to be a student at Montréal university, who writes about being given tickets for a performance of La Sagouine, and that when the audience saw an old woman with a bucket and mop get up on stage and start talking in an incomprehensible language she expected that the woman would be removed by security officers. But this was not to be: this, of course, was the beginning of the play itself, and bit by bit La Sagouine's strange words begin to take on some sense.

This edition comes with an eight-page Glossary because of the very problem mentioned above, although many of the unconventional words aren't in it and the reader is forced to work at understanding: words such as 'saouère', 'aouère' and 'ouère', for instance, mean 'savoir', 'avoir' and 'voir': there's often a kind of key which greatly aids understanding when unlocked.

La Sagouine is often cynical or skeptical, knows that there's one law for the rich and another for the poor, and gives her views on many subjects, such as: her floor-scrubbing job, Christmas and the New Year, the lottery, the church, war, the seasons, death, etc.

In a Foreword to this remarkable book, Alain Pontaut lists the paradoxes of La Sagouine, including the fact that she 'knows nothing and clarifies everythng', 'speaks in the name of people who have little language, and powerfully gives them a voice', 'speaks of a land which hardly exists and makes it exist by talking about it', 'has nothing and makes us a major gift', and so on.

My other post on Antonine Maillet:

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Antonine Maillet: Pélagie-la-Charrette