In her recent groundbreaking excavation of post-colonial literature, Assoc. French Prof. Maya Boutaghou investigates a far-reaching question — what does it mean to be the heir, as a female writer, of a colonial and postcolonial culture? Her third book, “White Tongue, Brown Skin: The Colonized Woman and Language” draws from her family history, experiences with students on Grounds and historic works of French-speaking multilingual writers. The book invites readers to reconsider their perceptions of colonial language.
Published this November by University of Virginia Press, this book examines how female writers who are grappling with the effects of colonialism in their societies navigate multilingualism. Formatted as a literary analysis, through examining these female writers’ work, Boutaghou demonstrates how colonial languages can simultaneously alienate and empower those forced to learn them.
Boutaghou said that it is this free-flowing nature of language that made her want to examine it within the context of colonization, which is notoriously characterized by control and imposition. The colonial attempt to control language — an inherently fluid subject — is a main theme in Boutaghou’s book and one which she seeks to decolonize.
“Language does not belong to people,” Boutaghou said. “Language is free.”
Since joining the University’s French department in the fall of 2016, Boutaghou has taught 3000- and 4000- level courses in the French department, as well as a few French in Translation courses and graduate French seminars. These classes have served as dynamic forums for intellectual discovery for both Boutaghou and her students. With their shared readings and historical investigations, her students were an influential force in uncovering many of the questions tackled throughout the book.
“The interactions I have with my students were central and crucial in developing some aspects of the book, particularly in the dimension of the ambiguity of the colonial experience,” Boutaghou said. “[They] like to ask questions … And together we have read books that outline certain aspects in ‘White Tongue, Brown Skin,’ like the alluring dimension of colonial culture and how colonialism is not just a straightforward binary oppositional situation.”
Beyond experiences with her students, Boutaghou’s family history — deeply rooted in linguistic and cultural power dynamics — also heavily influenced the development of the book.
Boutaghou said her grandmother was born in 1917 in Algeria, 83 years into France’s colonial rule over the country. Her grandmother attended a French colonial school, eventually developing a passion for French culture and language. Boutaghou said that through schooling, her grandmother became empowered with a newfound agency, one which enabled her to use language to contextualize the dichotomy between her admiration for French culture and her resentment of their — as her grandmother saw it — violent overrun of the Algerian people.
“It's because of her schooling that she also developed an agency … French schooling gave agency to some of my people, particularly women. Many women developed a very ambiguous relationship to the colonial legacy,” Boutaghou said.
Her grandmother’s story is a window into what Boutaghou refers to as the “alluring” facet of powerful cultural influence in colonial forces. Boutaghou said that in situations where people grow up under the suffocating grip of colonial rule, an attraction towards that colonial culture can form regardless of feelings of oppression.
Because her grandmother adapted French culture passionately, she was called the “little French lady” throughout Boutaghou’s childhood. Boutaghou said that whispered mockery showcased a deeper intricacy — the relationship to colonial culture was, and is, a tightrope walk between shame and empowerment.
In addition to drawing upon her grandmother’s experience of living under colonial rule, Boutaghou said the book was developed with a meticulous research process focused on writers Toru Dutt, May Ziadeh, Assia Djebar and Ananda Devi and the colonial histories in their respective countries. Dutt was an Indian poet during British colonial rule, Ziadeh a Lebanese-Palestinian author born in 1886, Djebar an Algerian writer and filmmaker born in 1936 and Devi a Mauritian writer born in 1957.
According to Boutaghou, each writer represents a distinctly different colonial experience. Boutaghou said she selected these writers because of their literary prominence and unique ability to address colonial scars through their literature by integrating aspects of their native culture into post-colonial writings. According to Boutaghou, their written word is a means of grappling with the ways colonization is embedded in their medium of self-expression.
“Whatever they produce as writers allows for a form of continuation between who they are as native people, [and as] Indigenous writers [within a] colonial culture,” Boutaghou said. “Through the experience of languages, these writers are repairing what is at first a trauma.”
To best understand that relationship in literature, Boutaghou said she encourages her students — and everyone — to decolonize the way they view foreign texts. A way to do that, in her eyes, is to read multilingual writers in several languages, and note the linguistic differences. In “White Tongue, Brown Skin,” Boutaghou said she selected multilingual writers and texts specifically to promote that approach to readers.
“One argument of the book is to decolonize the way we read and ask readers to read multilingually, which is what these texts are doing,” Boutaghou said. “I call for a reading in several languages, and I train my students to do that.”
According to Boutaghou, the textual excerpts and explorations in “White Tongue, Brown Skin” strongly exemplify linguistic nuances, mainly in the differences in how the authors express themselves emotionally, often conveying different tones and feelings with text intended to be direct translations.
Boutaghou expands on these nuances throughout the book, discussing how an imposed colonial language can force individuals to express themselves in ways that negate their native culture and emotional experience.
A more modern iteration of the colonial emotional disruption — also addressed in “White Tongue, Brown Skin” — is the experience of migration and its impact on language and one’s emotional identity. In her book, Boutaghou discusses the relationships of languages and their power imbalances, specifically in relation to their impacts on immigrant communities.
“In an experience of migration to a country where your language is not represented ... you lose this aspect of your own emotional life that's so embedded in the language,” Boutaghou said. “The book can address the questions of migration and languages in diverse situations, and the relationship between languages that have power and languages that have less power.”
Building on the foundation of postcolonial and colonial cultural dynamics outlined in “White Tongue, Brown Skin,” Boutaghou is already digging into the next chapter of her academic research in colonial history. In this new project, Boutaghou said she plans to uncover how colonial experiences historically transformed the lifeblood of cities, with Algeria’s capital, Algiers, as a notable case study.
“The work I'm trying to do in my next project is to work on urban sensations and thinking about the colonial city as first a city of power and alienation … The city transformed by colonial experience is also a city that loses its social body and certain culture,” Boutaghou said.
Boutaghou said in this project she hopes to combine historical research with modern technology — such as virtual reality — to reconstruct lost urban and cultural landscapes. According to Boutaghou, these reconstructions will tangibly present how they looked before French colonial presence and therefore outline the impact colonialism had on these cities.
Boutaghou said that Charlottesville, with a history of slavery which is still actively being uncovered, offers a compelling parallel to her deep dive into Algiers.
“In Charlottesville we have traces of a past that was hidden at some point and now is made visible because we are doing some more work to see and imagine the slaves who worked on our campus … And that's very important,” Boutaghou said.
“White Tongue, Brown Skin: The Colonized Woman and Language,” Boutaghou’s comprehensive analysis of the complexities of being an heiress to a colonial language, can be purchased on online retailers or through the University of Virginia Press.
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