In addition to being Women's History Month, March is The Month of La Francophonie (also called Francophonie month), a time to celebrate French language and culture. March 20th, which I have missed by a day, is International Francophonie Day, again celebrating the language and, also, supporting language diversity. The date corresponds with the anniversary of the Agency for Cultural and Technical Cooperation in 1970 in Niger, formed to work toward Francophone cooperation.
This year's theme for International Francophonie Day is Je m'éduque, donc j'agis (look I got the accent marks in!), which means I educate myself, therefore I act. This tends to be my personal mantra (in the sene of a repeated statement rather than a sound to aid meditation), anyway, and it seems hugely appropriate for the times we live in, whether you're talking language or anything else.
A Couple of Preliminary Thoughts
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| The French cover is much better |
Some people have raised the question of reading works in translation. Have you read the original, at all, if you've read a translated version? Or are you reading the translator's version? I can't answer that. I'm just saying I'm aware that reading French in translation raises that question.
In Ghost Empire: How the French Almost Conquered North America author Philip Marchand writes that at some point French Canadians were viewed (by nonFrench Canadians, I guess) as being jolly, fun-loving folk. This was never my perception of my Franco-American family. Many of them died young and that's not including my uncle, Joseph Elie, who lived four hours (I do a bit of genealogical research) and his three siblings who didn't even make it that long. There was a cousin who survived his military experience in Korea only to be killed on the way home when his military plane crashed. Growing up, I heard stories about aunts or uncles coming home from family funerals, answering a phone, and hearing the voice of the recently deceased or harp music. My father and his Franco-American buddies he'd grown up with would sit at the kitchen table and talk about how the Bible says the world will end ("Soon") and where the next war would be fought ("Here.)
My point being, I was well prepared for the dark world of the French living in Fort Detroit, The Future's setting. (Couldn't manage the accent mark there.)
The Future as a Dystopian Novel
Having read Ghost Empire and knowing how far south French explorers and settlers made it onto what would become the United States also set me up to find the basic premise of this both alternative history and dystopian fiction very believable. In the world of The Future, Fort Detroit is a French city, having never been taken over by the British or ending up with the Americans. A character explains that Poles, Irish, and Italians did come to Fort Detroit because they could practice their Catholic religion there. But the Catholic churches, schools, and hospitals encouraged them to learn French, and that was why French survived there, even after Ontario banned French education in 1912. (That really happened, though the ban was lifted in 1944.) Nonetheless, I don't know how invested American readers reading this in English will become in the French aspect of the book. While there certainly is a very specific culture in Fort Detroit, I don't know that English readers will recognize anything particularly French about it, though some of the characters speak in particular way. "How d'ya explain them leavin' the Francophones in peace for the next hundred years?" The children have an even more distinct manner of speaking that may be a French patois, in terms of its structure. (That's a wild guess.) If we were French readers reading this in French, however, we'd have no doubt we were in a French world.
But there are many other fascinating things here for us English-speaking folks.
Fort Detroit has fallen on very hard times. Houses are abandoned. People with money who got out, got out. There is not much police presence or help from them. Things are so bad that someone runs a bus tour "Decouvrez les ruines de Fort Detroit." We see this kind of thing for traditional real world old forts all the time, but this bus drives/tears through the area where are characters live. These people are left to band together to help each other. A former musician now runs greenhouses and gardens. A nurse runs a clinic in his house.
It almost seems post-apocalyptic, except there was no apocalyptic event here, which is a fascinating part of this story. Economically, things start going bad in the 60s when the WASPs and Americans are doing well, but everyone else lived in slums with immigrants "coralled in districts that were built too fast and went up in flames at the slightest spark." Blacks were banned from living outside their own district. "White Francos had more freedom to move around, but like the other proles, they lived among the rats and got saddled with the dirty jobs." There were strikes, demonstrations, and a rebellion. The rich left with their businesses, and the poor were left with unemployment, pollution, a bankrupt city. Oh, and drugs. Lots of drugs.
This is the kind of thing that could really happen. I'm sure some would argue that there are places where it is happening.
The Children of The Future
I didn't realize that the bulk of the people we see in the first section of The Future are older, until we got to the second section, where the children are. In Fort Detroit, many children are orphaned by drugs and some really bad parenting, and they escape to live together in a park within the city. They have their own, you might say, administrative structure, with their own manner of speaking. Social services is another thing Fort Detroit doesn't have, and these kids are free to live or die as they will. We (by which I mean I) slowly realize that this children's world has been leaking into and out of the adult world of the city that we've been reading about.
I found this section difficult at first. There are a lot of kids, and they all have strange names. There is a sense that there is a Lord of the Flies thing going on here or a lost boys (in this case children) of Peter Pan. There's some magical realism here, too, something I'm not usually very fond of.
But I was won over by these very young people who in many ways are stronger than the grownups in the city.
The Mystery of The Future
Gloria, our protagonist, has come to Fort Detroit because her daughter, a drug addict, was murdered there after which her grandchildren disappeared. Gloria is there to look for those girls who, for all she knows, are dead, too. It is her foray into the children's park to look for them that eventually brings the children and adult worlds together.
En Conclusion
The Future is a somewhat demanding book, in the very best sense of the word. Leroux has written other books I'm now interested in, and she's won awards for her translation of other writers' work.
I may have a favorite French Canadian writer now.
