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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
The controversy currently surrounding national literatures in foreign languages can be summed up by the famous statement: “to be or not to be, that is the question.”* But how is one to be oneself without having been that other whom one cannot deny (in the Marxist sense) since one sings as one grows? How, whatever effort one makes to deny one's father, can one fail to be presently what one is by separating oneself from the story of one's own birth or from the birth of one's own story?
* © Notre Librairie, nos. 92-93 (March-May 1988), “Litterature congolaise.”
1. Akutagawa, Rashomon et autre contes, with an introduction by Claude Roy (Paris, 1969), p. 7.
2. "The national character of a literature is above all the content of a people's consciousness, the aspects of psychology (depth or surface psychology). That is what makes a literature belong to or reflect the life of this or that people. Looking at it thus from this point of view, Cuban literature, for example, although it uses the Spanish language, keeps its national character, which is different from the Spanish national character because it bears the load of the human content specific to the Cuban people …" (interview with Jean-Baptiste Tati Loutard, 16 October 1978).
3. "Ce que parler veut dire," L'Economle des échanges linguistiques (Paris, 1982), pp. 8 and 9.
4. Ibid., p. 26.
5. Ibid., p. 33.
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