“Trembling, Céleste gathered up what little courage she had left to study her mother’s hands as they tucked her in. They moved like a lie being formed, a coffin being sealed shut. The hands brought Céleste out of her childhood. They were wood fire, churned up by lava, marked by flames, streaked with grey and shame.”

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This is the story of a mother who flays her own flesh in an attempt to find her place in society. It is centred around the relationship between a young girl and her mother, a story of Black, French identity, and of the modes of communication circulating in the streets of Paris’s 18th arrondissement, between Château-d'Eau and Boulevard Saint-Germain. In Noire Précieuse, the creole language Nouchi meets the "French of the whites" and seeps into Ivorian slang.

 

Inspired by the Greek tragedy Medea, Noire Précieuse is the story of a relationship that is as sensitive as a caress, as violent as an identity imposed from the outside, and has the power to stir the reader’s blood. This story is first and foremost one of culture shock between Africa and France, of a conflict of identity that plunges its protagonists into a complex state of ambivalence. Oumou, who has destroyed her skin in her attempts to make it lighter, and who intends never to set foot in Africa again, dreams of success and integration for her daughter. But she is as afraid of seeing her marry a white man as she is of her attachment to her Ivorian roots. Céleste seems to be on the cusp of a promising career, but this makes her hesitate all the more between two continents and two worlds, as she prepares for the split between her working-class background and the Parisian intellectual elite.

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“This is Asya Djoulaït's tour de force: showing how questioning our identity does not mean simply abandoning one way of life for another, but embracing everything that is around us and within us.” - Le Monde

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“A relevant, refreshing read, this first novel captures the inner journey of an unforgettable heroine with joyful empathy, and the journey of so many young French people of African descent.” - Le Monde

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“In 160 absorbing pages, Noire précieuse takes a walk through the Château Rouge district in the north of Paris, with jubilant language (Ivorian French) and identity issues that are more than skin-deep: in 2020, can you be a gifted young black girl in 2020 and fall in love with a quintessential white French boy like Grégoire without asking questions about colour?” - RFI

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For rights information, contact Anne-Solange Noble at Gallimard: Anne-Solange.Noble@gallimard.fr

“At first, you think you’ll only manage to live for a few nights. You tell yourself that you’ll be crushed.

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Walls too close. Faces too ugly. Dirty, cold, small, the world to which we're confined.”

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Working on Benchekroun’s feminist collection, I was naturally led to the latest thinking in feminist translation theory by Tissot, Flotow and Farahzad.

 

Benchekroun is a liberal feminist whose work is explicitly rooted in Moroccan culture. For Benchekroun, the decision to write in French is straightforward: it is her strongest language in which to confront and explore issues in Morocco, and not a “westernisation” of her cultural identity. These priorities are at the forefront of her work, and pose an interesting challenge in translation. The tendency in the anglophone West is still to “smooth over” linguistic differences. Feminist translation theory challenges this trend, calling on translators to preserve what we perceive as difference and deliver the source culture to the reader. In this way, translation can contribute to our concept of the universal as diverse and complex, rather than simplifying the universal under one westernised “world view”.

 

With this comment on languages in Morocco in mind, the short story ‘Living Words’ is an interesting case for translation. Its very essence is the French language, which inevitably must be lost in translation. As we move through the story, we see that the French language seems to keep the narrator in a purgatorial state. He pauses on the idea that ‘words are arranged into social categories’ and, despite learning the ‘language of the educated’, he remains excluded from it. This is an idea that has been researched by academics like Moha Ennaji, who are interested in the role of different languages in Morocco.

 

Following a feminist translation approach, it often felt appropriate “not to translate”, to preserve and interweave the source language with its translation. French loan words are used throughout: ‘Cristallin.’ becomes ‘Crystalline. Cristallin.’ These additions aimed to match the quiet, economical rhythm of the narrative voice, to preserve the comment on the sounds of French, and still to clarify the meaning of words for readers with less experience of French. In translating from French to English, I was lucky: the languages are similar enough for the narrator’s reflections on French to be understood by anglophone eyes. I hope you enjoy discovering the layers of language in Benchekroun's beautiful work.