Léa Sinoimeri

 

lea.sinoimeri@u-paris.fr

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I am a Lecturer in English (PRAG) at the Université de Paris and member of Politiques Linguistiques et Interculturalités research group of the Department of Foreign Languages (UFR EILA). My PhD thesis, awarded at Università La Sapienza of Rome, was an investigation of Samuel Beckett’s bilingual and intermedial aesthetics. I have since continued to research the work of bilingual authors focusing on notions of “hybridity”, “liminality” and “mobility”. More recently, my teaching position inside an LEA Department has opened new paths in my research looking for convergence areas between literary studies and sociolinguistics.

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Monolingualism and language depropriation in Oona Frawley’s Flight

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Set in Ireland in 2004, against the backdrop of the anti-immigrant sentiment that preceded the Citizenship Referendum, Flight, by Oona Frawley weaves the story of Sandrine – a young Zimbabwean woman who flies her country in search of a better future for herself and her family - into that of Tom and Claire, an old Irish couple for whom she works as a carer. As Sandrine’s life in a new country and a new language overlaps Tom and Claire’s loss of memory and slow decay, her pregnancy progresses along with Elizabeth’s – Tom and Claire’s daughter - difficult journey towards motherhood.

 

The novel engages directly with representations of migration and hospitality in contemporary Ireland by examining the complex ways in which political dimensions intersect with both linguistic and aesthetic paradigms. While it questions a model of citizenship that conceives of prospective citizens no longer through their territorial rights (ius soli), but through their blood-rights (ius sanguinis), it also reflects on the thickening of citizenship models around language discourse and language competence (ius linguarum). A model in which, as Gramling has argued, “forms of multilingual upskilling are promoted as models for global success and competitiveness for immigrants, always through the functional aperture of the nation-state and its primary symbolic language.” (Gramling, p. 25)

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Tellingly, the only reason for Sandrine to be granted a visa is to apply to go to Ireland to improve her English, although she never attends English courses and the school simply prepares for her attendance certificates. The question of language is, since the outset, intertwined with the question of hospitality as the novel focuses on migration as linguistic displacement and unsettlement. Sandrine’s, Claire’s and Elizabeth’s geographically and linguistically disparate migration experiences share the same effort of going ‘in’ and ‘out’ of language, struggling against impositions of linguistic belonging from the outside.

 

Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine as well as on scholarly criticism that has scrutinised the politics and aesthetics of monolingualism (e.g. Yildiz, Gramling), this paper aims at exploring the ways in which Frawley’s Flight challenges the modern notion of “mother tongue” as a linguistic family romance according to which “individuals are imagined to possess one “true” language and through this possession to be organically linked to an exclusive, clearly demarcated ethnicity, culture and nation” (Ylidiz, p. 2). To a model based on the assumption that language is a form of property, intimately connected to kinship and motherhood, Flight seems to suggest new modes of writing and reading that explore language depropriation as a strategy to overcome hostile barriers and build new communities.

 

Works Cited:

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Oona Frawley, Flight, Dublin, Tramp Press, 2014.

Jacques Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, ou la prothèse d’origine, Paris, Editions Galilée, 1996.

David Gramling, The Invention of Monolingualism, London & New York, Bloomsbury, 2016.

Yasemin Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonoligual Condition, New York, Fordham UP, 2012.