Monthly Archives: May 2014

TOWARDS A BETTER VOCABULARY OF QUEERNESS IN FRENCH

So in my recent post about my fancy ideas for a gender-neutral pronoun in French, ai mentioned the word «allosexuelle» and made reference to the fact that it never really caught on in French, losing out majorly in competition with the anglicism “queer”.

By itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Ai don’t mind if the French language gets “polluted” with anglicisms, although ai’m definitely a bit pedantic about orthography. Let me spell it all out for you: ai would much prefer it if the French version of “queer” became «kuire» instead of «queer», since the French «queer» (you know it’s French because of the guillemets) looks and sounds fucking weird from the perspective of how words are supposed to get together in that language and how they are supposed to be pronounced. The qu– phoneme should be pronounced like a hard letter-kay [k, K] in English, but it isn’t, and ai just plain don’t like that.

Let’s move on, though, to a problem that goes beyond my personal tastes.

To a very large degree, it seems to be more difficult to discuss queerness – which should be understood as something separate from mere homosexuality, something that encompasses a much larger array of subject matter – in French than it is in English, especially if the aim is to discuss it using precise language. Much of that precise language in English is a bit jargonny, to be sure, and that is because it is largely produced by academics and used by university-educated queers. But this language is definitely more jargonny, more impenetrable to the layperson, in French, and that is because so many of the words are anglicisms. A really comprehensive familiarity with the vocabulary basically needs to coincide with a degree of English fluency. And while ai don’t want to generalize too much as an anglo (cuz what do ai know), ai feel like some terms, like “genderfuck”, would pretty much need an entire footnote to explain properly to someone if you only wanted to use French words.

The vocabulary is also more vague in French than it is in English. Among anglophones, it is still common for people to conflate sex and gender with one another. Some people, like webcomic person A. Stiffler, actually say that “in the English language, [‘sex’ and ‘gender’] are essentially similes to each other.” Ai sort of disagree. Although you can definitely make the argument that the larger part of the English-speaking masses haven’t quite internalized the distinction yet, ai’m going to assert that, today, when people conflate sex and gender in English, they are actually making a mistake – just as much as if they had conflated ethics with morality, racism with white supremacy, or queerness with homosexuality. Yet this isn’t the case in French! Even in French academia, the word «sexe» can still refer to both biological sex and gender identity, and this conflation is why «allosexuelle» was, starting in the 1990s, used as a French-language translation of “queer”. There have been efforts to get the word «genre» to refer exclusively to what we call “gender” in English, and «sexe» to refer exclusively to what we call “sex”, but they simply haven’t been very successful so far.

To an anglophone like me, of course, the word «allosexuelle» seems to imply a concern with matters of sexuality in particular, and thus it seems like a poor translation of “queer”, since the things that can be discussed as being queer go far beyond the matter of simple sexual behaviour. A better word might be «allogenric» (grammatically masculine) or «allogenrique» (grammatically feminine), with «genric» and «genrique» being the words ai just made up for the adjectival form of «genre». Still, these two new words I’ve coined aren’t good enough either. They seem to address gender in particular, to the exclusion of sexuality!

It is clear to me that, when it comes down to the wire, neither «allosexuelle» nor the words ai just came up with, «allogenric» and «allogenrique», can replace the anglicism «queer» (which definitely should be changed to «kuire», just sayin’).

This becomes even more true when we consider that «allosexuelle» actually had a prior meaning to its meaning as a French translation for “queer”. Ai didn’t know this until ai was researching this post, but the term was apparently coined in the ’70s by French academics and used as an antonym to «autosexuelle», a word that referred to people who satisfy their sexual needs by themselves. «Allosexuelle» meant the opposite, referring to anyone who satisfies their sexual needs by seeking out others. Interestingly enough, in parts of the anglophone asexual community (something ai have determined from reading this blog post), “allosexual” is now being liberated from its origins in university research and being used once again as an alternative to the term “non-asexual” to refer to people who are, well, not asexual.

Ai will admit that ai had some grand plan of “fixing” the word «allosexuelle» before ai came across the aforementioned blog post; the title of this post was even going to be FIXING ALLOSEXUEL(LE). Essentially, my idea was to separate the concept of allosexuality from queerness, and to try to imbue it with some kind of new meaning that wouldn’t leave it completely redundant among all the other words that have -sexual as a suffix. But ai think my efforts to that end were banal at best, and ai actually think “allosexual”/«allosexuelle» as synonymous with “non-asexual” is pretty good. So can we all collectively agree to start using and understanding that word as such from now on?

Ai mentioned two other words earlier, «allogenric» and «allogenrique»; these were also part of my plan. Essentially, ai thought – in fact, ai think – that these words should be used as French translations for the word “genderqueer”, along with «allogenre», which might be necessary in some contexts as well. Like “genderqueer”, these words refer to a more specific manifestation of queerness. Like, you can have queer sex and yet you might not be genderqueer; that’s a pretty good description of my cis boy self. So yeah. For the record, in English, the word “allogender” looks horrible and so ai don’t think it should be used for any reason ever, especially since “genderqueer” looks great and already exists.

Ai am going to conclude this post with possible French translations for a few more terms that derive from “queer”. First, let’s all translate “queerness” to «kuiritude» (a feminine noun). There’s a good chance that you’re not sold on this new orthography just yet, but come on, «queeritude» is just dumb. If «kuiritude» rubs you the wrong way, you’re probably just better off rocking another anglicism and spelling it out «queerness» in French, i.e. «J’ai écrit un papier sur le concept de queerness quand j’étais un étudiant à l’Université Concordia.»

Next, the verb form of “queer”, as in the passage “[it] queers violence”, something that ai actually had to translate recently in CrimethInc. Ex-Workers’ Collective’s “Say You Want an Insurrection”. Ai translated that passage to «[il] rend kuire la violence». So there you have it again: “to queer” is the same as “to render queer”, thus «rendre kuire» if you share my vision or «rendre queer» if you’re boring.

Next, ai mentioned “genderfuck” at one point in this post already, and ai think this is a hard one. On January 12 of this year, there was at an event at La Belle Époque that was entitled, in the January 2014 poster as Genderfuck Art Making in English and Atelier d’art fuck les genres in French. (Ai would have added some dashes, but that’s just me.) Now, while genderfuck can mean “fuck genders”, it also means fucking with genders, which is a subtlety that the translation «fuck-les-genres» (see, it looks better with dashes) serves to erase. Ai feel like this is one of those situations where you might just need to leave it as “genderfuck” if you want it to mean exactly the same thing, since the word just can’t be translated in such a way that it carries all of the same intertwined meanings into the other language. This feeling was pretty much confirmed the other day in a conversation ai had over tea with a francophone friend when we were discussing this language blog ai was intending to launch, who said that the only way to translate this word clearly would be to say «fucker-avec-les-genres» or something equally long, i.e. quelque chose qui ne craque pas, y’know? However, that is boring and/or surrender, and so while ai want to leave it for now, ai would be open to suggestions about how to translate this word.

All of this comes down to an effort to create a French vocabulary of queerness («une vocabulaire pour la kuiritude») as rich as the vocabulary that exists in English, and to make it possible to discuss, in French, a great deal of the “queer theory” that has been produced in English without use of jargon anglicisms (as opposed to common anglicisms, which are widely understood by Québecers and can practically be considered French words by now).

As something of a believer in the validity of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though that’s a whole other topic), and as a person who thinks the conceptions of sexuality and gender in “queer discourse” in comparison are generally superior to those in to “gay discourse” (i.e. a conception of great fluidity, rather than a conception that is less rigid than the one that exists in heteronormative assumption, but which is still pretty fucking positivist and tends to limit the free expression of the individual quite badly), ai sometimes wonder about stuff. Like, imagining someone very much like myself, but who grows up with queer desires in a small town in Beauce speaking barely any English rather than a small town in south-central New Brunswick speaking barely any French, how is that person going to come to understand sexuality and gender?

There’s a good chance that such a person will do just fine, or suffer a lot of bullshit, or both, but ai think that things improved a lot for me when ai came into contact with the aforementioned “queer discourse” a little bit later in my teenage years and after ai’d moved out of that small town. The words that were suddenly available seemed more useful than the words ai had had before. Ai just wasn’t looking in the right place on the internet, it seems – but how much more difficult would it have been for me to find that shit if it was all written in a language that ai didn’t understand?

Final dictionary entries:

Allosexuality is a noun referring to those who seek and/or desire sexual gratification. It can be contrasted to asexuality. Both allosexual and asexual are both adjective and noun, referring to those who are characterized by allosexuality or asexuality.

French asexualité (f.) for English asexuality.

French allosexualité (f.) for English allosexuality.

French asexuel (or asexuelle, f.) for English asexual.

French allosexuel (or allosexuelle, f.) for English allosexual.

French genric (or genrique, f.) for English adjective gender. (Example: «l’identité genrique» for “gender identity”.)

French allogenre (probably, and problematically from a grammar perspective, neutral) for English countable noun genderqueer.

French allogenric (or allogenrique, f.; allogenre, n.) for English adjective genderqueer.

French kuir (or kuire, f.) for English queer (both noun and adjective).

French rendre kuir (or rendre kuire when applied to feminine object) for English verb to queer.

French kuiritude (f.) for English queerness.

TRANSLATING THE NAME OF INDIVIDUALIDADES TENDIENDO A LO SALVAJE 

SPOILER ALERT. This post contains a reference to a minor plot point near the end
of Watchmen, so if you haven't read the novel or watched the movie yet, go read
the novel! (Do NOT watch the movie first. The special effects are cool, though.)

This is an unsolicited opinion, and not necessarily the best-informed opinion, either. Ai can neither speak nor write Castilian, and my ability to read it or understand it when it is spoken is extremely limited at best, so let’s just acknowledge that right away.

A friend gave me a copy of the The Collected Communiques of Individualists Tending Toward the Wild in late 2012. The book, produced by Plain Words, is exactly what it sounds like. It comprises the first six communiqués released by Individualidades tendiendo a lo salvaje (ITS), an entity that made quite a splash with its Unabomber-inspired parcel bomb attacks against specific individuals in Mexico, namely those that are seen to be most responsible for helping to progress the conquest of wilderness by civilization. These communiqués were translated from Castilian into English by War On Society (WOS). It also contains five appendices, one of which is a chronology of relevant events in Mexico from December 2010 to January 2012, and the other four being communiqués or statements that were also released over the course of 2011, three of them by entities in Mexico and one of them by an entity in Chile. On top of all that, there is an introduction by Plain Words and a note on the translation by WOS. This note on the translation, or at least part of it, is what interests me.

Over half of the note is dedicated to what WOS calls “translation decisions that are worth mentioning”, and three out of the four paragraphs about these decisions are dedicated to the name of the entity itself. “Among the thousands of words penned by the group,” WOS writes, “their name remains the most difficult to translate.” Each of the three paragraphs is focused on a different part of the name: first, the word «individualidades», then «tendiendo a», then finally «lo salvaje». For the first part and the last part, the reasoning is provided for the choice about why the specific English terms “individualists” and “the wild” were used in the translated title, while for «tendiendo a», it is simply explained that the reader should keep in mind that the Castilian original doesn’t convey the wishy-washyness that the English word “tending” might seem to imply. In the end, WOS opts for “Individualists Tending Toward the Wild” as an appropriate translation.

Ai take less issue with the use of the English term “the wild” for the Castilian original «lo salvaje» than WOS itself seems to. Apparently ITS’ use of «salvaje» instead of the alternative «silvestre» might seem to imply an identification with the violent and chaotic aspect of wild nature; as a result, WOS says that it is “probably erring on the side of too much softness” with its use of the word “wild” instead of “savage”, a choice that WOS says is motivated by a desire to avoid “the racial connotations” of the word “savage”. For me, though, ai think the use of the term “the wild” would be appropriate even if we set aside the concerns about the offensive connotations of the word “savage” in English. It would be confusing as all fuck to speak of “individualists tending toward the savage”; we would probably be better off to speak of “tending toward the ferocious”, but then we’d be getting into even more tenuous territory. Another alternative is to speak of “tending toward savagery”, but then ITS’ name would probably incorporate either the word «salvajismo» or «salvajada», which are more direct Castilian correlates to “savagery”.

Ai do take issue, though, with the transformation of the Castilian «individualidades» into the English “individualists”. WOS acknowledges in its note on translation that the Castilian «individualidades» does not actually correspond with the English “individualists”; the actual term would be «individualistxs» (using the common style of feminization in Castilian that involves using a letter-ex [x, X] in place of a feminine letter-ae [a, A] or a masculine letter-oh [o, O]), a term that ITS never uses to describe itself. But WOS opts for the term “individualists” anyway because “it conveys an aspect of the group’s thought-action that distinguishes them from most other anti-technology warriors” and because “the group clearly expresses individualist positions in their writings and practice.” This reasoning seems weak, to me at least, and ai think it amounts to a failure to find an appropriate word in English for «individualidades». Ai think ai have found such a word, but first, ai want to get into the details of why the use of the word “individualists” is inappropriate.

Ai think it’s pretty fair to associate ITS with tendencies within anarchism that are labelled egoist or anarchist, but they make it clear in their communiqués that they reject the anarchist tradition outright. To speak of “individualists”, though, and to use that word with political/ideological content (rather than simply speaking of an individualist personality, something which may not have anything to do with a person’s politics), is to speak of anarchists. There is no other tendency or camp outside of anarchism that can be described as “individualists”, and thus, even if individualists may be harshly critical of much of what comprises the anarchist tradition or anarchism today, they remain within the anarchist fold. ITS, on the other hand, is decidedly outside of that fold.

Ai have, of course, made an overly general statement, because ai have no doubt that there are those who consider themselves individualists without considering themselves anarchists – whose individualism owes a great deal to the same people that the egoist/individualist tendencies draw from, but who have nonetheless made a comprehensive break (at least on the level of words) with what they see as both essentially anarchist and essentially problematic. Yet such people are a small minority, and ITS is not among their number because ITS does not describe itself as individualist. Ai think it is also fair to say that ITS, unlike the hypothetical non-anarchist individualists ai just described, also has an analysis that is informed by much more than anarchist egoism and individualism.

So ai don’t think it’s appropriate to describe ITS as individualist even if we can infer the influence of individualist analysis in their writings – and as for what we can infer from their practice, ai am skeptical that we can infer any individualism at all, since their tactics are not the sole property of individualists and since individualists have also opted for very different tactics in the past. As for the points about the term “individualists” conveying something about their thought-action that distinguishes them from other anti-technology warriors, ai would argue that it does nothing of the sort. Yes, there are many anti-techology warriors (to continue using the term used by WOS) that could be considered more collectivist (i.e. non-individualist or anti-individualist), and ITS is clearly different from them. But, at the same time, there are plenty of anti-technology warriors that do identify themselves with anarchist individualism (and often speak disparagingly of collectivism, leftism, etc.). The use of the word “individualists” in the translation of ITS’ name has the effect of unnecessarily conflating ITS with these groups.

Ai would go in for a different English name: Singularities Tending Toward the Wild.

The word «individualidades» could be rendered “individualities” in English, but this isn’t a very intuitive translation. We rarely, if ever, pluralize the word “individuality”, which is usually seen to refer to a person’s special uniqueness or whatever. This special uniqueness (lol) is very different from whatever ITS is trying to convey about itself in its name, since individuality refers to an aspect of the individual, yet ITS is speaking of the entire self of those involved as comprising an individuality. Ai think that this meaning could be conveyed better with the word “singularity” if we take this word for the specialized meaning it has developed within certain circles.

In Watchmen, Jon Osterman (Dr. Manhattan) comes a certain conclusion about humans just before he leaves Mars and goes back to Earth with Laurie (in order to save the human species or whatever). Specifically, he concludes that life on Earth is worth saving because it continuously, and consistently, produces completely unique creatures like Laurie. This is different from, say, the non-living forces on Mars that are also marvellous, but which don’t produce things without precedent, which we can also think of as “singularities”.

Ai am a singularity and so are you. Ai am a unique, unprecedented thing, something that can’t (yet) be fit neatly in any rational, orderly model of reality and its functioning – and so are you. But, as a singularity, characteristics can still be ascribed to me (and to you). What are these characteristics, though? Well, that’s a big question, but when it comes to ITS, we know that one characteristic they are ascribing to themselves is their tendency towards the wild.

This is, of course, a somewhat hokey proposal, and probably born of a fondness ai have for a particularly amusing graffito – one that read simply, in English, SINGULARITIES IN REVOLT – that existed on a wall in Montréal’s Southwest in 2009, and which me and my friends liked to talk about. Although ai am proposing it because ai actually think it makes sense as a translation, ai would, in order to hedge my argument, propose that, at the very least, it makes more sense than using the word “individualists” since it does not ascribe to ITS a politics that they never claim and which they probably reject.

Please note: ai have opinions about ITS, but this was not a post about those opinions. Pretty strong ones, actually. This was a post about how to render their name in English, and that is all. If you want the opinions, you should just talk to me.

And please note further: ai, as somewhat of a pedantic person who spends a lot of time thinking about these things, have come to a different conclusion than WOS as to how we should translate the name of ITS in English. This should be expected; translators are definitely going to disagree with each other. This post should not, however, be understood as a critique of WOS’ project, because it is my position that they have done the English-speaking world a great service by translating these texts into English. That’s because ai think the ideas of ITS should be, at the very least, of interest to people all over the world. Regardless of how much we accept, or don’t accept, those ideas as our own, their critique, backed up by their actions, constitute a challenge to prevailing attitudes that no one living in the civilized world should have the privilege to ignore.

THINGS THAT BOTHER ME ABOUT FRENCH, pt. 1: «AU-DESSUS» & «AU-DESSOUS»

So, «au-dessus» and «au-dessous».

For all ye French-incapable anglos, the first of these words means “on top” and the second means “underneath”. As you can see, there is only a single letter that distinguishes the two on an orthographic level, and if we only use sounds that make intuitive sense to anglos, they would both have to be rendered into phonetic English in the same way: oh dessoo.

There is, in fact, a difference in how the two are pronounced, but it is too subtle for anglophones to pick up unless they are familiar with languages that train their speakers to hear such a difference. This is definitely something that contributes to my frustration about these two words in particular. As far as ai can recall, during the entire nine years that some or most of my education took place in French, no one ever informed me that, to pronounce the sound that corresponds to the letter-yu [u, U] by itself in French, you must purse your lips as if you’re about to say ooooo, then leave your lips in that position while otherwise using your mouth parts (mostly your tongue) to try to make the sound eeeee.

This isn’t a sound that gets produced in English very much, or at least not in the varieties of English that we speak in these parts. It’s a sound that an anglophone with average hearing ability can recognize and distinguish from other sounds, like any other sound, but unless we have been specifically trained to do so, we don’t – and such a training isn’t a part of our normal language acquisition. As a result, whenever we hear a sound like this, we are likely to lump it in with other sounds that we are trained to hear.

Bit of a tangent here: when ai was in university, ai took a Putonghua (i.e. standard Mandarin Chinese) class, and ai learned on the very first day of that class that Putonghua has six distinct vowels. In pinyin, they correspond with the characters Aa, Ee, Ii, Oo, Uu, and Üü. My professor – again, on the very first day – explained that the one with the umlaut there is pronounced by having your lips make an ooooo but having your tongue make an eeeee. She must have said it in about as many words as that. Ai was able to pronounce this sound well enough by my second class, and ai think that this was also true for my anglophone classmates in general (because there was a native Korean speaker, a native Dzongkha speaker, and possibly a few other non-anglophones in the class as well).

The approach of my Putonghua professor should be compared and contrasted to how ai learned French in middle school and high school. Although ai had been taking “Core French” since Grade Three, it’s in Grade Six that ai was taken out of New Brunswick’s standard English curriculum and put into the province’s French immersion curriculum for anglos. What this means is that, at ten years old, after a decade of speaking only English with my unilingual parents and siblings and living in an overwhelmingly anglophone community (there were more kids in my high school that spoke German with their parents than there were kids who spoke French), ai was now going to have four out of five classes a day in French. There are all sorts of problems to this approach, but one major problem is that ai was well past the point where my brain might be plastic enough for me to pick up on, by myself, the subtle difference between the sounds designated as Uu and Üü in pinyin.

In other words, ai could not distinguish between that sound, as in «au-dessus» (or «but» or «rue»), and the sound in «au-dessous» (or «bout» or «roux»). To me, it all just corresponded with the sound that exists in English words like “moon”, “true”, and “cool”. That’s where ai was at – and unless someone was going to call my attention to the difference and provide concrete tips about how to improve my pronunciation, such as by telling me where my tongue should be if ai want to pronounce the Üü sound correctly – that’s where ai was going to stay. This isn’t something that any of my French teachers, neither the anglophones nor the francophones, seem to have understood.

It’s only in the summer of 2013 (almost four years into my Montréal life) that ai finally learned the difference. Ai was having breakfast with some franco buddies and talking shit about their mother tongue, as ai am wont to do, and ai brought up «au-dessus» and «au-dessous», two words that baffled me completely. “How do you know the difference unless it’s written down?” ai asked. They explained the shit with the tongues. They subsequently explained that whenever ai had thought ai was talking about “the streets” (as ai am also wont to do), ai had actually been talking about “the red-headed men”. And it is during this conversation that ai realized ai already knew about this sound, that ai could already pronounce it because ai had shown up for day one of Putonghua class. This actually seemed to surprise them a bit, since they were telling me and the other anglo having breakfast that “it’s okay, we understand you, you don’t have that sound in English.”

You would think, though, that now that ai have been enlightened as to the difference in pronunciation, these words would no longer bother me as much as they used to? Well, you would be wrong! These words are still unnecessarily similar, and there isn’t even a reason that makes any intuitive sense. That is because, while the more basic word for “under” is «sous», the more basic word for «on» is “sur”. It isn’t «sus» with a letter-ess [s, S], but «sur» with a letter-arr [r, R]. So why isn’t the word «au-dessur»? Even if your tongue is as clumsy and anglo as it can be, even if no one has told you how to pronounce the French letter-yu correctly (or the French letter-arr, for that matter), «au-dessur» would at least allow you to answer clearly, in as good a French as you can muster, a two-possible-answers question as to which sex position you prefer.

Let’s imagine a person who can’t pronounce the letter-yu or the letter-arr in French. Let’s name this person Anglo Pete. Here is his phonetically rendered answer to the sex position question: «Je préfaire le sexe au-dessoure!» It’s pretty poor, no doubt, but it meets the requirements for comprehensibility.

Now ai’m not saying that «au-dessus» needs to be changed to «au-dessur». It’s just that this particular convention seems like something that is designed to be difficult for anglophones, and as an anglo, ai just don’t appreciate it. This comes out of my belief that French should be easier for non-francophones, including anglos, to learn.

Final story: the day after ai learned the difference between «au-dessous» and «au-dessus», ai felt like ai had become aware of a great secret, something that granted me strange new powers and/or prestige. Drunk as if under the influence of the Ring to Rule Them All, ai told three anglos whose minds were also blown, including one who grew up in Québec but went to English-language schools his whole life. The whole thing was just crazy. The fourth anglo ai told was not very impressed, perhaps because he had actually been in a French-language school since kindergarten, so ai think ai stopped then. Truly my life will be the stuff of folk tales someday.

TRANSLATING “SETTLER COLONIALISM” INTO FRENCH

Settler colonialism (or settler-colonialism with a dash) is an English-language term that refers to a specific kind of colonialism without necessarily making any comment on the other kinds of colonialism that exist or what they might look like. By itself, colonialism is a very vague concept, like many other terms that are used frequently in anarchist, radical left, and onkwehón:we sovereigntist circles in the part of Turtle Island occupied and claimed by the Canadian state – and ai will address this vagueness in short order. Settler colonialism, on the other hand, is a concept imbued with much more substance and consistency (which ai will also elaborate upon!), and it is therefore an important part of the anarchist lexicon.

Unfortunately, for anarchists who speak French (on the regular or just once in a while), there isn’t any obvious way to translate it into their language, and that’s because the common French word for “settler” is «colonne». So the straightforward translation is «colonialisme-colon», which both sounds stupid and doesn’t convey anything different about this colonialism versus other colonialisms.

The thing that makes settler colonialism different, of course, is settlement. There is no precise French equivalent for this word, but there is «peuplement», which literally refers to “peopling” an area. Settler colonialism is the culture, the ideology, and the political structure that is produced by, and then serves to reproduce, any society that emerged from the population infusion of settlers – people who are not indigenous to the land, and who are also indoctrinated in the culture, or at least the routines, of a state and a civilization – into territory that, up until that point, was either outside of the state’s control completely or in which the state was only present in a military sense, not a civilian one. The first wave of settlement often served as the society’s great act of foundational violence, as it did in Canada, the United States, and plenty of other places.

Neither the English word “peopling” nor its French correlate are appropriate to describe this particular sort of population infusion from one place to another place. First, this word can just as easily refer to a process of human population growth that did not have a colonial character to it (for example, “the peopling of Thailand“, or even the peopling of Hiroshima and Nagasaki over the years since 1945) as it can to an influx of European or other settlers into an area. This is definitely a bit confusing, and there is also a fatal flaw: the words “peopling” and «peuplement» imply that there were no people in the area before this “peopling” or «peuplement» began. In a very small number of cases, like some islands in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans (such as Tristan de Cunha, Mauritius, and the Falklands), the islands were uninhabited when they were first sighted by Europeans, but in most other cases, this was not true – yet the historiography and mythology of Western civilization is rife with lies to the contrary, most infamously with reference to the continent of Australia. It seems to me that the use of “peopling” or its French correlate would be a perpetuation, if a very small one, of the pernicious narrative of terra nullius, and that doing so should therefore be avoided. Besides, how the hell would you make «peuplement» into an adjective that could sit alongside «colonialisme» and not have the resulting term look completely ridiculous?

For the record, the word “settlement” itself is rather politically neutral as well, and there’s a reason that we, as anarchists, speak of the colonization of the Americas rather than, as Wikipedia does, the settlement of the Americas. If ai told you ai was gonna settle somewhere else, you might just think ai’m moving to Toronto. If ai told you to settle down, you would take that to mean ai want you to act calmer. A settlement is simply a place where people live, and hell, even onkwehón:we people have their own settlements, like the Unist’ot’en Camp out West, the Zapatista communities in the Selva Lacandona, and the sites of “productive recovery” on the frontlines of Wallmapu and Chile. To properly speak of this process of five hundred years of extermination and assimilation of onkwehón:we peoples (read: genocide), the only term we can really use is “colonization”/«colonisation». These words have been imbued with violence, even if they can still also refer to politically neutral situations (like the colonization of newly exposed volcanic rock by lichen spores). To speak of colonization in a political conversation is to evoke the clash between the colonizer (the invader) and the colonized or would-be colonized (the indigenous).

So, while “settlement” is an inappropriate word for this population infusion process and the corollary war, genocide, enslavement, hierarchization, and displacement, its adjectival form is a necessary prefix to “colonialism” for the purposes of describing the political situation where ai live as well as many other places, from Kurdistan to the Russian Far East, from Tibet to Cascadia, from the Holy Land to Tierra del Fuego.

Personally, ai’d go even further and say that the concept of colonialism is, by itself, actually too vague to say very much about any situation that currently exists on Earth. The situations that have been named as examples of colonialism are incredibly diverse. They range from situations where colonization was led by an imperial state to situations where settlers initially acted in defiance of their own sovereign’s laws, but also to situations where indigenous authorities were vassalized by the more powerful state, or became willing partners in a world economy that generally benefited the people of the imperial centres more than the peripheries, or whatever else – in these latter cases, situations that generally didn’t involve significant population infusions or large-scale displacements of indigenous people with settlers (as opposed to displacements in general, which are probably happening pretty much anywhere that capitalism is happening). In many parts of Africa and Asia, the sovereign state headquartered in Europe was only present in a military sense (and even then, many of the coercive functions of the state would often be devolved to local monarchs and their employees) and wealth extraction activities conducted by state-owned or private firms did not require permanent settlement by Europeans.

This isn’t to say that the word “colonialism” is meaningless – it obviously isn’t – but by itself, it isn’t very descriptive. The word “settler” adds substance to the word “colonialism” by implying a population infusion. Settler colonialism, while looking different in different contexts, is something that seems to have some consistent qualities no matter where you look, although the purpose of this post isn’t to detail these. Instead, the question ai want to ask is what word formation can allow us to speak about settler colonialism in the French language more effectively?

My proposal is «le colonialisme-habitant». This suffix implies continuing to live in a place, as opposed to making reference to the original act of arrival like “settlement” does – but that’s fine, since it is still a colonialism that has successfully infused an area with a population of state subjects that can sustain and perpetuate itself.

The English adjectival form is settler-colonial, which, unlike the noun form, should always use a dash. In French, to take a somewhat more cyberpunk aesthetic approach, ai would propose the adjectival forms of «habcolonial» (for masculine nouns) and «habcoloniale» (for feminine) rather than the somewhat unwieldy «colonial-habitant» and its feminine counterpart. Of course, in many instances, context is going to allow for the shorthand use of “colonial”/«coloniale», or possibly «colonialiste» in French. (The English word “colonialist” is terribly ugly, and ai am pretty firmly against it. Ai’m honestly not a huge fan of «colonialiste» either, but you need it for the rhyme scheme in the chant A – ANTI – ANTI-COLONIALISTE! SOLIDARITÉ AVEC LES INNUES QUI RÉSISTENT!, so it gets a grudging pass in my book.)

A settler, of course, cannot simply be a «habitant» (if male) or a «habitante» (if female) in French; this is, once again, an inappropriately neutral word, for ai am a «habitant» of my apartment, and so are many onkwehón:we people in their own respective apartments. The words that are already being used, «colon» and «colonne», are absolutely fine. Of course, if it was ever necessary to make things more precise for some reason, one could easily write out «colonne-habitante».

Final dictionary entries:

Settler colonialism (alternative form: settler-colonialism) is a noun, usually uncountable but to be counted with the plural form settler colonialisms (or settler-colonialisms) when necessary. The adjectival form is settler-colonial. These words refer to the culture, ideology, and political order produced by, or serving to reproduce, a society whose foundational act of violence was the colonization of an area heretofore outside of a given state’s control by that state’s subjects.

Settler is a noun, countable with the plural form settlers. It refers to any participant, willing or unwilling, in a settler-colonial society, starting with the first settlers and continuing through successive generations.

French colonialisme-habitant (m.) for English settler colonialism.

French habcolonial (or habcoloniale, f.) for English settler-colonial.

French colon (or colonne, f.) for English settler.

French colons (or colonnes, f.) for English settlers.

A GENDER-NEUTRAL PRONOUN IN FRENCH?

Ai propose to you, dear reader, «ale» – plural form being «ales».

The word derives from the prefix allo-. These two syllables are affixed to the words for the categories of stuff that are other from, apart from, and/or aloof from the categories of stuff that are considered most important by the dominant sources of metanarrative production in our society (what ai like to call “the dessemp”, based on the acronym DSMP).

For example, Québec’s allophones, who are not perceived as those with the most agency or the most responsibility in the conflict between the Province of Québec’s official French unilingualism, on the one hand, and the threat of «le bilinguisme grimpant» and/or English-language hegemony, on the other. Then there’s the word «allosexuelle», a French translation of “queer” that never really caught on. It sounds a bit clinical, for sure, and it’s pretty obvious why it couldn’t compete with that sexy single-syllable anglicism that has swept the world (or at least a large number of European languages). Right now, though, in this paragraph here, ai’d like us all to appreciate «allosexuelle» for what it is. Ai think it implies a certain vastness, one as diverse and far-reaching as the human animal’s propensity for creativity, experimentation, desire, and resourcefulness. It’s not infinite, but for limited subjectivities like ourselves, it is effectively so. (EDIT: while the main thrust of this paragraph remains relevant, research done for a later post revealed some important information about the word «allosexuelle» which is probably worth looking into).

My motivation here, for the record, is that ai want to have a French word that ai, myself, can feel comfortable using to refer to the people in my life who, in English, prefer to use they as a personal pronoun. Ai don’t feel comfortable using «il», ai don’t like the gendered «lui» (as opposed to the non-gendered «lui» that you can also use for someone who is otherwise an «elle» – such is the intricacy of proper French grammar), and ai don’t like the needlessly ugly and binary-affirming «ille». It doesn’t seem like any of the other gender-neutral pronouns ai’ve seen (all of which come from this blog post, incidentally) have caught on very much, and ai don’t like any of them anyway.

The sort of go-to in Montréal, at least among the small number of people that ai’ve ever had this conversation with, is to use «ille», which you may notice ai just shit-talked in the last paragraph.

Ai came up with «ale» because «ille» is terribly inadequate as a when-in-doubt pronoun. To be clear, if someone told me to use «ille» when referring to them, ai would do so, just as ai have used “e”, “ze”, and even “it” in English when people have told me that such or such is the pronoun that so or so uses. But in English, if ai’m uncertain about someone’s preferred pronoun and ai can’t just find out easily, ai’m going to use “they”. It seems to me that «ille» isn’t appropriate for this same function, though, because of a few reasons. First, «ille» sounds pretty much the same as the masculine pronoun in French unless you really stress the final letter-ee [e, E] and get another syllable out of it, like you might do for certain chants or songs. That sounds a bit weird in regular speech, though, and it’s still going to sound pretty much the same as «il». Second, the orthography of «ille» is simply a cross between «il» and «elle». There is an implication here that the person to whom this pronoun refers is simply between masculinity and femininity, rather than completely beyond the two of them. It is entirely possible that the person in question does feel “in between the two” (or feels like an embodiment of the two, or whatever other subjective experience they might have of their gender), but it’s also possible that they don’t, and frankly, ai am rather unlikely to know for sure. Once again, it’s subjective!

Ai like to think, though, that «ale», in contrast to «ille», is closer to «hen», the Swedish gender-neutral pronoun that has been generating a lot of controversy in some circles as of late. Like «hen», «ale» has a different vowel sound than its masculine and feminine counterparts (which, in Swedish, are «han» and «hon» respectively), but the word has the same consonant structure, so it doesn’t look completely out of place alongside the other two. In French, of course, the orthography is also a bit different between the masculine and feminine pronouns, with «il» having two letters and «elle» coming in at four. «Ale» has three letters. There is a risk, of course, that it will look like it is “in between” masculinity and femininity because of this, an apparent compromise that ai don’t like about «ille» and something ai want to avoid. But hopefully ai’m reading too much into it, and no one else will care! The purpose of the three letters is to render it different enough in form from both of the predominating pronouns, not necessarily to be “in between”.

So the final thing here is finding a word that corresponds to «ale» for those situations where «lui» is not epicene. In this case, ai am not sure if ai should propose another word formation in order to differentiate «ale» even further from the predominating pronouns (using, for example, «aule»?) or if it’d be better to go with the standard that is set by «elle». It’s basically a question of whether «lui-même» (“himself”) and «elle-même» (“herself), and all other situations of this kind, will be joined with the obvious «ale-même», or with the alternative «aule-même». Considering that ai can’t actually speak French properly, ai doubt it’ll be much of a problem for me, but there should be a standard, and considering that ai can’t decide between the two, ai am going to unilaterally propose that both are appropriate!

Of course, the introduction of a gender-neutral pronoun doesn’t resolve the problem of adjectives which, in French, can have either of two genders, masculine or feminine. Short of making a new version of each adjective that corresponds to a third grammatical gender, which is an absolutely daunting task, the only solution seems to be for people who use neither masculine nor feminine pronouns to simply pick an adjectival form they feel more comfortable with. In many cases, the adjectival forms are not going to matter too much, at least when spoken, because the difference in pronunciation is very subtle. It is going to be more difficult in cases where the masculine and feminine versions of the same word are markedly different from one another in both pronunciation and orthography, as with the words «beau» and «belle».

Today, many English-speaking anarchists ask for and offer pronouns when in the midst of introductions. Ai think this cultural practice is good and useful, and ai think it would be nice if this practice could be imported to French-speaking anarchist scenes too. In French, though, due to this matter of gendered adjectives – something that, at least as far as ai can see it, can’t be torn down or reformed without a total negation of the French language itself – introductions may sometimes need to include the question «Et c’est quoi ta forme adjectivale préférée?» after name and pronoun come up. This may not be necessary if a person has already told you that their preferred pronoun is «elle» or «il», but for someone who uses «ale» (or whatever other gender-neutral pronoun, since there’s no guarantee that the one a cis boy anglo came up with is the one that will eventually actually catch on), it is definitely pertinent information.

Of course, asking for adjectival forms in English might not be a bad idea either, at least if you live in a city where the French language predominates. Ai might be anglo, and you might be anglo, and so you might think that ai don’t need a preferred adjectival form since we’ll be speaking to each other in English, but there’s a chance that ai’m going to have a conversation about you (using adjectives!) with a francophone later. If ai don’t have know what to do, ai’m going to be staring at my phone, trying to tell someone that you are “determined” or something (in French, either «déterminé» or «déterminée»), not knowing whether ai should add that extra letter-ee to my text or not, and generally freaking the fuck out.

(This has actually happened, although “freaking the fuck out” is a bit of an exaggeration.)

So here’s my proposal, once again, in a nutshell. Unless another French gender-neutral pronoun has been specified as appropriate (for example, «ille», which some people do prefer), use «ale» when referring to people for whom you would use the singular “they” (or any other gender-neutral pronoun) if you were speaking in English. Use «ale» when referring to someone whose gender identity you do not know, in the same way as you would use “they”. Bring the practice of asking for pronouns to the other solitude, and when necessary, ask for adjectival forms as well. Expect some confusion, but do it anyway, because it’s a good thing to do.

In any case, whatever you choose to do yourself, you’ll now know what I’m talking about if you ever hear me say «ale».

BONJOUR/HI IS A STUPID SALUTATION

If you go shopping in downtown Montréal, or if you want to buy a coffee at Second Cup or a burger at McDonald’s, there is a very good chance that the first word out of the mouth of the employee who greets you will be be «bonjour», the second “hi”. This construction, bonjour/hi, is possibly unique to Montréal, although ai wouldn’t rule out that it gets used in Sherbrooke or the North Outaouais as well, and maybe even in some francophone parts of Ontario.

As of the last time we heard from them, the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) doesn’t like it when cashiers, bank tellers, receptionists, wait staff, or people trying to sell electronics for commission at Future Shop use bonjour/hi to greet customers/potential sources of revenue/unpleasant people that the wage system obligates them to interact with. The OQLF would prefer a simple bonjour, thank you very much.

In the spring of 2012, the Office released a series of studies that included the claim that the use of bonjour/hi had increased by 1300% in the period of time between 2010 and 2012. Louise Marchand, who was president of the OQLF from 2010 until her scandal-driven resignation in 2013, said around the time of the report’s release that «ce n’est pas une infraction à la Charte [de la langue française], mais ça peut contribuer au sentiment que Montréal s’anglicise.» And that would be a problem.

At some point, ai’d like to write a longer post about this phenomenon called “the anglicization of Montréal”, whether it’s actually happening or not, and what it actually matters to anything. But that can wait. For now, ai would like to direct most of my vitriol to those good Canadian citizens that have rushed to bonjour/hi’s defense. For these people, bonjour/hi is “that familiar and uniquely Montréal greeting” that stands as a true testament to everything that Canada is supposed to be.

As for me, ai hate bonjour/hi. Let me name the reasons.

#1. It isn’t a single salutation, but two. It’s like saying hello/good day or bonjour/salut. That might be fine in some cases, but as a constant go-to? And this isn’t even very similar to a common greeting like “hey, what’s up?”, either. It’s not a salutation followed by a friendly and perhaps irrelevant question. It is just two greetings. There is no need for this.

#2. The word «bonjour», by itself, simple means “good day”. First of all, ai just think this sounds silly, and secondly, it sounds British to me. It always has, ever since ai started learning this language in Grade Three. If there were five defining characteristics of what it means to be Québécois, being opposed to all things Britannic would be among them – so this has always struck me as a bit strange, even if ai realize that it obviously isn’t a translation of the British greeting. Perhaps it’s less that it sounds British specifically, and more that it sounds European generally. In any case, ai don’t like it, whether by itself or as part of a bonjour/hi.

#3. The only person who would ever say bonjour/hi to me is someone who wants to sell me something, or someone who works for someone who wants to sell me something. It reeks of artificiality. This is not some innocent collision of two languages. Bonjour/hi is borne of an intentional effort to appease both Québécois nationalists and anglo chauvinists who are so fucking stuffy about being spoken to in the right language that they might just take their loonies and toonies to another bread-and-tomato-sauce establishment if you fuck up the greeting. Sadly, such people actually exist, and they are obviously annoying as all fuck, but the point is that bonjour/hi only exists to get money out of people – and thus it is totally inappropriate except when you have to deal with pricks. No one says bonjour/hi at a fucking house party! No one says bonjour/hi when they’re meeting their neighbours for the first time!

#4. There is a significantly better greeting available in French, a word that can be used in English as well: «salut». When there is this greeting available, which is so musical and nice, why would anyone ever use the shitty other one?

Ai am going to stress this last one again. When ai go to the small fruiterie near my house, the cashier usually says salut to me, whether it’s the cashier that likes to make small talk with me in French, the one who likes to make small talk in English (sometimes), or one of the cashiers who has never expressed interest in talking to me. If there’s any greeting that the self-proclaimed champions of Montréal English should be stoked on, it’s salut.

There is a possibility that someday, perhaps someday soon, ai will be forced to get a job at a Tim Hortons or some other shithole, and it is quite possible that my boss will thereafter inform me that ai must greet every coffee drinker and donut eater with a fucking bonjour/hi. At that point, as much as ai hate the likes of Louise Marchand, Mario Beaulieu, and other anglophobes, ai will be tempted to call up the OQLF or the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste or someone, and then ask them to picket my store until ai can say salut like ai want to.