Trouver sa voix (Audio)

“To us, not to have the accent is to have it. “This line from the poet Zamacoïs that we hear here sums up in itself how we have established a way of speaking as a social norm. Touraine, for example, is said to speak the purest French. However, if he is referring to it, it must be understood that it is because it is a bourgeois accent, heir to the court of the kings of France, that it was thus able to impose itself on the greatest number and end up not getting along anymore. “To have an accent” is therefore to be perceived as a person who knows the language less well, who lacks this invisible but audible legitimation. Where things get more complicated is that the narrator has lost her own language on arriving in Paris, making her in a way foreign to her own family, without being fully accepted in her new environment. This sound creation thus takes us between the shores of two worlds, drawing a singular trajectory that breaks down borders and makes us hear the system of power implicit in our ways of speaking.(Sylvain Maino)