General
Antonine Maillet, Writer Who Celebrated Her Native Acadia, Dies at 95
She gave voice to an overlooked French-speaking population in Canada, adapting an archaic language that had survived through oral tradition.
Antonine Maillet, a Canadian writer who shaped a new literary language for an isolated French-speaking minority, becoming the first non-European to win France’s most prestigious literary prize, died on Feb. 17 at her home in Montreal, on a street named after her. She was 95.
Her death was confirmed by her publisher, Leméac.
In novels, short stories and plays, Ms. Maillet gave voice to the overlooked French-speaking populations in the historic region of Acadia — perhaps half a million people spread across the Anglophone Maritime Provinces of Canada.
Their ancestors had been expelled by English overlords in 1755, in what Acadians call “le Grand Dérangement,” or the Great Displacement. Ms. Maillet was determined to call attention to that historical injustice, and to establish the independence and vitality of Acadian culture in the present.
“We Acadians, we were considered inferior beings,” she told the French newspaper Le Monde in 1979 after winning the Prix Goncourt for her novel “Pélagie-la-Charrette,” which tells the story of a tough 18th-century Acadian woman, Pélagie, bent on returning to her homeland in an ox-driven cart up the East Coast of revolutionary America. An English translation was published in 1982 as “Pélagie.” (The literal translation of the title is “Pélagie the ox cart.”)
“I was perfectly aware that if I wanted to succeed in life, I had to become English-speaking, because the Acadian was looked down on for what he was,” she told Le Monde.
