The storyteller and actor Pépito Matéo presents “The French Lesson” during a tour presented by the ATP of Nîmes. Five dates are planned for this week.
How did this “French lesson” come about?
I’ve been a storyteller for a long time. I’ve always been interested in the misunderstandings of language, in the fact that you can’t understand the same thing when you evoke a memory, an idea. My father was Spanish, he pronounced certain words with errors that gave poetry. For example, he said “we will eat the widower”. He created strange images. The “tarpaulins” gave the milk… The children, one of whom has a foreign parent, immediately learn the games between the two languages.
My mother was from Champagne. In this region, many ready-made expressions are used. My grandmother, my aunt, my mother, especially women… When we told my grandmother that she had white hair, she said “there is snow on the roof, but there is fire in the hearth”. If we told her we didn’t want to eat, she would reply “she will make you lose weight”. Everything was like some kind of folk poem, always with this discrepancy between reality and word.
Is this something you discovered while working in foreign detention centers?
I started writing and at the same time I was doing workshops for asylum seekers. I realized that I could not address the issue of misunderstandings without mentioning the foreigner for whom these misunderstandings can sometimes be fatal.
So I decided to use what I saw, what I heard, the difficulties people were facing to make a kind of portrait of the characters with their travels. I’ve used reality, but I’m also a storyteller, I work on the imagination and I’ve made collages, discrepancies, I’ve brought back stories, childhood memories to embark the audience on a journey…
You talk about a journey through “the French languages”, in the plural.
I also speak regional languages. “It rains in the bottle” in Champagne, while “it pissouille” in France-Comté and “it drache” in the North. We also have different ways of apprehending reality with language and images. I think this diversity in the regions, but also in the West Indies, in Quebec, in Africa shows that this language is very much alive.
In Africa we use all the idioms that revisit the French language. We will “soften the ear” of someone to tell a secret or “love” to fall in love. It is the opposite of the English language, which is used so that everyone can agree to trade. French is not unifying in the sense that everyone starts speaking impeccable French, but it comes in a thousand different ways and allows everyone to appropriate it. It is the fortune of the French in the future.
Today, with the abuse of technical terms, is French losing its subtlety?
Most business, technocracy or English terms don’t create images in our heads. What interests me as a storyteller is the difference in ways of speaking. In French it says “when the chickens have teeth”, but in Spanish it says “when the chickens have hair”, in Russian “when the crayfish whistles in the mountain”, in Ukrainian “when the louse sneezes”. This diversity of images, sometimes from one family to another, creates many exchanges that force us to reflect.
Today, with machines, we are moving towards a language that is not made for speaking, but for communicating. However, what makes human richness is above all the oral exchange. We all have a legacy that comes to us from our parents, our grandparents, the people we’ve met. We all have a unique oral print. That’s why when I leave my shows, I ask people to put all the familiar, regional and international expressions that come their way into a little box and put them together in little notebooks. I just mounted the third, I’m preparing a fourth. It’s infinite, they are things that I don’t want to see escape and that I collect.
This administrative language erases, hides, euphemizes everything that gets in the way…
Today there are tools for communicating quickly and effectively, but this shouldn’t replace or erase the difficulties. Language follows the evolution of society, which is moving towards individualism. We will realize that this creates loneliness, depression… I have recently heard teachers or doctors saying that it is more and more administrative tasks. It gets more and more complicated and we spend less and less time with people. People need us to talk to them, to listen to them. When we do prison seminars, people find it hard to listen to each other because we haven’t listened to them. You have to accept that you have your time talking and listening, it’s important for a group. In society there are many problems related to the fact that people cannot express themselves.
