Duty, a Quebec daily, tells us with relish that many Quebec publishing houses have made the use of inclusive writing their own.[1]. I'm not sure if this boosts their sales... There are some gems in this article! Just one or two: "Ecosociété will publish AfroQueer. 25 committed voices. The editor spontaneously suggested to the author, Fabrice Nguena, to use the pronoun “iel”. He flatly refused. “Readers in Africa do not know the neutral pronouns and would not understand” (me neither). A poet, Baron Marc-André Lévesque, made this choice because he “meets non-binary people or people who, in one way or another, are not represented by either the masculine or the feminine. I would have trouble, he says, writing in a French where “iel” does not exist”. I loved the expression “J’aurais de la misère” because my great-aunt, a Saintongeaise Gabaye, spoke like that. Now, she would have never used “iel”, I doubt it.
This author cannot do without the pronoun "iel" because he knows, he says, non-binary and asexual people... Well, I think of real readers, not of the bobos undecided about how to use or not to use what nature has provided them. I think of people who are trying to learn to read, of immigrant women in particular, of people from disadvantaged backgrounds or who have dropped out of school. We have a duty to make their task easier and not to complicate it for the sake of it. When Georges-Emmanuel Clancier, a little boy of 7, taught his grandmother Louise from Limousin to read[2], how would he have taught her these new traps? How could she not have stumbled over these "dot e dot s" that are scattered throughout the wokies' writings? Over these "iels" unknown to her vocabulary, over these "directresses" when everywhere else people spoke of "directresses"? There is in this strange use of writing a great fatuity and an obvious class contempt.
Of course, there are no more illiterate grandmothers Louise or Jeanne: today they are called Leïla or Nabila, but they want just as much, with infinite discretion, to enter the Gutenberg galaxy and they, too, need to be encouraged. "What good would it do me," Louise would say, "Grandfather Jules reads me the newspaper!" But she lets herself get caught up in the game, learns the letters in an ABC book, deciphers her grandson's school books, then reads novels that she comments on with him, especially after the premature death of Grandfather Jules. What would have become of her, terrified, in the face of these new subtleties, foreign to her peasant culture? In the face of these unknown words, these bizarre forms that emerge in the text, that we read but do not pronounce? This writing excludes dyslexics as well as those who already have, without being illiterate, reading difficulties – and the average level of sixth grade classes clearly shows that this is not a rarity. A report from the High Council for Education reported in 2011 that 40% of children have reading difficulties when they enter secondary school.[3]. Unfortunately, things have not improved...
The proponents of inclusive writing have gone to great lengths to shift the problem from writing to language. They lecture us by saying that language evolves, that it is "reactionary" not to recognize it and "progressive" to accept it. Who spoke of language ? We are talking aboutwriting ! Not all languages are written, those that are not evolve like those that are (I don't know if the pace is the same, but linguists know it). The evolution of a language is a fact that we observe without being able to oppose it, the imposition of a form of writing is a constraint. The Iranians still speak an Indo-European language, Persian, which they have written with an Arabic script since the conquest, in the 7th centurye century; and the Turks, at the beginning of the 20the century, switched from an Arabic alphabet to a Latin alphabet – they still speak Turkish! Writing is only the vehicle of the language.
In France there are movements to simplify spelling – the last one being that proposed in 1990[4] – which are perfectly useless but which oppose each other de facto to inclusive writing since it complicates writing instead of simplifying it. As much as one can be indifferent to a spelling reform that aims to simplify it, one must oppose a writing reform that would result in its complexity. Let these Quebec publishing houses with their otherwise so poetic names (Éditions de ta mère, Éditions du remue-ménage, Marchand de feuilles, Mémoire d'encrier) rave about. It is in the long term that we will see what influence so-called "inclusive" writing, which is in reality only exclusive, has on the world of publishing in general. To think that Annie Ernaux won the Nobel Prize without a single one of her books having so far used inclusive writing! But she will probably catch up...
So who is really right-wing: those who defend the working classes handicapped by exclusionary writing, or those who attack a writer presumed to be right-wing while promoting writing that excludes the poor – the case of many of the signatories of the recent anti-Tesson column?
