Cobweb of ‘The French Connection’

What’s the trick for a year-end review that always makes one feel like it is a concentrated and deviated version of lifelong soul-searching? And why do we bother to give in, knowing that it would be neither enough nor accurate if it articulated based only an individual experience?

After almost 25 years in France, living mostly in Paris and three years in Brittany, having dedicated the past 30 years to French language which I began learning in Calcutta at the age of 22, and after being recognised as a French author and citizen, what I am experiencing currently proves that no amount of individual effort can untangle us from our collective story, that too a post- colonial one.

The summer of 2023 saw agitations in France. I organised and participated in a protest programme with some other fellow Indians from the diaspora and French friends, against the French President’s decision to invite the Indian Prime Minister as a ‘Guest of Honour’ in the Bastille Day celebration. Our protest was widely covered not only by the French media, but also foreign media, from India, Germany (Arte, DW…) and elsewhere (Al Jazeera…).

For the event, I wrote an open letter in Libération newspaper, addressed to French President Emmanuel Macron, gave interviews, and participated in a talk show (France24). That was the beginning of the end for me.

A lot of journalists, book critics, literary people and a few Indians from France and India, openly condemned my political engagement and since then put me on their blacklist.

The year before, I had published a non-fiction book relating my passionate relationship with the French language, my writing process in French and my “non-white woman” intellectual life in France. The book drew acclaim from critics, some of whom even compared my literary journey with greats, such as Samuel Beckett, Milan Kundera etc… Little did I know that this would become another nail in my coffin!

Oblivious of the danger that I was facing, I carried on with my political engagement, always in favour of the Left wing.

This summer, after the hasty dissolution of the French Parliament by our President and the risk of a Far-Right party RN’s victory, during the formation of the New Popular Front (a broad Left-Wing alliance), I wrote an open letter in l’Humanité newspaper appealing for votes for the Left alliance, and kept posting messages on social medias. That is when the gloves came off, and a defamatory, intimidating harassment was unleashed against me. These became ugly after I joined protest against the genocide in Gaza and against the massacre of innocent Palestinian children.

A journalist from Le Monde newspaper, a specialist on India, who reached out to me before his visit to India, got contacts of journalists from me, shared his articles, radically changed his attitude. Over the phone and during an unofficial interview in a café that he himself asked for, he treated me as an “imposter”, stating that I don’t write in French, that there must be a Bengali or English version hidden somewhere, that I am not the ‘real Shumona Sinha’, and that I have usurped the identity. He interrogated me for two hours on whether I was really born in Calcutta, studied in India and then in Paris at the Sorbonne university. He didn’t seem to be satisfied with my replies, as he was determined to accuse me of false accusations.

Another journalist from a web literary magazine accused me of the same: “imposter”; warning me against stepping my foot in any programme at the Sciences Po, adding that he preferred women writers who stayed away from politics.

There’s another, if not a crucial knot, to this story.

I noticed that my defamatory harassment started when I left my last publication house and published my last three books by Gallimard, the most prestigious and coveted publisher in France. Someone from my former publication house, some journalists, moderators of book meets, literary people, and most disappointingly, several writers from the former French colonies, from North Africa, South Africa, Mauritius etc. began spreading rumours that I do not write in French, and that somebody else writes for me. They alleged that my French was not well enough to be published and trashed the content and form of my novels. Some even raised questions about my “relationship” with my editor and “advised” me to return to India since “my life in France is a

failure.”

 “No husband, no child, no money, and your literary life is finished. Is it worth it?”

“Stop writing. Do something else. Go back to India”.

“Go find men where you find them, I don’t know about these things, but him*, you leave him alone”.

Another woman a publishing house interrogated me for over a year on how I write in French, as “she can’t believe it”: “I can guess that you are able to translate a few poems, but I don’t understand how you can write in French and unless you convince me, I can’t allow it to be published,” she said. This was about my recent book for which I got critical acclaim and was compared with famous writers whose mother tongue wasn’t French.

Invitation to book fairs and book meets have stopped.

Shouldn’t these humiliating, defamatory rumours fermented in France and abroad about my writing process in French and my character as a woman, be considered as hazing and mobbing? As harassment of sexist and racist nature within the workplace, an obstruction to my professional life?

The cobweb of this ‘French Connection’ is so well spread, that a few days ago, a professor at an American university, in his critique of my novel, wondered “whether the heroine of the novel will crawl back to where she came from or whether she will commit suicide like Madame Bovary?”

I believe that the visceral suspicion about my French writing has a lot to do with our post-colonial history, the absence of major French colonisation in India -- the fact that I am from Calcutta and not from Pondicherry – as well as the French people’s reaction to the worldwide status of English language.

Amid the widespread domination of the current ruling party culture in contemporary France, McCarthyism and Left bashing can be seen at every level, as is intimidation and defamation of public figures or citizens protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Something similar happened in Brittany, where I lived from end 2019 to September 2022.

Disgusted with small, overpriced rented apartments in Paris, I ventured alone and received a bank loan to purchase a flat, not in Paris or its suburbs, but in a small city in Brittany. For three years, I stayed there, not quite in peace, as living alone as a non-white woman, an author, staying alone and still paying my bills, triggered a series of rumors. And surprise! These were generated by two neighbours, both single, divorced men of French origin, who tried to flirt with me. When rebuked, one of them declared that I would be kicked out of my flat. “How? That’s my home. I paid monthly instalments to my bank, as well as to the building managing committee without any trouble.” But they created the needed trouble.

In June 2022, the building managing committee voted for a huge renovation work of our building. For my portion, I was supposed to pay 12 000 euros. Considering the amount, I asked for an instalment payment, which is a common practice in France in a similar situation. I was refused. All my neighbours, of middle class and of French origin, opened a joint loan at the bank (the same bank that gave me the loan). I was not made part of that joint loan. “We don’t believe you. You’ll take the money and go where we don’t know. We don’t believe in documents that you are showing us as your source of income, your publication house, the French cultural ministry, that’s all rubbish, we don’t believe you”, I was told.

Within a month they filed a lawsuit against me. Their lawyers were rather considerate with me. I left Brittany, putting the house up for sale, renting again a small, overpriced flat in Paris. The racist

Nostradamus was right. For a whole year, I had to deal with the lawsuit (parallelly writing my latest novel, published in March 2024 by Gallimard. When the sale of my flat was finalised, the building managing committee was furious: “That’s our flat! How dare you sell it?” Despite the final signature date fixed at attorney’s office, they voted in their last meeting for seizing my flat and put it on auction for 20,000 euros (the market value of my flat was around 130,000 euros). I barely managed to sell off my flat the same week. And of course, paid off every organisation, bank and committee who charged me extra 3,000 euros for the expenses of the lawsuit.

I am now living again in the most beautiful city under the sky, in the cultural capital of the world, writing and fighting for the right causes.

So, when I describe the Far-Right menace in France, when I describe racist and sexist harassment, that’s not a theoretical abstraction: it’s lived and felt in blood and tears.

Is there any solution? I don’t think so. At least not an easy one. The poisonous tree of racial hatred has spread its roots all over.

The writer is a Kolkata-born French author and a citizen of France. Her works have been published by Gallimard. She is also a winner of the French academy award for literature. The views are personal.