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PHOTO: T. SINGARAVELOU

WORD POWER Paule Constant

Novelist Paule Constant, whose name on the internet came up with 30,800 hits on Google, the author of nine novels including “White Spirit”, which won the Priz de l’Academie Francaise in 1990, and the “Confidence pour confidence” (currently being translated into Malayalam) was here in Puducherry recently at the Alliance Francaise. She says she started writing at the age of 35 to tell stories to herself and also get a clear answer to many questions that had risen in her mind. “I like to tell and listen to stories, but did you know, with most people, they never wait to listen till the end of the tale!”

Though her novels discuss serious issues issues such as the girl child and her education, they have a lot of humour. “Ouregano, her first novel, is about an eight-year-old black girl Tiffany through whose eyes Paule explains the war and racism that she saw.

“Having been affected by scenes of war myself, in that book, I depicted the horror I witnessed. I spent my childhood in Africa and without a proper school I learnt the basics from my mother and the servants and through correspondence. I was sent to a boarding school when I was 12 years,” says Paule, whose books are part of academic curriculum and subjects of PhD thesis.

She presently teaches French Literature at the Institute of French Studies for Foreign Students at University Paul Cézanne (Aix-Marseilles III). Paule, who was born in 1944 in Gan (Pyrénées-Atlantiques, France) and lives in Aix-en-Provence, has a doctorate in Arts and Social Sciences from University of Paris-IV Sorbonne.

“Though I write about women and girls, I have not participated in any feminist movement. Any woman of my generation has to be a feminist. But women in France of the present generation are not feminists since they don’t have to fight for anything like their mothers had to. Women in France started to write during the Rennaissance. There were no rules as such because most of it was disguised biographies,” she explains.

The two dials on her wrists catch your attention. “I don’t know how to change Indian time to French time, and I need to call my husband (Auguste Bourgeade).”

Paule’s way of working is quite different, in that, she does not write down the plot of the novel, but processes the entire novel in her mind. She takes about four years to complete a novel, makes at least 12 manuscript corrections and writes just four pages at a time. “Writing for me doesn’t come from an idea. It comes from my heart. Also the thousands of novels that I have read from a young age stand by me. Even when I write one novel the next one is ready in my mind and so are the ones I have already written. I have to find the rhythm in the novel, its structure and listen to the music in it. My novels are not biography based but have a lot of personal experience in them.”

There are times when she never writes anything. “I teach at the university, guide students with their PhD thesis, am busy with the work of a cultural centre that I founded, I receive about 20 writers every year, organise seminars and a judge in about 10 juries for writing and also travel a lot.”

She is presently working on a novel with three characters. “It’s the tale of a middle-class, middle-aged American woman, who is married to a man sentenced to death. I think death sentences are monstrous.” For one of her novels, she spoke to people waiting for the death sentence to be pronounced, and won the Amnesty International’s prize.

Considered the funniest novelist in France, Paule, says you can go deeper into tragedy through humour. “What seems the most extraordinary is the biggest truth and in reality we find a lot of extraordinary things. Take the story of the ‘White Spirit’, which is about a young French man who runs a shop in a banana plantation in Africa. He sells export surplus from the West. One day there is a product called White Spirit and the Africans think they will get a part of their soul if they eat it. The end is tragic since the hands of life are always bad. The tale has a false end and the chapter is called ‘Happy End.’ I had left six blank pages for the readers to write an end for themselves.”

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