Maillet, Antonine (b. 1929). Canadian novelist, born in Bouctouche, New Brunswick. She is the chief representative of the Acadians of the Maritime Provinces, a people with a development quite distinct from that of Quebec. Persecution, isolation, and lack of social opportunity have given the Acadians an oral culture of folk-tales, proverbs, racy language, and a life-style suited to survival through fishing and subsistence farming. Maillet maintains that Acadia escaped the dubious advantages of French classicism (‘Malherbe vint, mais pas chez nous’), and her thesis, Rabelais et la culture populaire en Acadie, traces the survival of French traditions in New Brunswick. It is this vigorous popular speech, folk-history, and humour which she has exploited with great skill in her monologues, La Sagouine (1971) and Gapi (1976), and in plays like Les Crasseux (1973), and carefully distilled in her novels through her own blend of orality and narrative.
Creating a modern fictional form for an unsophisticated oral culture has been an impressive innovation, and Maillet has achieved this while losing little of her verve. She plays off the bootlegger, rumrunner, village scold, against the establishment, priest, teacher, mayor, prude, entrepreneur, to great satirical effect. Her first novel, On a mangé la dune (1962), created a delightfully innocent portrait of childhood, poking fun at the smugness of adult society. Her latest work, L'Oursiade (1990), uses animals and children to paint an idyllic picture of primal harmony, contrasting good-naturedly with the prejudice, greed, and malice of those who ‘own’ the world. The tantalizing illusion of peace between man and animals becomes credible. Maillet's other Homeric task has been to redraft Acadian history from the expulsion by British troops in 1755, through the great trek back from the Carolinas (Pélagie-la-Charrette, 1979, Prix Goncourt), to the reconquest of legitimacy at the Congress of 1881 after Cent ans dans les bois (1981, published in France as La Gribouille, 1982). Antonine Maillet is a member of the Haut-Conseil de la Francophonie and a delightful spokes-woman for the diaspora. Her narrators are aged story-tellers, ‘défricheteux de parenté’, defenders of the disenfranchised and guardians of the collective memory.
— Cedric May
