“Dios mio”, c’est bien la vague du futur!

L’écrivain et essayiste d’origine argentine Ariel Dorfman a vécu au Chili jusqu’en 1973 avant de s’expatrier aux USA pendant la dictature. Depuis la chute de Pinochet, il se partage entre ces deux pays (une partie de l’année aux Etats-Unis comme professeur à Duke University). Il fait un commentaire (The Guardian du 10 mai) sur les récents événements latinos aux USA : les manifestations gigantesques et le “scandale” de l’hymne national américain traduit en espagnol (Star-Spangled Banner devenu Nuestro Himno).

« The streets of America are not filled with marching Eskimos or Basque patriots and certainly not with scholars ardently shouting against discrimination in Virgil's lost language. What resonated recently in Los Angeles and Atlanta, Chicago and New York, was the voices of hundreds of thousands of protesters demanding that 12 million undocumented workers living illegally in the United States be granted amnesty. And the language in which they were chanting was the same sacrilegious Spanish of Nuestro Himno.

» That's why the latino version of the national anthem caused such alarm: it was a reminder that those mojados had smuggled into El Norte, along with their swarthy and labouring bodies, the extremely vivacious language of Cervantes and Octavio Paz. They weren't coming to the US merely to work, bake bread, lay bricks, change diapers, wash dishes, pick strawberries, work, work, work; Dios mío, they might decide to speak!

» What differentiates these recent arrivals to American shores from earlier “huddled masses” is that they're not prepared to abandon their mother tongue. This Spanish is not going to fade away as Norwegian or Italian or German did during previous assimilated waves. Not only whispered by the largest minority in the United States, it is also being spoken, written and dreamed, at this very moment, by hundreds of millions of men and women in the immense neighbouring latino South. Spanish is a language that has come to stay.

» Nuestro Himno, therefore, by infiltrating one of the safest symbols of US national identity with Spanish syllables, crossed a line, inadvertently announcing something that many Americans have dreaded for years: the fact that their country is on its way to becoming a bilingual nation. »

L’analyse de Dorfman est à la fois un constat et une espérance. Le constat est que l’irrésistible vague latino va submerger les USA et complètement transformer ce pays, voire les deux Amériques. L’immigration latino n’est semblable à aucune autre, elle ne mène certainement pas à une intégration (et une dissolution) des latinos dans le système ; ce serait plutôt une annexion d’une partie de la chose… Mais la chose (les USA) peut-elle accepter un tel marché qui la transformerait complètement? L’espérance de Dorfman est que l’actuel système américaniste, montrant de la tolérance, saura effectivement “s’adapter”. Si nous sommes complètement d’accord avec le constat, nous doutons fortement du bien-fondé de l’espérance.

Mis en ligne le 10 mai 2006 à 09H36