Monday night’s lecture by author Marie-Célie Agnant in Craig Lecture Hall explored the role of writing and language in the immigrant’s struggle for identity. Agnant’s lecture inaugurated the week-long mini-course, “Migrant Literature in Quebec,” sponsored by the department of French and Italian and the Maison Francophone.

Agnant (pronounced An-yant), a Haitian living in Montreal since 1970, described migrant literature as a force “agitating the literary scene” in Canada for much of the 20th century. Migrant writing, according to Agnant, is a sort of “literary and social experiment” in which writers from marginalized groups struggle to find their own voices and identities in a new land, reconciling the past and the present. Migrant literature is often seen as its own genre — the “roman du terroire,” or literature of the homeland. Agnant also calls migrant writing a “literature of survival,” meant to preserve immigrants’ traditions, religions and histories.

La Quebecoite (The Wanderer), by Regine Robin, a French immigrant born of Polish parents, is a semi-autobiographical novel that explores Jewish culture in Quebec. Robin said her book is “not a neat novel,” but a work that wanders (hence the title) through many different stories. The novel’s unconventional structure evokes a history broken by exile and an immigrant’s feelings of displacement.

Another influential contemporary of Agnant’s is the Italian playwright Marco Micone, who came to Quebec in the ’50s. Micone’s play, Deja l’agonie (Beyond the Ruins) uses satire to ask, “What does it mean to be a real Quebecois? Is there one true identity for people in Quebec?” With Francophones and Anglophones constantly at war, immigrants in Quebec speak many languages. Many children speak French in school, English outside of school and another language at home, never developing full competency in any one language. Reduced to speaking three or four broken languages, “they are silenced,” said Agnant.

Agnant writes poetry, short stories, novels and children’s books. Her work follows the tradition of social realism, exploring themes such as racism, identity, exile, the status of women, exclusion and immigration. In 1996, her novel, La Dot de Sara (Sara’s Dowry), was a finalist for the Prix du Roman Desjardins and in 1998, her collection of short stories, Le Silence Comme De Sang (Silence Like Blood), was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s Prize. Last year marked the publication of her most recent novel, Le Livre d’Emma (Emma’s Book) in Quebec, Haiti and France. In the last five years, Agnant has lectured in Africa, Canada, the U.S., Latin America, Europe and the Caribbean.