In 1979, Antonine Maillet won France's most coveted literary award, the Prix Goncourt, for Pélagie-la-Charette. She was the first Acadian, and in fact the first non-European writer, to receive the prize. In her acceptance speech she said: “I have avenged my ancestors.”
Antonine Maillet did that and so much more. As a writer, Maillet was part of the literary impetus of the Acadian Renaissance of the early 1970s. Born in Bouctouche in 1929, she studied at Collège Notre Dame d’Acadie, Université de Montréal, and Université Laval, where she obtained a PhD that focused on the linguistic and folkloric traditions of ancient Acadie. In her 1971 radio play La Sagouine, she put that language onto the tongue of a simple but feisty scrubwoman. Acadians recognized themselves in the words of la sagouine and understood Maillet’s play as an allegory of their struggle for survival. Maillet went on to write more than fifty works, including Pélagie-la-Charette, which catapulted her into international celebrity.
Throughout her career, she was an indefatigable lecturer, speaker, essayist, and public intellectual — a defender of Acadian identity in North America. She raised Acadian history, folklore, and speech to epic status in her many novels and plays. And she played a major role in shaping the collective consciousness. Revered in Acadie, lionized in Quebec, and celebrated on an international scale, she put Acadie and Acadian identity on the world’s literary map.
We mourn the passing of Antonine Maillet but celebrate her life and her work and the worlds that she released through her words.
