ÉCRITURE DE LA MOBILITÉ, RECONSTRUCTION DU SOI CHEZ VASSILIS ALEXAKIS
Writing of Mobility, Self Reconstruction in Vassilis Alexakis’s Work

Summary/Abstract: Vassilis Alexakis is a kind of author who had already been French in spirit even before adopting French as his language of writing. He also had, like so many other writers before him, the traumatic experience of the change of scenery caused by exile, an experience which led him to constantly seeking his personal, social, cultural, narrative self. Vassilis Alexakis’s voyage to French language and land is not, however, definite: he has never cut his ties with his native country and has chosen a back and forth journey between Greek language and Greece and French as well as France, just to depict from the two “a kind of very personal homeland”. Located “at the crossroads of languages – à la croisée des langues“ (Lise Gauvin) and cultures, he has experienced various stages in the process of reconstruction of his creative self: deculturation, acculturation, re-enculturation, transculturation. It was the French language that brought him literary notoriety, but above all, it led to a (re)discovery and at the same time a distancing from his artistic self. Aware that the choice of a language of expression is intimately linked to the mere process of the artistic conception, Vassilis Alexakis resorts to self-translation, which is, in fact, a recreation of the text, but also an epiphany of his most intimate self. The use of self-translation, the utter need to experience and to reconnect with his mother tongue as well as the practice of a third language, Sango language, attest his refusal to settle in and settle down in one place nor a single language. This very sheer coexistence of all these languages and cultures are generating, in fact, the quintessence and the originality of his literary work

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