French slang in Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin

Plays on words used to play, then to hurt

First off, happy Pride month!

Second: My first language is English. I am a cis female, my pronouns are she/her. I am an ally. I am discussing a scene written by a gay black man about gay (and possibly bi) men using the French language to both play (with each other, and with words) and to disparage.

Third: There is a slur in French in this towards a certain section of the LGBTQ community, that I am including to help explain what it is going on in the escalation between these characters. I do not support this language and am not using it myself, and do not support it.

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Also, avoiding spoilers.

I brought this up last night in book club/class last night, hosted by

Christopher Frizzelle

; he had asked before the Giovanni’s Room course started if anyone knew French. I have been supplementing my high school and college French with Duolingo

(104 days in a row, y’all, take that, chronic illness! I’m CarlaCupcakes if you want to friend me there)

and have always been fascinated by language. I am here for the challenge.

Part One: Four characters are on their way to an after-hours bar. They start throwing around the French words fou and folle at each other. Le fou is the masculine noun, fou the masculine adjective; la folle the feminine noun, folle the feminine adjective. It means “the fool” and “foolish”, and can also mean “crazy”, “mad person”. It can mean that literally, as in someone who is behaving irrationally, as in the old sense of “madman”, or it can mean someone is acting silly or, as they say, out of pocket.

An actual mental illness is not referred to in this way, but rather la maladie mentale, and the person suffering from it is le malade mental (male) or la malade mentale (female).

So, things start to get rude when the guys are using the feminine form of fou with each other: folle. There are two ways to politely do this, when you are referring to having a good time, and they may be punning off of this and being sly: s’amuser comme des folles, which literally translates to “to amuse oneself like the fools”, let’s get silly. So are they using French’s gendered language rules to misgender? I don’t know, but it is worth pointing out. Baldwin was precise with his language.

The other way to politely do this (that I am aware of is folle envie de, which means “strong urge to”, like lust, which I don’t believe was overtly used here, but Baldwin, I’m certain, knew this phrase, and may have been pointing to it, for the number of times that fou and folle were used in such a quick period of time in these two bar scenes.

Now, from rudeness to ugliness:

In the first bar scene, a person wearing drag is referred to in animalistic adjectives both vulgar and possibly racial in English. Not going to repeat them here. Then we get to the after-party bar, and vache folle is used. The animal insults continue, this time between acquaintances. This means mad cow. I don’t know the exact connotation in 1950’s France; it’s not referring to “mad cow disease” (la maladie de la vache folle), but it’s definitely ugly. I suspect it is along the lines of calling a woman a “cow” today.

Then we arrive at the slur, which I am going to dance around translating, because of who I am, as stated above. I believe it was Stephen King who said “what it is it can only be said in French”? I think he was referring to something endearing or mysterious, so forgive me.

Folle by itself in a different context (considering the speaker, writer, etc.), or if it’s spelled fol, or grande folle (notice again, the feminine in all cases) is a pejorative term for a…I am struggling with how to say this…person perceived by the speaker to be extremely or inappropriately effeminate in allure or attitude. I paraphrased that from my French dictionary; I wanted to get the point across as clearly as possible without being offensive myself. I don’t feel this way; do you every day. Please don’t shoot the piano player.

To end on a lighter note, there’s one more pun that wasn’t made, because the conversation about “why are you waiting?/what are you waiting for?” was in English, but I know Baldwin had to be aware of it: mettre un temps fou means to take forever, literally translated “to make the time of a fool”.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin at Bookshop

James Baldwin Reading Challenge at The Story Graph (read at your own pace)

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