[spectre] Jack Kerouac in Dublin, Ireland

[Séamas Cain]

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The Dublin Writers Festival presents ...

“LA NUIT EST MA FEMME :

Jack Kerouac’s search for

a Language and an Identity”

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Venue : The Workman's Club in Dublin, Ireland

Date : Thursday, 23 May 2013

Time : 8:30 p.m.

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“LA NUIT EST MA FEMME”

Kerouac's given name wasn’t Jack; it was Jean-Louis.  His mother
tongue wasn’t English; it was French.  In the early fifties Kerouac
wrote two unpublished works in French — “Sur le chemin,” and “La nuit
est ma femme,” in which Kerouac identified French as the language in
which he often swears, often dreams, and always cries.

“When Jack was feeling wounded or angry,” Joyce Johnson remarks, “he’d
sign his letters Ti Jean.  He’d save Jean-Louis for his darkest
moments.”  She suggests he never felt truly American, and his love for
the star-spangled nation was always the love of an outsider.

In “Lonesome Traveller,” Kerouac wrote “My people go back to Breton
France, first North American ancestor Baron Alexander Louis Febris de
Kérouac ... was granted land along the Riviere du Loup after victory
of Wolfe over Montcalm; his descendants married Indians (Mohawk and
Caughnawaga) and became potato farmers ...”

Kerouac’s father told him : “Ti Jean, n’oublie jamais que tu es
Breton!” (“Never forget that you are Breton!”)  In 1965, he traveled
to Brittany searching his family’s roots.  Unfortunately, he followed
a wrong track.  He never went any further until just before his death,
in 1969.

“LA NUIT EST MA FEMME” will construct a literary exploration of
Kerouac's relationship to French, to Catholicism and Buddhism; of his
bi-lingual identity; and of his fraught relationship with America.
The selections will draw on his letters, poems, haiku and novels ...
especially his writings in French.

Two writers — Gabriel Rosenstock and Gearóid Mac Lochlainn — will both
translate and respond to Kerouac’s work, in Irish and in English.  The
texts will be read to improvised jazz accompaniment by The Dirty Jazz
Band and on-screen projections created by Margaret Lonergan.

“LA NUIT EST MA FEMME” is curated by Liam Carson, director of the
IMRAM Irish Language Literature Festival.

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Venue : The Workman's Club in Dublin, Ireland

Date : Thursday, 23 May 2013

Time : 8:30 p.m.

Tickets: €10 / €8

Book online at ...

https://dublinwritersfestival.ticketsolve.com/shows/873493436/events

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For additional information, contact

THE DUBLIN WRITERS FESTIVAL at ...

E-mail : info at dublinwritersfestival.com

Phone : +353 (0) 1 222 5455

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