I think we will go back to reading Where are the Green Sheep? and The Elephant and the Bad Baby.

In the most recent installment in his Sunday Philosophy Club series, The Careful Use of Compliments (Little, Brown, 2007), the value of archives and the issue of appraisal is deftly and comically described… and initially disturbing at that!

Isabel Dalhousie, the main character, edits an academic journal on ethics and has done so for years. Recently informed that in spite of her success in turning the journal around she is to be replaced by Professor Dove, who requests the editorial archive be handed over to him, she warns him in writing that ‘I do not consider these archives to be anybody’s property but my own.’ The narrative continues:

What she had said about the ownership of the archive was probably wrong. Some of it belonged to her – the personal letters written to her as editor and the copies of letters which she had written, on paper which she had provided; those, she thought, were surely hers. (p.92)

Professor Dove duly arrives at Isabel’s place for the handover and Isabel explains:

‘When I took over the editorship,’ she said, ‘I threw out a lot of old files. There were boxes and boxes of papers which my predecessor had done nothing about sorting out. There were all sorts of things which would have been of no interest to anybody. Letters from the printers, and so on. I cleared it all out. There was even an ancient letter from Bertrand Russell about a claim for a train fare to a symposium that the Review had organised.’

Dove, who had been facing the window while Isabel spoke, now spun around. ‘Russell? But what about his biographers? What if they had wanted it?’

Dove’s tone was one of subdued outrage, and Isabel bristled defensively. ‘Would his biographers be interested in a claim for a train fare? Surely not, unless Russell questioned the reality of the train journey, or something like that. I think that I boarded a train at Paddington, but can I be sure?’ She laughed, but Dove did not; he was concerned with posterity, and could not laugh at such things. Isabel wondered what conclusion biographers might draw from such a letter: that Russell was always one to claim expenses? Or that his finances were not in a good state and that he needed to watch even very minor outlays? (pp.135-6)

Isabel is given to these flights of philosophy, but more than anything she is annoyed at the manner in which her downfall has been plotted: her attitude to the archive is tied up in this. But I felt a pang that a favourite character (and the author no doubt) could apparently trivialise the idea of the archive. She knows her idea about the ownership is probably wrong, and her dilemma about the division of personal/professional in the archive is interesting.

As a researcher first however, I blenched at her cavalier statement of appraisal and disposal (‘I threw out a lot of old files’) and like Dove (described in the blurb as machiavellian) find myself slightly more concerned with posterity.

Delightfully however, McCall Smith brings this to the point some forty pages later, when Isabel is trying to track down the identity of a man who stayed at a guesthouse and asks the proprietor to check his register for an address (let’s not consider the ethics of that):

Rob looked through the papers again. ‘No idea,’ he said. ‘We would have known at the time, but we weed out the old letters. We don’t keep them.’

‘A pity,’ muttered Isabel. She thought of her conversation with Christopher Dove: it was exactly what she had done with the old correspondence of the Review of Applied Ethics. She was one to talk. (p.177)

So, has Alexander McCall Smith the right attitude to archives? I’m sure if asked to elaborate on this point, he’d make an interesting keynote speaker at an archival conference!

I first read Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince in the original French in year eleven at school (1983). There are now over 160 translations of this beautiful story, and in 2006 it was translated into Mauritian Creole (Morisien/Morisyen) – Zistwar Ti-Prens. I read about its publication (ironically in Germany) in the paper the day I left Mauritius last October, and at last have my very own copy, sent by philatepat, along with the gift of another book for children, in Mauritian Creole, about the time of slavery in Mauritius. (Mike’s paternal grandmother’s side of the family, at least, are descended from slaves – evident in the family name Lagrec.)

My French is okay but my Creole (except for the obvious – mot mauvais) is non existent. We hope that Mike will speak mainly Creole to the baby and I will speak English.

The language situation in Mauritius, briefly, is this: When the British took possession of Mauritius in 1810 (under French rule 1715-1810), they agreed to respect the culture, language, legal system and religion of the incumbent French, and for many years afterwards French remained the dominant means of communication. English eventually replaced French as spoken in government and the courts (and is today the country’s official language) but it never escaped the confines of its ‘official’ status. French remains dominant in the media, and Mauritian Creole, based on French, is the most widely spoken language. However, some Mauritians look down on Mauritian Creole which I think is a GREAT shame. I met with the Director of the National Library of Mauritius when I was there last October. He is a linguist and, thankfully, does not buy into that snobbery.

Mauritian Creole is a rich language and I look forward to learning it alongside my baby. What a pleasurable way to do it.

Resources on Mauritian Creole

The Mauritian creole and the concept of creolization
Entry in Ethnologue.org