He arrived in 1975. Now he guards the language
Amin Maalouf ran an Arabic newspaper in Beirut until the war. He is now the Perpetual Secretary of the Académie française.
Until 1975, Amin Maalouf was a director of An-Nahar in Beirut. An Arabic newspaper, in an Arabic city, in the country he was born in, in 1949.
Then the war started and he went to Paris, and took work as a journalist on an economic paper.
On the twenty eighth of September 2023 he was elected Perpetual Secretary of the Académie française. That is the office that speaks for the institution charged with the custody of the French language. Not a member of it. Its permanent head.
There are forty seats in the Académie and the people who hold them are called the immortals. Maalouf was elected to seat twenty nine on the twenty third of June 2011, taking the chair left vacant by the death of Claude Lévi-Strauss. He was the first person of Lebanese origin to be elected in the institution’s history, which dates to 1635.
He does not write in his first language.
A man whose working life began in Arabic, who directed an Arabic daily until he was twenty six, arrived in a foreign country in his mid twenties and started again in French. Not conversational French. Publishable French, then prize winning French, and eventually French that the body responsible for the language elected to protect it.
Anyone who has worked in a second language professionally knows what that costs, and knows it never entirely stops costing it.
The Crusades Through Arab Eyes in 1983, which did something obvious that almost nobody had done, and told a European story from the other side of it.
Leo Africanus in 1986. Samarkand in 1988.
Then in 1993, the Prix Goncourt, which is the most significant literary prize in France, for Le Rocher de Tanios. The novel is set in a Lebanese village in the nineteenth century.
Read that sequence once more. He won France’s foremost literary prize, writing in French, with a book about a mountain village in Lebanon.
He did not arrive and become French. He arrived, and made the place he came from legible in the language of the place he had reached. Those are completely different achievements and only one of them is interesting.
There is a piece on this record about 1920, when a group of emigrants in Lower Manhattan took Arabic poetry off its classical rails and renewed a language with centuries of formal tradition behind it, from a city that neither knew nor cared what they were doing.
This is the same act, running in the other direction.
In 1920 Lebanese emigrants in New York renewed Arabic from the outside. A century later a Lebanese emigrant in Paris was handed formal responsibility for French.
Put those two facts beside each other and a pattern appears that is worth naming. The recurring Lebanese contribution abroad is not capital and it is not territory. It is language, drafting, negotiation, the ability to move between worlds and be trusted inside both. It is what we kept exporting and it is what kept getting hired, whether the buyer was a newspaper, a foreign ministry or an academy founded in 1635.
It is also worth saying what this is not.
It is not evidence that leaving works out. He left because his country was destroying itself, and the career that followed is what he built out of that, not a reward for it. An-Nahar lost a director. Beirut lost a writer who would have written in Arabic, in Beirut, for Lebanese readers. That book does not exist and never will.
Every entry on this record has that second column, and it is usually left blank. A gain somewhere else is a loss at home, and the loss is invisible because it takes the form of work that was never done.
The honest version of the whole project is that both are true at once. The Lebanese abroad achieved an extraordinary amount, and the country is poorer by precisely the amount they achieved elsewhere.
Which is the argument for the only thing this record asks. If the work is going to happen abroad regardless, the very least that can be arranged is that the people doing it can find each other.
Be findable.