During her 20 years of writing, Nancy Huston has continually
proved to be difficult to categorize on a national or cultural level. Born
and raised in Anglophone North America (Canada and the U.S.), Huston claims
that it was not until she experienced the feeling of “étrangéité”
living in France, immersed in the French language that she discovered her
literary voice. Huston’s collection of essays, Nord perdu,
reflects the conflictual mind of the expatriate caught between two or more
countries, languages and cultures. In Nord perdu, she challenges
such notions as the idea of being “perfectly bilingual,” and by
describing what she calls the brain of a “faux bilingue” she opens
up the debate on nomad thought and identity politics. Her discussion of language
from everyday conversation fluctuating between French and English or the task
of translating her own fiction, exposes the gap between any given linguistic
and/or cultural system as well as the difference between monolingual, sedentary
individuals and those who have several places to call home. For Huston, nomadism
is not defined by a state of perpetual deterritorialization, but is more accurately
a state of mind, a nomadic esprit which fluctuates from one cultural, linguistic
model to another and more often is an expression of several at once produced
by a process of negotiation. In this paper, I will discuss Huston’s
idea of what it means to be a speaking and writing subject of several languages
at once, and also how Nord perdu addresses the debate in identifying
what Abdelkebir Khatibi calls “la patrie de l’écrivain.”