Scholar looks at accessibility of French books in province
REGINA Books in English are easy enough to find on a whim, depending where you are. Books in French, less so.
That’s what Richard Russo is finding as he researches the Fransaskois community’s access to books.
A geographer from Maryland’s Frostburg State University and a Fulbright Scholar, Russo has travelled thousands of kilometres across Saskatchewan to explore communities’ access to French books.
“How an anglophone can use a library, they can just go into a library and not know what they want and maybe come out with a lifechanging book,” Russo said.
“But that experience isn’t available, necessarily, to francophones … You have to know what you want and order it. That’s a different kind of experience than libraries as a place of discovery.”
This research relates to Russo’s work as a cultural geographer, exploring cultural spaces.
“Wherever you have books, you create a space,” he said, whether it’s a bookstore or a public library or a book fair — or a Fransaskois school library.
After children graduate high school, though, “What books are available for you to keep your brain, your mind, living in French? That’s basically what I’m interested in,” Russo said.
He was drawn to Saskatchewan after reading a 2008 report by the Assemblee communautaire fransaskoise (ACF), which offered a progressive view of Fransaskois identity to keep the minority culture alive.
His work in Saskatchewan is based at the University of Regina’s La Cite, but he has travelled to visit libraries and community centres in Willow Bunch, Saskatoon, Zenon Park, St. Isidore de Bellevue, Ponteix and beyond.
What he has found is an unequal availability of French books.
“You can go into Saskatoon Public Library and there’s this pretty nice collection of books in French that you can browse, and then you can go to Debden Public Library, where a third of the people in the town speak French, but there are no French books for adults.”
That’s not to say there are no options for the French-speaking residents of Debden and similar communities. Saskatchewan has an interlibrary loan system, which allows people to order from public library branches across the province. The collection includes some French books.
At College Mathieu in Gravelbourg, Le Lien provides Frenchlanguage materials, including more than 40,000 books. Le Lien is a free service, mailing books across Western Canada and paying for the return postage.
“If there’s a will, there’s a way, that’s one thing I’ve found,” Russo said. “But, that said, that requires a whole lot of work on behalf of somebody who might just want to roll into their public library and find some French books.”
Russo doesn’t know whether this is a problem. Maybe people don’t mind that their libraries don’t offer huge quantities of French books. Maybe the Debden library used to offer French books but nobody checked them out.
Russo’s goal is to “describe the situation on the ground.” He will not be interviewing people about the state of things, but hopes to generate a conversation within the Fransaskois community.