Writing in a language other than one's mother tongue is certainly not
         a new phenomenon. However, displacements across national and
        ethnic lines, combined with the popularity of memoirs, may account for
        renewed interest in bilingual authors.

        Richard Rodriguez, the son of Mexican parents who raised their children in
        California, speaks for many such writers when he recounts in ''Hunger of
        Memory'' (1982) the nostalgia for an original monolingual childhood
        paradise. The private language of his home and family represented a
        linguistic unconsciousness, an unfragmented territory from which he was
        expelled painfully when he had to acquire the public language of school.
        He transforms his autobiography into a reasoned argument against bilingual
        education. A different response is that of the Mexican-American poet
        Gloria Anzaldua. In ''Borderlands/La Frontera'' (1987) she makes strong
        claims for legitimizing a language already much in evidence throughout
        America, one based on creative code-switching between Spanish and
        English. As for Ariel Dorfman, in ''Heading South, Looking North: A
        Bilingual Journey'' (1998), a rich, multilayered memoir, he traces his
        continuing divisions between two languages as well as two political and
        literary identities. Eva Hoffman, whose family migrated from Poland to
        Canada when she was in her early teens, may have summed up with most
        lucidity the enriching if unsettling experience of bilingualism. In ''Lost in
        Translation'' (1989), her trenchant analysis of the apprenticeship of living
        and writing in a new language, she suggests that in our decentered world,
        where ''dislocation is the norm rather than the aberration,'' a bivalent, and
        therefore necessarily multivalent, consciousness is, despite its attendant
        anguish, the only condition of contemporary awareness.

        In France, a country that struggles more than most to maintain the ''purity'' of
        its language from the dreaded interference of modernity and foreignness,
        those not born into the language (Samuel Beckett notwithstanding) find it
        arduous to become accepted as French writers. One of the more successful
        is probably Milan Kundera. Kundera, who spent most of his life in Prague,
        sought exile as a dissident in 1975 and moved to France, where, since the
        early 70's, his novels appeared ''translated from the Czech.'' He was given
        French citizenship in 1981, and by the mid-80's he was not only
        collaborating actively on translations of recently completed works but
        revising translations of his early novels. French reviews from this period
        identify him as a ''French writer of Czech origins'' or as a ''Franco-Czech
        author.'' By 1995, when he wrote ''La Lenteur'' in French, he had become a
        ''French writer.'' When he was asked in an interview about his two
        languages, his response shows how well he has absorbed the values of his
        adopted culture. Everything in Czech comes easily to him, he said, while
        each French sentence represents a conquest and a performance, but French
        is his ''passion.'' He compared himself to an adolescent boy who is
        desperately in love with Greta Garbo and confesses his desire. Amused,
        she laughs in his face, but her refusal merely fuels his passion.

        Andrei Makine, who was born in the Soviet Union in 1957 and migrated to
        France 30 years later, wrote his first novels directly in French. But French
        publishers were so suspicious that his first two manuscripts were
        repeatedly rejected. He resubmitted them ''translated from the Russian,'' and
        both were accepted, accompanied by praise for his fictitious translator.
        Makine remembers that once he was asked for the ''original ms.'' and had to
        translate his French text feverishly into Russian. When in 1995 he garnered
        two of the most prestigious Parisian prizes for ''Dreams of My Russian
        Summers,'' a lyrical autobiographical meditation on bicultural identity and
        myth, he became identified as a ''Franco-Russian'' writer. Soon after, he
        was granted French citizenship, and his novels now appear under the rubric
        ''French literature.''

        The varieties and complexities of literary bilingualism are particularly well
        illustrated in the recent memoirs of Jorge Semprun and Patrick Chamoiseau,
        two writers who, despite their differences in generation and background,
        share an ambivalent relationship to the French language in which they
        write.

        Semprun followed his Spanish Republican father into exile during the
        Spanish Civil War. The family was dispersed and Semprun arrived in Paris
        at the age of 16 with only a reading knowledge of French. Shortly after, he
        joined the Resistance in World War II and was deported to Buchenwald as
        a political prisoner. Semprun later wrote screenplays, campaigned against
        the rule of Franco and eventually served as Minister of Culture in Spain
        from 1988 to 1991.

        But it was in French that he wrote powerful narratives about his experience
        in the camps, including ''Literature or Life'' (1992). ''Adieu, Vive Clarti,''
        which appeared this year, chronicles the months he spent in Paris between
        the fall of Spain and the beginning of the war in Europe. The central
        anecdote in this memoir recounts the day he walks into a boulangerie to buy
        some bread. The boulangere, who pretends she cannot understand
        Semprun's accent, makes him repeat his request several times, then insults
        him in front of other customers because he is a foreigner, ''some Spaniard
        from a defeated Red army.'' Jorge flees the shop in what he always recalls
        as fierce humiliation. Why then would Semprun evoke those same months as
        being so dazzling? Because that year he also discovers French literature.
        He becomes enamored of Gide, Malraux, Baudelaire -- whose poetry not
        only gives him the title of his memoir but which he recites to a comrade
        dying in Buchenwald. Semprun writes that at 16 he vowed to eradicate any
        accent from his speech and to master the language of his humiliation
        because the discovery of Gide reintegrated him into the community from
        which he had been expelled by the xenophobic Frenchwoman.

        Patrick Chamoiseau, on the other hand, has built his literary career on the
        rejection of French claims to ''universalism.'' In a manifesto written with
        Jean Bernabe and Raphael Confiant in 1989, ''In Praise of Creoleness,''
        Chamoiseau, who is from Martinique, pays homage to the ''Negritude''
        movement of the poet Aime Cesaire, which proposed a new model for
        French-Caribbean writers in the 1930's and 40's. Yet he also critically
        analyzes its esthetics, its mimetic impulse, its replacement of a European
        illusion by an African one and its efforts to master classical French style.
        Chamoiseau, who calls instead for political and literary ''Creoleness,''
        writes in a unique personal style, creating a language somewhere between
        the orality of his native Creole and literary French.

        In his memoir, ''School Days'' (1997), he recounts his first stunned
        encounter with the French language when he entered primary school in
        Fort-de-France (Martinique became a department of France in 1946, and its
        schools are modeled on those of metropolitan France): ''Baffled, the little
        black boy realized that he did not know this language. The chatty li'l voice
        in his head used a different language, his home-language, his
        Mama-language, the language he had not learned but rather absorbed with
        ease as he eagerly explored his world.'' His book describes the brutal
        transition from loving home to hostile school where the teacher, who has
        completely assimilated the French educational system and the values of the
        former colonizer's language and culture, stuns and terrorizes his
        Creole-speaking students. The teacher, like other French assimilationists,
        whom Chamoiseau calls ''slave traders of our artistic impulse,''
        systematically demeans Creole, humiliating and punishing those who do not
        adhere to the ''universal'' quality of French-centered traditions, values and
        symbols. The ''little black boy'' quickly learns that to survive he must keep
        silent. Chamoiseau uses as counterpoint one of his classmates who becomes
        the teacher's scapegoat. Big Bellybutton (his Creole name) initially resists
        the teacher's blows but is ultimately defeated.

        Despite his internalized racism, however, the teacher inculcates in
        Chamoiseau his love of language. Even if the references, metaphors and
        myths in the works of Sand, Daudet, Saint-Exupery, Chateaubriand or Hugo
        are alien to him, the magic of hearing the teacher reading aloud, and the
        teacher's reverence for books, constitute a legacy. ''School Days'' is a
        double tribute -- to the fearsome teacher who nevertheless gave him the gift
        of words, and to Big Bellybutton, who struggled to retain his identity and
        who stands in Chamoiseau's memory for the spirit and imagination of the
        Creole storyteller. The effort to reconcile these antagonistic influences
        accounts for Chamoiseau's distinct form of writing. Although he attacks the
        traditional concept of a ''universal'' purity of language and values and has
        gained literary fame for the creation of a colorful personal ''Caribbean''
        language, he has never denied his proud conquest of classic French.

        There is a note of irony in these two writers' complicated journeys toward
        French institutional acceptance: Semprun, a lifelong disciple of French
        language and literature, was denied election to the French Academy,
        officially because of his Spanish nationality (though his Communist past
        was also hinted at). As for Chamoiseau, despite his militant stance against
        ''l'hexagone,'' his books appear under the logo of the most illustrious
        Parisian publisher, Gallimard, and it is in France that his ''Texaco'' won the
        Goncourt Prize in 1992 and became an immediate best seller.

        Isabelle de Courtivron is involved in the development of
        bilingual-bicultural studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.