I recently finished A Study in Drowning, by Eva Reid, and this is not a review of the book itself. Instead, it's a little rant to express my disappointment and whatever sort of hurt I've been feeling about it that I haven't been able to express properly.
I picked up the book because of the dark academia vibes and the Welsh-sounding names. When I started reading it, I thought some of the names sounded Breton, a Celtic language that's very close to Welsh from the Celtic nation of Brittany, a region in the north west of France. I didn't really think much of it at first, the two languages have a lot of overlap and I thought the author had just taken some artistic license with it, particularly as its spelling lends itself very well to fantasy names.
I kept reading when I stumbled upon words that looked awfully familiar. Just here, on the page, was a whole-ass quote in Breton. At first I was pretty happy about it, it's not every day that I see my culture represented in books, and certainly not in international literature!
But something didn't sit quite right with me, and it took me a little while to figure out what it was. The first thing is that in the book, Breton is completely co-opted as a made up language, Argantian. That wouldn't have been too problematic if it hadn't felt like it had been pitted against the fake Welsh from the book, Llyrian, because of the characters' situations. But what really got me was that there was absolutely zero mention of the borrowing of the language anywhere from the author. It's not in any acknowledgements that I've seen, it's not mentioned by her in interviews, it's just… nothing.
And this is the part that hurt, because Breton is a language that is classified as severely endangered by the UNESCO. It's a language from a region and a people that have been vilified and reduced to nothing by the French government for centuries. My grandparents were beaten at school when they were caught speaking it. You can't use Breton letters in names you want to give your French children to this day and until recently, Breton names were sometimes straight up denied. France is still trying to stop the efforts that have been made to make Breton relevant again, to preserve the language and the culture that go with it, because it's just not French enough.
And Eva Reid had this absolutely perfect opportunity to give it a little light, to show people that it existed, that the efforts made to keep that part of Brittany alive were worth it. To mention that she'd enjoyed the poetry of the language and that it wasn't a made up fantasy invention that had come out of nowhere. Instead, she took it, probably straight from the Wikiquote page about Breton proverbs, made it into whatever worked for her without a thought to the history and the culture behind the language, and didn't even acknowledge it. I don't even know if I can call it cultural appropriate, but it certainly felt like it.
So there I end my rant, still a little hurt but with no real recourse than grumbling about it on the internet. If anyone who works with her reads this, I hope you'll do better next time you get inspired by a little-known Celtic culture and acknowledge it properly. You don't know how much that might help it grow and stay alive.
by Akatchuk