France, Take 3: Avignon

This is a post I never thought I’d write. When I left France two years ago, circumstances were…complicated, to say the least. (If you don’t know what happened in my life back then, I will not be explaining it here. Long story short, let’s just say I lost little pieces of my heart all over France.) I didn’t know if I’d come back some day.

But after two years of not using French on a regular basis—especially having little opportunity to listen to and speak it—my French has rusted and I have vocabulary gaps everywhere. Not particularly ideal for someone in grad school for French literature, or for someone who’s going to start teaching college kids in the fall. Luckily, my advisor suggested I apply to the Institut d’Avignon, an intensive six-week summer program run by Bryn Mawr College, and here we are. Avignon! Another 47 days in France!

I flung my entire summer stipend across the Atlantic and into France, but hopefully the experience will be worth it. I’ll be in Avignon from June 6 to July 21, then in Paris visiting L from July 21-23. In Avignon, I’m taking two classes, Mémoire(s) francophone(s) and Deus ex Machina : Métamorphoses des mythes antiques sur la scène française. The former course will complement my interest in Francophone literature and questions of women’s resistance, while the latter course includes performances at the famed Avignon Theater Festival and archival work, which I’ll need to learn eventually as a PhD student. (Also, call me a nerd, okay, but Percy Jackson was my middle school childhood and I have a soft spot for classical mythology.) The program also includes excursions to nearby villages, and I’ve dearly missed traveling. It’s just not the same in America. Everything tends to be…so shiny and new.

I never got the experience of studying abroad through a program—when I studied abroad in Nice, I was dropped off and left to my own devices. It’ll be interesting to see how this compares to my first study abroad experience; I’ll be here a shorter time but with more fluent French. Junior year of college, I barely had literature classes, and the only one I took required regurgitation and trying to guess the professor’s interpretation of the texts, which is not the proper way to teach literature. This time, I get American academia. I’ve also never been in France during the summer before—both of the previous times, I arrived in September and left in May. But this time, I’m lucky to have met someone who did TAPIF in Avignon, and she gave me plenty of recommendations. Whether this will be my last time in France remains a question that currently has no answer, seeing as I’m more interested in Francophone than in French literature and would like to travel to the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and/or Africa one day. We’ll see.