Vous écoutez RFI

Anna Gaca finally understands French, in a preview of LARB Quarterly no. 46: “Alien.”

By Anna GacaSeptember 22, 2025

• LARB Lit

• Cultural Studies

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly no. 46: Alien. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

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AS AN AMERICAN CHILD I was reading stuff like Jane Austen and Vanity Fair, not the magazine, so learning French just seemed the thing to do. How else to keep up when quintessentially English characters penned furtive missives to foreign paramours or ostentatiously switched to la langue de Molière mid-drawing room conversation? How else to become a writer oneself without the ability to import a few bons mots? I’d never seen a drawing room, but clearly the Western literary canon anticipated that I would, and when I got there, we’d be speaking French.

This worldview held up as well as most formed on the basis of three or four novels at a tender age and eventually I dropped French entirely. Then, with the admitted advantage of ten years as an A student, I decided to get it back. I enrolled in a course of refresher lessons at the local Alliance Française, pored over the quaint children’s classic Le petit Nicolas—he’s like Amelia Bedelia in Calvin’s body—and attended a handful of private tutoring sessions with an elegant Frenchwoman named Geneviève who was generous in complimenting my accent and whose services I feared I could not really afford to engage in the long term.

Among the next things I tried was “Journal en français facile” (News in Simple French), a ten-minute weekday program from Radio France International (RFI), the international public radio broadcaster (not to be confused with Radio France, the national public radio broadcaster). This, it turned out, was not so facile after all: the presenters seemed to speak about fifteen percent slower than usual and to explain perhaps three vocabulary words a week. But such impressions are rarely accurate when one understands only la moitié, the half, which was the most I could comprehend.

Failing at this avenue, I binged the entirety of a free podcast called InnerFrench, which advances from very easy in the first episode, when it was one guy’s amateur project, to medium easy in the present day, when it’s now a production of his language learning company. Recent episodes posed me little difficulty, but anticipating the value in gradual conditioning, I stuck it out and sincerely recommend, because at the end, I cued up the infernal “Journal en français facile” and understood nearly the whole thing. (Merci, Hugo.)

Once I’d started listening in French I couldn’t stop, incidentally a key principle of effective language learning—Hugo talks about this all the time—but also I just couldn’t stop. French-language audio was all I wanted to hear, a problem because my full-time job was music journalist. On est devenu accro (one became addicted), in the idiom employed by the beginner learners who recorded themselves for InnerFrench’s mercifully short-lived call-in segment. Soon I had exhausted the archive of the podcast and required a new source of input. Ten minutes “en français facile” could not offer sufficient volume and so I took what seemed the natural next step and tuned in to the regular live RFI broadcast and found that I understood, not everything, but enough still.

Quickly I did feel addicted to the station’s blend of intellectual reserve and almost evangelical welcome, as heard in the Mister Rogers–esque concept of the call-in discussion program 8 millard de voisins (8 Billion Neighbors), the way Claudy Siar saluted the listeners of African and diasporic music show Couleurs tropicales with “Bienvenue la famille nombreuse” (Welcoming the big family), the way environmental presenter Anne-Cécile Bras concluded episodes with, “Prenez soin de vous, de votre et du monde” (Take care of yourself, your loved ones and the world) and science host Caroline Lachowsky signed off by saying, “Surtout gardez l’esprit libre et ouvert à tous les possibles” (Above all, keep your mind free and open to all possibilities). I felt attached to these phrases, oft-repeated and thus readily understood, anchor points that became like emotional hooks. I fought technical difficulties to reach them, opening and reopening an app that disconnected with every switch from wi-fi and stubbornly defied Bluetooth, tapping through localized offers for drug rehab or luxury condos wondering if the fraction of a cent generated from this display ad was, somehow, being funneled to the government of France. When the public broadcasting union went out on strike the programming switched to all music and I was like, Solidarité, mes camarades and also like, I miss you guys.

“Journal en français facile,” I discovered, was only one of the ten-minute international news reports at the top of every hour, in addition to longer programs dedicated to events in mainland France, d’Outre-mer (Overseas France), Africa, and Haiti and the Americas. Even the stiffer newsreaders greeted the audience with a gracious, “Bonsoir, ou bonjour, tout dépend sur où vous écoutez RFI” (“Good evening, or good morning, that all depends where you’re listening to RFI”) or an even more expansive, “Bienvenue à toutes et à tous que vous soyez sur la planète” (“Welcome to everyone wherever you are on the planet”). From there, my comprehension wobbled by subject matter. Often I’d already read the day’s international headlines in English, while details of French national policy debate remained more obscure. Easiest to follow was music coverage, because intermediate language learning is, in a sense, a map of territory already best known. Football was nearly impenetrable, based on scoring rules I’d never followed and names I’d never seen in print.

Something magic about radio, something not quite passive about the medium, some way the listener is implicated in its creation: “to tune out” (se deconnecter) is to stop hearing. French radio required my total linguistic concentration: I could not accept any simultaneous form of written or verbal input, could not scroll social media, could not read so much as a television chyron, nor risk glimpsing any image novel enough to set off the persistently English-speaking internal narrator and thus break the thread of intelligibility. RFI became a flow state, the chimes announcing the hourly international news report a way of marking time through weekend afternoons. I heard programs on the history of AIDS activism in Paris, desertification in Burkina Faso, the griot tradition in Côte d’Ivoire, mining industry pollution in Québec, drug smuggling gangs in Marseille; an archival interview with the late Malian film director Souleymane Cissé and a recent one with the Italian novelist Donatella Di Pietrantonio.

RFI regularly proposed a subject hardly touched in my very American French education, with its extensive consideration of Louis XIV, Napoléon Bonaparte, and Victor Hugo: Francophone Africa and the diaspora, non-France French speakers in general; the events and concerns of formerly and currently colonized territories in Africa; in the Antilles; in New Caledonia; in Madagascar, Mayotte, and Réunion (this is not nearly an exhaustive list). French foreign-language education remains, in my experience, disproportionately focused on what’s less and less referred to as le métropole, though this is (somewhat reluctantly) changing to reflect the reality of a language also shaped by Arabic-speaking teens in Beirut and drill rappers from Kinshasa.

Perhaps the totality of RFI’s novelty is why it took me far too long to recognize the fact, in retrospect quite obvious and well-publicized, that much of its main service focuses on Francophone Africa, home to la moitié of its listenership. (Among the station’s other sixteen working languages are Hausa, Mandinka, Fula, and Swahili.) Here were international and non-Western perspectives, broadcast in French by the ancient imperial state. Decolonization was celebrated and regularly in the news: Britain gave up control of its final African colony in the Chagos Islands in October 2024. Uprisings over the cost of living in New Caledonia culminated this year in negotiations to create a new autonomous French state. Interviewers sometimes closed by asking subjects to share a favorite proverb in their native language and its French translation.

On RFI music wove in more naturally and generously than I was accustomed to on American radio, with its truncated “bumpers” and binary divisions of programming by hour and frequency band. Here songs played at full length mid-talk show and interviewees on science or political programs sometimes introduced a personal musical selection themed to the day’s topic. In some cases the jazz-festival-crowd-pleasing tendencies of public radio music programming extended across continents: Angélique Kidjo, Craig David, Femi Kuti, and, on more than one occasion, “Uptown Funk.” In other moments RFI served up songs not quite like anything I’d heard before: the multilingual Côte d’Ivoirian rapper DJ Sara’s ridiculously hard “DJ Sara Freestyle (Décalé Yorobo)” (“I could flood you down for your next wife”) or Cameroonian singer-songwriter Donny Elwood’s blisteringly ironic populist anti-war protest “Mon cousin militaire.” Whatever the obscenity standards might have been in French, seemingly none existed in English: Where else, I thought with pride, could you find serious interviews with the prime minister of Albania, the former Spanish ambassador to France, and the respective representatives of France’s far-right and far-left political parties, as well as a banger Jamaican dancehall track about flinging pussy, such as Skillibeng’s “Boom,” featuring Tokischa?

One hears of Americans who attest to following, for example, BBC News or Al Jazeera English in order to hear an international perspective on the U.S., to escape the cynical commercial stranglehold of our newstainment complex and the psychological dysfunction of our local television. There is value in this approach, but consider also that such channels are formed in part to sell themselves to you: while the angle and focus may differ from the major national outlets, any publication that puts resources behind English-language international coverage considers the interests of its largest potential audience. French-language international radio for Africa does not, a comparison demonstrated in miniature on RFI’s own web-only English homepage, where the stories skew broader and the French-language live stream doesn’t show up.

Live on RFI, American politics finally seemed to appear in their appropriate dimensions and context: on some level inescapable, never less so than recently, and yet somehow less determinative, as if many other discussions and ways of life yet remained open. I heard the name Donald Trump often but not constantly (though des droits de douane—tariffs—dragged on for months). Gradually the station became my main source of international current events, tracing the contours of a globe that felt closer to the true shape of the world: Death and famine in Gaza leading the news daily; Cannes obviously bigger than the Oscars; a conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo that I barely saw in English-language headlines; the most popular sports being international soccer, international tennis, and (logically enough to me) American basketball. If the balance of my information diet now included more coverage of affairs in Francophone Africa and the Caribbean, this seemed the appropriate remedy for previous ignorance, what the French might describe as la discrimination positive (affirmative action). I started a French West Indian dancehall playlist and picked up a copy of the anticolonial activist Andrée Blouin’s memoir, My Country, Africa.

In another sense, though, RFI was intended for me: for those who want to learn French. Meeting this demand remains a project of imperial soft power in various forms, among them RFI, the “Journal en français facile,” official cultural promotion agency l’Institut Français, and non-governmental cultural embassy l’Alliance Française. No one wants you to learn French more than France (except for Canada, which is practically desperate). I wondered if my local l’Alliance membership would be honored abroad. I wondered if, when my elders said there’d never be a good reason to speak French, they ever considered how many more people I could talk to in Africa and the Caribbean.

Over months of listening I felt my own speaking skills atrophy yet I uncovered new subtleties of speech: distinguishing Caribbean, West African, or Québécois accents, reasonably confident by ear that one speaker was a native Anglophone with advanced French and another was a native Francophone with advanced English. Entirely English-speaking interviewees quickly faded into French translation, a spark of fluency followed by instant task redirection. Certain terms that I rarely encountered in daily American life came to feel more immediately familiar in French, sounding a strange colonial echo as European language claimed foreign-to-me territory: “Maghreb” and “Sahel,” la Centrafrique (Central African Republic), l’Afrique lusophone (Lusophone Africa). And the absurd Anglicisms: le zapping for channel surfing, le wokeism (God help us), the borderline unrecognizable collisions of vowels and intonations in phrases like “deep fakes” or “Mariah Carey.”

From the opposite edge of the hemisphere I found myself continually out of sync, tuning in at hours never anticipated. Evening news landed at lunchtime, nighttime programming kicked in midafternoon. Certain shows, on topics including food, electronic music, and North Africa, I never encountered; perhaps I would have had to invert my whole schedule. If my account is lopsided, apologies; to me the greatest discoveries of RFI were historical specials on Couleurs tropicales, with playlists celebrating 177 years since abolition in Guadeloupe or the archive of music commemorating Congolese independence; the grands reportages, feature-length field reports on Colombian mercenaries in Ukraine, Gen Z teens from North Korea, or the superhero industry in Nigeria; the impossibly French-sounding Pascal Paradou, host of De vive(s) voix (Out Loud), an arts and poetry show with a cold open and an implausibly high vibe; and a short program titled Pourquoi RFI dit ça ? (Why does RFI say that?) that served as newsroom ombudsman, responding to audience questions about editorial methods and standards.

According to a guest I once heard on an RFI program, when you identify with something, such as a goal or a role in life, and struggle but cannot achieve it, this represents aliénation from the object of your identification. Alienation on the far side of language and cultural barriers, understanding within them. On RFI I heard the architecture of the vintage imperial enterprise as well as the cultural legacy of contemporary anticolonial movements, the mission of influence balanced against the mission of public service, a series of links and compromises we may perceive to have outlasted similarly complicated American institutions such as the public editor at the paper of record and our own overseas media operations. A facile way, if you will, to frame the question: What do we give up in the American press’s loss of integrity, the defunding of our public media, and the shutdown of our foreign broadcasters? What trust is lost, what intimate connections with language, with culture, with auditory experience? Which possible conversations are foreclosed? And a second thought: You can go and find out, you can hear for yourself.

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Featured image: Ross Lynn Freeny (DOE - Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management). Buffalo Mnt. 2005 Radio Tower, April 28, 2005. Flickr, CC0, flickr.com. Accessed September 18, 2025. Image has been cropped.