Geographer of the Americas and encounters, essayist, philosopher and poet, Jean Morisset died Thursday, at the age of 84, after having crisscrossed the Far North and traveled the continent for miles at the wheel of his eternal Westfalia. Author of On the Trail of Wandering Canada (Boréal, 2018),Deliberate Haiti (Mémoire d’encrier, 2011) and Cursed silence (L’Hexagone, 2022) signed with his great friend Chloé Sainte-Marie, Morisset was a fine connoisseur of indigenous peoples and languages. He “collected the words, the movement, the languages and the music of each person”, as the author Nancy Huston recalled.
Jean Morisset “is a geographer of a type that is no longer made”, according to the colleague at Duty Jean-François Nadeau, “in the tradition of Kenneth White’s geopoetics, which combined poetry, language, literature, culture with geography”. Mr. Nadeau, at the dawn of the 2000s, published Americas (with Éric Waddell, L’Hexagone).
This type of Serge Bouchard, coming from geography rather than anthropology, is for Dalie Giroux “the first thinker of decolonial thought in Quebec. »
“Jean Morisset wrote open letters to the Dutywhere he argues that thinking of an independent Quebec without collaboration with indigenous peoples is hitting the wall,” recalls the author ofA civilization on fire.
Generous, extravagant, with tightly curled white hair, colorful knitted Peruvian sweaters, bones in his neck and intellectual provocations, he leaves his books: Métis Witness to the North (1987), Dogs devour… Indians, Whites and Metis in the Canadian Far North (1977 and Mémoire d’Encrier, 2009), Polar songspresented by Nancy Huston (Leméac, 2002) and Deliberate Haiti (Memoir of Encrier, 2011), among others.
But Jean Morisset leaves above all a reflection based on encounters, the link to others. “His thinking was geohistorical,” analyzes Dalie Giroux. “When he thinks of Quebec, for example, he thinks of the river. »
“Its geography is the opposite of that of institutions; she thinks of herself horizontally, through encounters and literature”, and her work will thus navigate, almost by choice, in the margins, and among all literary genres.
“Its geography says that its life, our lives, are allied to the continent”, to the Americas; and that the River connects us as much to the sea, to the Caribbean” – Haiti is essential in its journey and its thought – to Louisiana, as to the rest of Canada, and even further.
Rituals, friendships and travels
A sailor on icebreakers in the Canadian Far North and responsible for surveys offshore of the tundra during the 1960s, he then embarked for Peru, Guatemala, Alaska and the Amazon, to begin with. Throughout his life he was a great traveler, in love with the people of the First Nations and Brazil.
His travel diaries, as pointed out by all the interlocutors of the Duty, are true visual works. “Every day”, recalls Mme Giroux, “he would get up at 4:30 or 5 a.m., light a candle, and write. Everything for him, each encounter, became material, and was added to his monster manuscripts, which cannot be edited, and to his reflection.
“He had so many notebooks in his drawers, so many and so many. He collected all the pieces of wood and words that he gathered in his temple in Saint-Michel de Bellechasse”, confirms the editor Rodney Saint-Éloi, of Mémoire d’Encrier, who subsequently describes it as “a kind of wild writer, like FrankÉtienne, who puts their genius in every word. It’s actually sublime. »
“Creativity was dripping from every pore,” recalled author Nancy Huston. His meeting with Jean Morisset? In 1993, Nancy Huston won the GG Novel Prize for Song of the Plainss (Leméac Actes Sud). This is her author’s version, in French, of Plainsongalso published the same year.
Outcry in Quebec: five major publishers believe that the prize was given to a bilingual work rather than a French-speaking one, a novel which could only have won the English-speaking or translation GG. A heated debate ensued.
“It was a very difficult start to public life in Quebec,” recalls M.me Huston. “Jean wrote to me [alors qu’ils ne se connaissent pas] to support me, in his own humorous way. He said I helped dissolve boundaries. A flawless friendship was born, around books and trips together in Brazil.
Or to see the tar sands of the author’s native Alberta. “His presence and his gaze in this infernal universe, in my home, among the most sinful places on earth, were essential. »
In the flow of the night
Poetry for Jean Morisset is a laboratory, believes Mme Giroux, which allowed him to express more directly what he had to express. “You who only seek / the absolute pleasure / of an endless question / in the flow of the night”, he writes in Polar songs.
“There was in him a refusal to separate science from life, life from art, science from art, and from the others — all those on the continent. »
Not always well received among literary scholars, because he puts forward theses, not taken seriously among geographers because voluntarily a troublemaker, Jean Morisset left, as we saw when his death was announced, a wake of strong friendships, among creators and intellectuals of all kinds.
“I believe that his thoughts will continue to travel,” predicts Dalie Giroux. “ On the Trail of Wandering Canada [qu’elle a édité] is truly a great book. »