Teeth of fortune, by Fanie Demeule | Digging up the past

In his new novel, Makeshift teethFanie Demeule immersed herself in the past to trace the story of her maternal great-grandmother, who left the Magdalen Islands in the 1930s to make a life for herself in Montreal.

Throughout her life, this grandmother, who died a few years before the writer’s birth, was discreet about the trials she had been through, believing that they were not worth telling her children and grandchildren about.

“My great-grandmother Lauretta was very ashamed of her past. She called it the time of misery,” confides the author of Mukbang And Digging up the bones.

This elusive part of history has nevertheless always fascinated Fanie Demeule who, in her novels, loves more than anything to “dissect what we want to keep quiet”. Helped by her mother and her maternal grandmother, she gradually pieced together pieces of history before imagining the rest.

“She started working as a maid for a wealthy Englishman. My grandmother didn’t know if he was a surgeon, a notary or some other illustrious personage, and we have no idea how long she stayed there.”

Lauretta – alias Laura in the novel – left her island of Havre-Aubert when the economic situation was catastrophic in the archipelago, during the Great Depression. She thus took, without knowing it and a few months apart, the same path as the man who would become her husband, whom she met in Montreal at the home of a widow who organized “Madelinots evenings”.

“She was a bit caught between a rock and a hard place in the Islands,” explains Fanie Demeule. Her position as the seventh child of the same sex in the family gave her, according to beliefs, a gift of divination that she had difficulty carrying. “At the same time, she wanted to help her family, so the solution she found was to go into exile to escape this kind of inner suffocation.”

Back to the Islands

With no written traces of her ancestor, the writer searched the historical and genealogical archives of the Magdalen Islands to try to understand the period — among other things, as part of a creative residency there. She also expanded her research on the history of Montreal, as well as the long journey by boat to Halifax, then by train, that awaited the many Magdalen Islanders who left in the 1930s.

While some of them returned to the archipelago, his great-grandmother turned the page and ended up settling in Longueuil, where she gave birth to her children and saw her grandchildren grow up.

“Her relationship with the Islands is really not something she liked to talk about,” notes Fanie Demeule, “while for us, it is a source of pride today to delve into this heritage.” Her parents even bought the ancestral home in Havre-Aubert in 2005, which allowed the Longueuil author to visit there frequently since her adolescence.

Besides the challenge of remaining faithful to the language of the time in the dialogues, the writer faced another major obstacle.

It was finally her mother who convinced her to move forward by telling her how much she loved to read and valued literature.

In short, telling the story of this anxious and hypersensitive young woman “who always feels like all sorts of curses and twists of fate await her” allowed her to highlight her agency, concludes Fanie Demeule. And perhaps even to bring some balm to this problematic relationship she had with her past. “Literature allows us to cauterize these pasts that are seen as being troubled. It’s a somewhat existential reflection, basically, on our share of decision-making power over what happens.”

Makeshift teeth

Fanie Demeule

Hammock

320 pages