Ten years ago, on April 7, 2012, in the feverish beginnings of the student spring, stood WE ?a unique speaking event bringing together on the same stage, in the same place, as many people as it takes to reflect and discuss together on this question: how to make visible, effective the freedom that characterizes us and that escapes us the same time ?
For 12 hours that day, at the Monument-National in Montreal, people entered it like a mill, to come and find something simple and vital like bread, a common word, a miracle, to tell the truth.
It’s because the public square in Quebec is a desert, and the student spring for many of us seemed like an oasis of greenery, as unexpected as it was unheard of. No mention was made of that, of that reality, indubitably, in the obligatory reminders that were served to us last March, in the various media, to underline the ten years of this historic moment.
The historic character, worthy of remembrance, of the student spring was nowhere to be found, in these journalistic duties, in these hurried pensums, as we say of pressed ham; desertification was at work in this fast news served in French, at work, the silting up of an imperishable memory, alive, vivid in me, as in so many others, I guess.
As if the essential disappeared before this ordinary violence done to memory, a vivid memory like a weed, like tares, like the intoxication of living. From this plant, harmful to good grain as well as to well-meaning, we made a bread that nourished the body and the soul, a bread for strikers of the end, a bread to break once and for all enchantment, bewitchment, to put an end to desertification.
Of joy, there was no mention anywhere in the newspapers, but of slices of life, of a gouged out eye, of a frustrated ex-minister, of a spokesperson turned deputy, the boredom on each page spread over these sliced breads that are newspapers; ordinary violence, sad song, little end-of-the-world music, of this endless world.
The desertification of souls is as tragic as that of public places, as that of large natural spaces, the same privatization affects us intimately and politically. Ecology, the real thing, is to say it. Arranging places to say it is also that, the environment. Buying carbon-neutral actions as a gift at Christmas, like indulgences in the past, to earn your paradise, gives absolutely nothing. Shames us. Who is shame for?
Newspapers, the world is dripping with guilt and contempt, morality, joy is nowhere. Rage is everywhere, the rage to live, nowhere. Eco-anxiety is the dizziness that seizes those who know they are surrounded by lost, thwarted people.
Joy occupied us for a whole spring, ten years ago. She had no age or gender, and it was youth that set her in motion. I remember.
To think outside the political norm, a binarity as morbid as that of the genres, the same in truth—sovereignty-federalism, right-left-right-left, military, the norm, crazy and desertifying—to challenge the norm, that was reveal the power that defends it and depends on it, a power that has become natural over time, that is to say, indisputable, divine and delirious. To thwart power by defying the norm was to live and talk, for a single long day like a spring, in full light. That’s what we did ten years ago.
This living memory that I know how to share with many, very many, countless others, this is what I wish to celebrate today, in this spring of 2022. Who are they, all these people who dream in the shadows? What is this silent, enormous, invisible world? Who are we ? What are we?
I remember. Who are we ? Who am I when I really remember? The people.
And the people are another, to paraphrase the poet.