“I have a significant debt to this territory, this society, this nation, but any debt deserves to be questioned, any heritage requires to be weighed”, writes Pierre Nepveu in Near Country Geographies, his last attempt. Bearing as subtitle Poet and citizen in a plural Quebecit is the double point of view that he claims.
Through these dozen texts in which it is above all a question of proximity and belonging – but also of literature and poetry – Pierre Nepveu felt the need to evoke, through his itinerary and that of the family of ” modest middle class” from which he comes, his own experience of Quebec.
The nation, for me, today, cannot be a pure transcendence. The expression “unitary nation” that we find in some essayists prevents us from thinking about the reality of Quebec as it is.
“I lived in a family where the Quebec reference was very important, in terms of responsibility”, says the poet, essayist and novelist – and biographer of Gaston Miron – born in Montreal in 1946, who remembers that his father read “religiously” The duty each morning. “I was accustomed very early to hear about political debates that concerned Quebec. References like André Laurendeau or Claude Ryan were important, sometimes in disagreement, but always with the feeling that there was an attempt to think about our political, social and also, to a certain extent, cultural reality. »
With his literary perspective, he navigates on sight between the Quebec of yesterday and that of today, of which he thinks “sometimes the best, sometimes the worst”. He notes inspiring intellectual and social advances, while deploring, he writes, “areas of mediocrity, sterile identity tensions, persistent social inequalities, cultural and spiritual carelessness”.
Essays which form a sort of “autobiography of the mind” — to use the title of a book by Élise Turcotte — in which the poet and essayist revisits his personal journey, in which he approaches translation, the idea of nation, transcendence or geographical awareness. A book he dedicates to the memory of François Ricard, “indispensable first reader and critical companion”, who died in February of this year.
An “ecologist of the real”
“Was it possible, in such a tightly knit world, to experience the slightest change of scenery? asks Pierre Nepveu. He will find it during his studies in Montpellier, France, then in Toronto, Gatineau, Vancouver and Sherbrooke, before returning to teach, from 1978 to 2009, in the French studies department of the University of Montreal. Each of his travels and each of his experiences will nourish in him “the feeling of the plurality of languages”, despite a visceral attachment to the French language. He who was one of the first, in the wake of Jean Le Moyne (1913-1996), through the trials of‘New World Interiors (Boréal, 1998, Governor General’s Award), to think about our Americanness, to probe the complex ties that unite us to this continent that is both “intimate and unknown”.
This reader of Rabelais, Miron and Emily Dickinson, who describes himself as a “rooted cosmopolitan”, adopts on his own account a formula of Marco Micone, which he believes does not apply only to immigrants: “We are not born not Quebecers, we become one. »
Contrary to a certain Quebec nationalist discourse which, operating in a reductive way, does not always take this dimension into account, it seemed as important to the author of Readings of places (Boréal, 2004) to probe our relationship to the territory. “There has been a kind of evolution, and even revolution, which is undoubtedly due to ecology, but not only, which means that culture is now also rooted in this territory, with all its diversity. »
In this respect, the coincidence between the Amerindian philosophy of the territory and ecology seems to him obvious, if not fundamental.
We will have to, he believes, move from “The earth belongs to me” to “I belong to the earth”. “It completely reverses a relationship that we know well, that of the exploitation of resources with no other concern than to make a profit, a relationship of possession. For me, along with feminism, it’s one of the great contemporary revolutions,” says Pierre Nepveu.
And it is literature and the imagination that reinvent, he believes, the spaces we inhabit. This is what he himself did, as a poet and a citizen, in Overhead lines (Le Noroît, 2002, Governor General’s Prize), where his poems took as background the construction of Mirabel airport.
“The nation, for me, today, it cannot be a pure transcendence. The expression “unitary nation” that one finds in certain essayists prevents us from thinking of the Quebec reality as it is, he believes, that is to say a very pluralistic reality, and not only in terms ethics, but also in terms of regions and places. This sensitivity is very important, adds Pierre Nepveu, because it is the world we live in, the world we can improve, the one on which it is possible to act. »
The poetic sentiment of the world
And while the society of identities can be problematic, he acknowledges, he refuses to accept the idea that specific grievances — whether about racism or the treatment of the elderly — necessarily work, in ignorance. and indifference, against the nation. “Do we really want an ethical society where we take care of the most deprived? The idea of always opposing specific claims to national cohesion, for me, it is harmful, ”thinks the writer, who says he is close in this to the thinking of Gérard Bouchard.
A desire to debunk a few myths, to spark debate, which we already found in the essays ofThe ecology of reality (Boréal, 1988), where he sought to decompartmentalize Quebec literature, mixing reflections on modernity and the national question. He who was also, among us, one of the first to take an interest in migrant literature. Another way, in short, to open up to the ecology of reality — in the sense of the relationship of living beings with their environment.
On this question, Pierre Nepveu says he was “strongly influenced” by the thought of Octavio Paz, who very early on led him to consider poetry as an ethical and civic act. “Every place is the same and nowhere is everywhere,” wrote the Mexican writer. “The fundamental idea in Octavio Paz is that poetry presupposes otherness. Poetry takes place when our emotions are projected into something other than the poet himself,” explains the essayist. And he can turn it into a landscape, like when Miron, in The walk to lovesays to the beloved woman: “I roll in you / all the black water Saguenays of my life”.
As an “ecologist of the real”, advancing with the deep conviction that everything is interrelated, Pierre Nepveu invites us to cultivate the “poetic feeling of the world”.
Because “despite the cries, the tears, the howls, writes Pierre Nepveu, there is a dignity of human speech, an ethics of forms which is also a hope of sociality”.