“At the beginning you just come back to bury your parents”, writes JP Chabot in the first lines of the Way from aboveas its protagonist makes the road from Montreal to the Haut Pays, to Rivière-Bleue, crossing bridges, “four hours of fields roped one over the other before ending up in the hole in the forest”.
The rest, we already know. The nostalgia of the horns and the loves of the city, the paperwork to be signed, the memories that disarticulate childhood, the neighbors who come to settle their last scores, the stories and the secrets that are exchanged between two big bowlers of Laurentians, the mourning that refuses to be fleeting, weighed down by things left unsaid, late discoveries, disappointments. Then, something holds us back: the identity which is cracking, which seeks in its new crevices the paths of the future.
By exploiting a theme almost overused in Quebec literature — that of the return to the land — JP Chabot delves into the vagaries of our collective memory to better show the cyclical tenor of our history. In the fading murmur of a sawmill, in the exile of a youth trying to avoid being crushed by this inevitable wheel, the writer sketches the sketches of a future as irrevocable as the past.
The mourning, here, is not that of a glorious past of valiant and resourceful settlers, but rather that of the ideation of an era, no matter which one seems the rosiest to us. Because if it is wrong to believe that everything was better before, the present and the future do not flourish either under the promises.
The author recounts, in a dense, exuberant, oral narration, the spoliation of bodies and territories, the looting and commodification of these exhaustible resources, their decrepitude, their rebellion that we strive – individually and collectively – to anesthetize with large swigs of alcohol, demagoguery or public relations. He recounts this denial which, as death approaches, increasingly takes on the guise of regret.
“You spend your life walking straight, spinning gently. To do your business in the sense of the world. You follow your line, your little line of nothing, you don’t pick up an inch. Another day, you do your own thing. You spend your life, you think you spend your quiet life drinking your pay without saying a word, you don’t mix your underpants with your stockings, and in the end it’s your life that gives you a pass. You go for a ride, the ice splits, the lake swallows you, you don’t come back. You’re not cold for a second. All the useless hours of your life for that salary. »
Death, whether human, societal, political or environmental, becomes a vehicle for the writer to explore filiation and transmission. It is easy to see in the disappearance of a life, a project or a vision the sign of its transience and its insignificance, reinforcing cynicism and standing still. Rather, JP Chabot finds, in the personal and literary past, the traces of what survives the passage of time, drawing from it the strength to be part of the present and to go beyond the ephemeral.