There was Jean-Paul Sartre and the Café de Flore. Émile Zola and the Opera district. Stephen King and Castle Rock. Or Anne Hébert and Kamouraska. Great writers have always been associated with spaces, neighborhoods and landscapes that have marked their works. In this summer series, The duty visit, in the company of four Quebec authors, the places that inspired them.
When Nelly Desmarais moved to the corner of Cuvillier and Sainte-Catherine, in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district, after a particularly difficult breakup, she felt a shock. The cries—of longing, of distress, of drunkenness—that rouse her from sleep, in the middle of the night. Sex workers, who haunt the sidewalks like the imagination.
Misery is there, tenacious, threatening, mysterious. It manifests itself, echoes the tumults that the writer goes through, the feeling of failure, of mourning, of emptiness, of grief. To heal, she knows, she must take to the streets, join this colorful fauna which screams its suffering, walk the alleys, learn the torments, the mazes and the dead ends.
“Here the sidewalks are wider than my back / the bodies planted in the center / speak a language that tells / all that it will take to destroy / to see the sky”, she writes in the collection Walk in a low voice (Le Quartanier, 2022), where she recounts this reverberation, this eternal exchange between her soul and the stories of the neighborhood.
It is therefore in front of her old apartment, which she has since left to settle a little further north of Hochelaga, that she meets The duty, on a beautiful summer afternoon. Dressed in long denim overalls and aviator sunglasses, Nelly Desmarais displays a radiant smile that is unmistakable: it is here, in Hochelaga, that she found her voice. Her voice of a poet like her voice of a woman.
“Here, I made all kinds of encounters that allowed me to wipe the slate clean of my life before, and to choose a way of life that better suits my values. I made committed friends, who seek to live differently, by choice, by necessity or a bit of both. I have met people who choose mutual aid, community rather than individualism. It seems anecdotal, but when I run in Hochelag’, there is always someone who encourages me or gives me a high five. It’s as if there were less distance between people, as if the history of the places made them more united. »
Take time
This ability to bring places and history back to the intimate, Nelly Desmarais attributes it to the process of introspection and therapy that she began at the time, which forced her to slow down, to take the time to observe and feel. “You have to slow down to let yourself be touched by a place. The real gaze implies a form of projection and makes it possible to make oneself available and permeable to what it arouses. It becomes a real exchange. »
“When I don’t I felt no, I felt like no one wanted to see it. I was given ready-made sentences: eat well, play sports, go out in nature. If it didn’t work, I was a failure. We have a hard time dealer with suffering collectively. I realized that the precariousness that I saw around me also aroused indifference. It made me live a lot of anger, this rejection of everything that is not beautiful and licked. »
We make a first stop, in the alley that overlooks the courtyard of his old apartment. “Hi Oliver! asks the writer to a man who is preparing the canvas for a mural on a brick wall. He’s my previous owner. »
It seems anecdotal, but when I run in Hochelag’, there is always someone who encourages me or gives me a high five
Places are heavy with meaning. It is in this alley that Nelly Desmarais started over. In this alley, too, she screamed to death to free herself from the clutches of a repeat offender, who had attacked her one night when she was returning from a drawing session at a friend’s house. “It took me nearly a year to heal from this attack. I had post-traumatic shock syndrome. When I was followed in the street, my body had involuntary reactions; I was shaking, I was screaming. I lived in constant fear of being killed. To free myself from it, I took a self-defense course. It gave me back a form of power, a tool to defend myself. »
To better understand what surrounded her and what it awakened in her, the author also offered herself a dive into the history of the district. In particular, she recounts the convent of Hochelaga — a religious educational establishment destroyed in 1970 — and the days regulated to quarter turns, the weight of the sins of its tenants, the search for absolution, like something to leave, to leave behind so that you can begin the new beginning. “farewell regulated life / to the hour / what flows below / will be my contribution / to the study of the saints / I whisper / in spite of everything / amen. »
Sitting on a bench in Square Dézéry, she points to a church, built on the ashes of the Laurier Palace theatre. In this cinema – as she recounts in her collection – 77 children lost their lives in 1927, asphyxiated or crushed, when a fire broke out and held captive the young spectators seated on the balcony, delighted to be able to watch to all the screenings in exchange for ten cents.
“In a superb documentary by Gilles Trudeau Dauphin on this tragedy, there is a map that shows all the addresses where the victims lived. Most lived in this part, south of Ontario Street. That is to say that everyone was in mourning. »
As we continue on our way, she adds: “You can’t guess, walking here, that it was the economic and historical heart of the area. The disturbing strangeness that reigned here when I arrived always led me to believe that the neighborhood had not come to terms with its mourning, as if it were haunted by this event. »
In Hochelaga, Nelly Desmarais discovered shock, pain, fear, violence, difference but, above all, love and the path towards oneself and towards the other. “We often say that writing is an interior place, but to get there, we must first find what drives us to write. This is what Hochelaga represents in my trajectory. Living here has allowed me to understand what is important to me, what I want to fight for and the way to touch and be touched. »