Tomorrow will be Father’s Day. We will celebrate them in a completely different tone than that which usually surrounds Mother’s Day, very reverent, flowers, honey… Father’s Day, if we trust the advertising with which we are bombarded to celebrate dad, is more BBQ and chainsaw. Let’s say that for the gift, we will go shopping at the Tired Canadian rather than at the florist…
I will tell you about my father.
He would have been exactly 100 this year. By the end of the summer, he’ll have been dead for 10 years. He retired at a time when workers were given five years of life after the fateful 65th birthday. Yet he worked hard, a longshoreman at the Port of Montreal at a time when all the transfer of goods was done on the backs of men, when they carried pockets of asbestos without any protection. Several of his comrades died of asbestosis or cancer.
I want to celebrate it, by talking to you about transfer and social classes.
Francesco had a dented, particular course. Northern Italian, Venetian. Italy was only 62 when he was born. He experienced the harshness of the post-First World War in the countryside, his father’s exile in the Alsatian mines. He was 16 when World War II broke out. He was enlisted, on the wrong side of history, on the edge of Mussolini, sent to North Africa, taken prisoner by the English. After, immigration to France with his family to work as a miner, misery and dirty work, dangerous. Then arrived in Canada in the 1950s, no doubt in search of a better life.
He met my mother in 1960, had two daughters and worked days, evenings, often nights, weekends, earning a very modest living, but upright and proud.
He was silent.
It’s probably generational, but very revealing of his personality. Of his unique career, he said little. Every bit of his story had to be squeezed out of him. He spoke only when no one was listening, like in an emergency, spilling an overflow. From his personal chronology, I learned more by consulting his identity papers: his first Canadian passport, his enlistment documents in the Italian army, at his death, than by listening to him. I do the math: he didn’t go to school for long, the war has come. Why had he chosen America, Canada, French? He was not part of the great and powerful wave of Italian immigration that fled the South after the war. He came alone.
Speaking of him, I evoke an old world, long gone, made of injustices, sacrifices and wrenchings. A world that many have wanted to flee to keep only the best and offer it as a bouquet to their descendants. They knew their new life would be difficult, but their children would take root in a new land.
These values, I find them the same today, in the quest of current immigrants. There is something powerful in the sacrifice of these people who think of those to come rather than themselves.
There was therefore a time when the immigrant forgot himself, even if he thought none the less. He was thinking about the second generation, and the possible class transgression that he ardently wished for his children. And this is still what immigrants dream of, even humiliated, even invisible, at the end of their journey. Dream better.
When he started a family, my father broke with his community. We did not live in Saint-Léonard, THE Italian district at the beginning of 1960. We would not go to English school as was very often the case in those pre-Law 101 years. be that countries are not immutable.
As he got older, my father understood the world around him less and less. He certainly had his head. Pneumonia will win. His heart was already struggling, having paid the price of a harsh life, peopled with heartbreaks. He felt that his values were losing their place and their importance.
He had seen his dream of a second country get lost, and was told that it was because of ethnic votes…
This disappearing world was that of the silent generation, known as the “builders”, in reference to the reforming elites who laid the foundations of modern Quebec. It would also be necessary to include all these workers, these workers who have physically built this Quebec that is livable all the same. And thank them. They were the cohort of humble, silent people who gave birth to the following generations, and who saw that their dream of a sweeter life for their children was about to come. Everyone rejoiced, immigrants and purebreds alike.
My father bequeathed the most precious thing to me: determination, the desire to get to know others. The naivety of believing that one can act on one’s world, too. He has, despite his background, pursued his dream through his daughters. Her silence made us people who express themselves, my sister through art, me through words.
My dad would have been 100 this year.