Once a month, from the pens of Quebec writers, Le Devoir de literature offers to revisit works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature in the light of current events. Discoveries? Proofreadings? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec with the complicity of the Duty.
On March 9, 1921, Louis Dantin (1865-1945) dared to assert, writing to Olivar Asselin: “Except for the color, I am as Negro as all of them. » Nowadays, anyone who does not know Louis Dantin would condemn him doubly: for the use of the n-word and, moreover, as a white person usurping an identity. Unforgivable double fault, for which the guilty party would have nothing to say in his defense. Had he been a lecturer he would have been shamed, sacked…
Since 2019, the various censorships against Wendy Wesley at CBC, lecturer Verushka Lieutenant-Duval at the University of Ottawa, Annie Desrochers and Simon Jodoin at the SRC, are all reminders that, regardless of context, the n-word is prohibited, unless uttered by a black person. Otherwise, using it means adding to the oppression of the victim and posing oneself as the executioner. So why call Dantin to the helm of history some 100 years later? What reading can we draw from it? But first, who is Louis Dantin, pen name of Eugène Seers?
Eugène Seers was born in Beauharnois on November 28, 1865. An exceptionally brilliant student, he entered the Fathers of the Most Holy Sacrament in 1883, during a stay in Belgium. Quickly assailed by doubts about his vocation, he nevertheless remained in the congregation while leading a dissolute life. In 1894, he was transferred to Montreal, where his life was less and less exemplary. He then met Émile Nelligan, whom he saw regularly at the convent and whose poems he published in 1903. This was also the year in which he moved to Boston with his lover, the city where he lived. until his death in 1945.
Typographer at Harvard University Press, he began his career as a critic at The Modern Review in 1920. He wrote in The Future of the North, Canada, Ideas and, above all, around 150 articles on American literature in The day, by Jean-Charles Harvey, between 1938 and 1942. As for his correspondence, some 2,500 letters of exceptional quality, it addresses literary questions, but also philosophical and social ones. Furthermore, and this is what interests us here, these missives reveal his sympathies for black communities and introduce us to fascinating revelations. Let’s follow Dantin and his links through three forms of writing: literary criticism, poetry and the novel.
Dantin, honorary consul of Haiti?
On September 6, 1920, Dantin told Asselin that he had received theAnthology of Haitian poets, which turns it on its head: “All French poetry transposed into black! » His criticism, in The Modern Review on December 15, is dithyrambic: “we are amazed,” he exclaims. And he does not fail to note: “We are surprised to see feminist culture carried so far in Haitian society. » Then this friendly warning to Quebec poets: “ […] our artists in syllables will now have to reckon with serious rivals; it is that they will have to shake off their indolence and their mane, and do the work of their ten fingers, if they want to be sure, even on American soil, of making the French lyre sing the best and sound the loudest. . »
In Haiti, the effect of this criticism is incredible. On January 10, 1921, Louis Morpeau, the compiler of the said anthology, wrote to Madeleine Huguenin, director of The Modern Review : “The poets of Port-au-Prince gathered in the salons acclaimed The Modern Review and removed the numbers received by your agents. » In a letter to Dantin, Morpeau said he distributed copies of his article in Paris, Brussels, New York, Geneva. He even wants Dantin to be named honorary consul of Haiti in Montreal! But, unaware that the critic lives in Boston, he must abandon the project; well, not entirely, as we will see later…
Fanny, “you’re a big girl from Africa”
In 1922, Dantin lived on Walden Street in Cambridge, a street with many black families. A certain Stanley Fields-Johnston, like many blacks at the time, fled Virginia to settle, in his case, in Boston. Stanley publishes a newspaper there, The Universal Bureau“ the paper of all nations, all races, all religions “. But, also employed at the post office, he usurps address lists in order to send advertising for his newspaper. Subject to prosecution, he was found not guilty.
But Dantin, who heard of the affair, met him in June and lent him $50 to help him. At this time, an unwavering friendship developed between the two men. Dantin supported Stanley for several years, even writing to him that he felt “ more than ever like a real friend and an older brother » to him (February 26, 1925).
However, this friendship takes an unusual turn, to say the least. Eugène Seers always needed women in his life and, in 1922, it was a love desert. Taking advantage of Stanley’s newspaper, he published the following announcement: “ A French gentleman of middle age, single, of fine education and habits […] would like to correspond with a Colored or Mulatto lady, 25 to 35. » And who, following this announcement, knocked on his door on October 7, 1922? None other than Frances Maria Fields, Stanley’s… mother, both of them unaware of this incongruous situation to say the least! Boileau said it 350 years ago: “The true can sometimes not be probable. »
Then an intense romantic relationship was born between Dantin and Fanny, nickname of Frances Maria, whom Dantin calls “ my beloved brown girl “. But Fanny’s health deteriorates; a tumor is eating away at her, she undergoes an operation which degenerates and dies on 1er April 1924.
He knew several women, but Fanny was Dantin’s great love. He assumes the cost of her funeral and wishes when she dies to be buried next to her, which will not happen. But the writing is there… Dantin creates a magnificent poem, Funeral song, which will only be published after his death, where he reviews the three great loves of his life, including Fanny: “In the great silence where you rest / The prayer of the roses leans / And you feel, on your narrow bed, / My dead heart held close to you. » But above all this other poem of 485 lines, Javanese song, published by Alfred DesRochers in 52 copies in 1931: “This black, poor floating debris / Down here, which resembled me so much, / And which with its simple and prodigal heart / To my life had made a dam / Encircling this blurred river. »
“Scenes from Black Life in the United States”
In the mid-1930s, Dantin was still mourning Fanny’s death. He wrote to Stanley: “ when I feel the urgency of writing […]it becomes the inspiration of what I would like to express » (July 2, 1936). Inspiration, indeed, since Dantin began a novel in 1935 which would be entitled Fanny’s childhood. “Fanny is a slice of my life; it is the memory of a time when I was completely helpless, when I asked for affection like a poor person asks for bread. I defied the conventions of the world then, and today I am not ashamed of this attachment: a human feeling belongs to humanity. »
The novel, whose subtitle, Scenes from black life in the United States, will disappear upon publication, tells in a barely cryptic manner the story of Dantin, Fanny and Stanley, but above all, “you can well imagine that through this melodrama there run many related incidents and traits of Negro morals and it is this above all, I suppose, which could be interesting” (to Alfred DesRochers, February 15, 1939). The work will be published posthumously in 1951 and reissued in 2017.
Justice for black people
To conclude, I return to the critique of Morpeau’s anthology. In April 1921, the latter transmitted to Dantin the text of a conference which he liked by Paul Reboux on “the black question”. Contrary to his expectations, Dantin criticizes this conference: Reboux, he says, places himself on “much too narrow ground” by comparing whites and blacks, by demanding “the cessation of the atrocities of the lynch, etc. “.
Dantin’s final thought on the subject follows: “Why not affirm the great principle of the equality of men, and show what is childish, what is philosophically worthless, in these social gradations based on the color of a pigment? Why not demand justice for black people through justice itself? I admit for my part that I have always been above all racial prejudice. » Morpeau likes this line so much that he publishes it in the Haitian newspaper The morning (June 9, 1921).
Dantin even received a posthumous tribute through Louis Morpeau’s brother. On April 16, 1947, “the honor guard of Libertador and Civics” named him a “Golden Cross officer” “in recognition of services rendered to philanthropy, civics, education, social and cultural works, to the ideal of mutual knowledge and harmony of peoples.
“I am as Negro as all of them”: this is not a provocation, but an invitation that Louis Dantin offers us to go beyond words, which do not say everything about being. , and to exercise a tolerance that welcomes the infinite complexity of existence.