Members of the National Assembly unanimously supported two Quebec authors and an illustrator on Thursday who were victims of censorship in the United States and Montreal.
The text of the motion tabled Thursday morning by Québec solidaire with the support of the Parti Québécois “affirms its support for Quebec writers Élise Gravel and Myriam Daguzan Bernier, as well as the illustrator Cécile Gariépy”. He reiterates parliament’s support for “freedom of opinion, freedom of expression and the free circulation of ideas”.
The book NakedEnglish version of All naked! of Mmy Daguzan Bernier and Gariépy were burned with a flamethrower a few days ago by Valentina Gomez, candidate for secretary of state in Missouri. Mme Gomez released a video of her spectacular burning.
Élise Gravel is targeted by the decision of the Jewish Library of Montreal to remove around thirty of her books from its self-service shelves (but not from its collection). The decision stems from the broadcast by Mme Gravel on his Facebook page with illustrated comments on the conflict between Hamas and Israel deemed anti-Semitic by the library management.
The motion tabled by Québec solidaire quickly filled the 106 votes available. No MP spoke against or abstained.
“We are really united, all the parties together, all the political tendencies,” said in an interview with Duty the solidarity deputy Sol Zanetti, bearer of the motion with the support of the PQ Pascal Bérubé. It is important to say that we are not getting involved in the discourse of the American right. What is happening among Republicans in the United States, the radicalization of the conservative discourse of election candidates who burn books with flamethrowers and who promise to burn others if they are elected, is is very, very, very alarming, very alarming. […] It must be said that this matter, in Quebec, does not work. »
Culture Wars
The book continues to be a battleground in the culture wars made in USA. Just between the 1er July and March 31, 2022, nearly 1,600 books were the target of book bans in 86 school districts across the country bringing together nearly 2,900 schools according to a PEN America investigation.
By contrast, in 2021, of the 74 requests for removal of books from the collections of Canadian public libraries, only one came from Quebec. The request targeted a Franco-French essay on serial killers containing false information. The request was rejected.
QS tabled a first motion of support for Élise Gravel last year, which was adopted. This time, the action concerned the censorship in the United States of a book on gender identity.
“It’s worrying because the message that is being sent to Quebec authors is: ‘be careful what you say, be careful what you publicly express as a political position, because your books could be removed from certain libraries,” says Mr. Zanetti.
The Minister of Culture, Mathieu Lacombe, himself deplored these situations of censorship before the vote of the deputies. “Putting books on the index, I think that sounds a bit old priest from the 1900s, we are elsewhere,” he said in a press scrum at the National Assembly. “Burning books, there, at some point, it’s 2024! »
With the Canadian Press