Since leaving the National Theater School in 2011, I have spent hundreds of hours leading workshops in schools in the greater Montreal area. Everywhere I went, in Laval, La Prairie, Villeray, Outremont or Verdun, I was both disturbed and distressed that outside the classrooms — and sometimes even in the classrooms — students expressed themselves among themselves. in English. Students for whom, moreover, the vast majority, attendance at Quebec cultural productions is almost non-existent. And I’m only talking here about schools in French-speaking school service centers.
Now, each time I had these same students write and create, in often hesitant French, we unearthed nuggets and pearls, we were able to find beauty in ordinary words, we knew, at least one little, re-enchant the anxiety-provoking and concrete world that is theirs. Above all, we succeeded in fostering a love of a language.
However, I am not a magician. I am an artist who loves his language, and who loves to share it. I am only offering a framework so that these students can attach themselves to the beauty, the polysemy and – contrary to the myth constantly conveyed – to the plasticity of French. This unique language in Quebec has been able to integrate thousands of English words and indigenous languages throughout its history and it still proves every day, despite the rigidity of the diktats of the French Academy, its flexibility by integrating Montreal words from Haitian Creole, North African Arabic or Latin American Spanish.
Those who have experienced the hard learning of a second or third language have experienced it. It’s motivating, at first, to learn new rules, new ways of naming things. But after a while — and especially if this language is only confined to the domain of theory — your motivation fades. Your new acquisition becomes both passive and too demanding. You quickly return to your comfort zone.
This is what happens with francization, which many experts (including me) have proven to be a failure. In Montreal, French seen as the only communication tool is soon reaching the end of its useful life. A language flourishes in the culture that carries it. Even though I studied German for five years on Duolingo, it was when I saw theater in Berlin – and met a few Germans… – that I said to myself: “I want to master this language. »
On May 16, hundreds of us took to the streets of the city center to denounce the chronic underfunding of arts and culture. However, it is the artists who take the French language out of theory and bring it into the domain of practice. It is through cultural encounters and aesthetic shocks that we fall in love with a language.
Ministers Sébastien Lacombe and Jean-François Roberge, we need an army of artists who bring this language to life in schools and community environments in Quebec. If your government were really serious in its desire to “rapidly reverse the decline of French”, it would double the budget of the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) and that of the Culture at School program, to which are already registered hundreds of artists and writers, too often little solicited by educational circles.
Your government would set up a guaranteed minimum income program, inspired by French intermittency, where in exchange for a subsistence allowance (for example, $2,000 per month, the amount of the late PCU), artists who join it would commit to offering a determined number of hours per month (for example, a dozen) for creation or mediation in the presence of students or adults, school or community environments, in order to make the creations known which they work on on a daily basis anyway (workshops around a theater show, reading and discussion on extracts from a novel in progress, dance laboratories linked to a choreography, etc.).
In addition to removing a host of artists from precariousness and survival jobs, such a program would offer a real vision for French by making it possible to bring a language to life through its creations. This would arouse curiosity about our cultural productions and would necessarily have a favorable impact on the attendance of Quebec stage or literary works.
American culture and its catchy language will always be popular with young people. This is why we need an army of artists who take concrete action with them to offer resistance worthy of the name. Our language does not lack grammar lessons; she lacks love. Offering a decent minimum income to Quebec artists to propagate it is certainly one way to keep it alive.