Writing was not Marie-Hélène Voyer’s greatest ambition, because she saw herself above all as a reader. It was boredom and the low period of the pandemic that made him write two books in parallel: the essay The habit of ruins – the coronation of oblivion and ugliness in Quebec and poetry collection Chickweed. With the result that these two titles, a rare thing in a writer’s career, are now in the running for the next Booksellers’ Prize in the essay and poetry categories. A double, what.
“I’m very touched and at the same time, I don’t think about it too much, it’s a little unreal, which makes it protect me against the big head,” says the 40-year-old author, mother of three. and professor of literature at the Cégep de Rimouski, while we are doing our interview virtually, because neither of them could make the Montreal-Rimouski trip.
For my part, I am not surprised by this double. What I like the most in this profession that I have been practicing for 20 years is to come across a new voice that convinces me in a few pages that it will never leave my life. The habit of ruins is a vibrant plea for the protection of our heritage which sometimes borders on the pamphlet – she discovered with the books of Pierre Falardeau that one could indeed write “en crisse” –, while Chickweed is a poignant tribute to the women of the rural world in which she grew up – especially her mother, whom she tragically lost too young. A suicide.
If I had not known that Marie-Hélène Voyer was born in 1982, I would have bet that she was much older, so solid is her writing and her language, tinged with the influences of poets like Miron or Saint-Denys Garneau and the speech of the people of his world.
It’s not the first time I’ve been told this. I feel like maybe it’s the poetry of my childhood. That’s how we talked back home. It is perhaps a space on the fringes of the world where popular speech has survived longer. It was important for me to be loyal to that language, and for my books to be a bit of a black box.
Marie-Helene Voyer
What a strange irony, all the same, for the one who dreamed of setting fire to the family farm when she was a child. Like many young people who grew up in the regions before the internet, Marie-Hélène Voyer felt like she was dying of boredom in her corner of Quebec and dreamed of great culture. She was on the show Tarmac Tribe on the radio despite being fried and begging for increased borrowing from the library to stock up on books before the weekends.
When I was little, Rimouski was for me the inaccessible big city. I grew up in what is called the non-touristy Bic, in the ranks where no one goes. You have to forget the bucolic islands and the trendy little cafes, I was in the dusty Bic.
Marie-Helene Voyer
During her studies in literature in Quebec, the family farm was destroyed by fire, as she had wished in her childhood. And it was this loss that made him realize his attachment to his roots. There was nothing left but writing to reconnect with his memories and his origins. “It’s a very belated reconciliation with this founding boredom which, I think, ultimately made me. I feel like it took a great loss for me to realize that this was the breeding ground for everything I was. Everything I hated, all the incantations I made for this place to disappear, it was a prophecy, after all. I think that I live better than ever in these territories of my childhood since I revisit them through writing. The characters who have inhabited these places too. I call them characters on purpose, because they were larger than life good men and women who raised me and showed me everything. »
In particular her father, a great storyteller and an avid reader, who is in the process of typing the whole catalog of La Peuplade where his daughter is published, and who rereads Anna Karenina Once in a year. In Chickweed, she says that when she confided to her mother her desire to do “long studies”, she replied: “Life will put you in your place”. Far from resenting him, she understood.
I heard his pain that day. The pain of those who could not.
Marie-Helene Voyer
For Marie-Hélène Voyer, there is no beauty without a story. “That’s what made my view of the world,” she says. One of the most annoying things about my childhood was when on Sunday afternoons my dad would make me take him for rides in a pickup truck through the rows listening to country music. We passed in front of the houses and he told me about each of them. Ultimately, for me, that’s what’s beautiful. Anything that is crossed by different stories, anything that has a depth of stories, in the plural. Like Michel Garneau’s little childhood stories in Winter, yesterday. My entire library could burn if I kept Winter, yesterday, I wouldn’t miss anything because everything is there, in the way of telling a place. For me, it touches the essence of beauty. »
What places carry
We understand better why she defends so fiercely the idea of heritage, in this province where every week, we hear horror stories about it. Because by demolishing in the most total indifference of historic sites and buildings, it is also stories and memory that are confiscated, most of the time for simple profit. In The habit of ruins, she writes this about the wealthy suburbs where we build replicas of castles: “We raze ancestral agricultural landscapes, we demolish authentic heritage houses, precious and irreplaceable traces of our history, all this to build something new that mimics the former; we demolish our architectural heritage, symbol of our origins, but above all testimony to the inventiveness of our ancestors in terms of adapting to the rigors of the territory, to build something new that mimics the elsewhere. »
These new mansions are not simple houses, they are identity crises. It is obviously necessary to be inhabited by a form of self-shame and obsession with the past to come to inhabit such pastiches in their setting of fake stones.
Extract of The habit of ruinsby Marie-Hélène Voyer
Marie-Hélène Voyer does not at all want to glorify the past or say that “it was better before”. It is in fact against voluntary amnesia and ransacking that she rises up. “I believe I have a desire for loyalty, not petrification. Respect by thinking of those who have gone before us, quite simply. Also a kind of fed up with these speeches where we pride ourselves on wanting to recycle everything and to do in sustainable development. It seems that heritage is impervious to all these issues of recycling, recovery, and that it is more the discourse of what-for-good or too-late that prevails over the rest. I believe more in the stories conveyed by places, which are not empty shells, than in a monumental past or a “great” story. That’s the most precious thing, from my point of view. »
From mine, I will welcome all the stories that Marie-Hélène Voyer wants to write, because I find them so beautiful, so essential. Good news: it is the furrow that she will continue to dig, failing to have taken up the torch of farmer, which makes me believe that writers have the task of being sowers.
It also makes me smile that a pure-bred Montrealer like me is so fond of what a girl from Bic writes who rarely leaves her corner. I think this is because the heritage crisis, like the housing crisis and the climate crisis, is happening across Quebec. And that our destinies are all linked to these issues.
Questionnaire without filter
1. The cafairy and Me :
I’m not very picky, and I’m not going to pretend to be a great connoisseur. Me, a coffee, as long as he does his thing job coffee, I’m happy.
2. Departed personalities with whom I lovewould have beento change :
Jacques Ferron, that’s for sure. If I could donate a kidney for him to come back, I think I would. Michel Garneau, Pierre Perrault… I know it’s not equal, I would have to appoint women, but what do you want, I come from a world of good men.
Who is Marie-Helene Voyer?
- Born in Bic, in Bas-Saint-Laurent, in 1982, she holds a doctorate in literature from Laval University and teaches literature and French at the Cégep de Rimouski.
- She has published four books: Housing Expo (The people, 2018), Terrains vague – Poetics of uncertain space in contemporary French and Quebec novels (Nota Bene, 2019), The habit of ruins – the coronation of oblivion and ugliness in Quebec (Lux, 2021) and Chickweed (The people, 2022).