I know that Marc spoke to you about Jean-Philippe Pleau’s book this week last1but I can’t help but also write a column on Rue Duplessis – My little darkness. This book upset me too much for me to keep it inside.
Pleau anime Think out loud, on Radio-Canada radio. He was the faithful companion of the great Serge Bouchard on the same channel, on the show It’s crazy…
In short, you watch him host ideas shows on Radio-Canada, and if you force yourself to imagine his career, you think that he must have attended high school in Brébeuf, that his parents must have been minimally literate, and then …
And you’re in the field.
The subtitle of Rue Duplessis says it all: My little darkness. Pleau grew up in a world of abysmal poverty in all respects: material, intellectual, cultural. Born for a bun, white, sliced, industrial.
The sociologist takes our hand and presents to us this past which shaped him and which still haunts him. He takes us on a tour of the Drummondville of his childhood, through a genealogical detour: grandparents, great-grandparents. Born for a little bread, all of them, or almost. Alcohol, violence, the cultural desert. Hatred of the unknown.
The father works in a shop. The mother stays at home. They know nothing about the world, are afraid of everything. They brood over their son to the extreme, sending him to the hospital at the slightest sneeze…
An immense, but stifling love. Little Jean-Philippe is actually suffocating. Today it seemed like he was having anxiety. At the time, his teachers found it tiring to always have to vomit in the toilet. He remembers the number of the bathroom door: 303.
Leisure, in the little world of little Pleau, was to go “for walks” in a neighborhood where there were houses barely bigger than theirs.
A small world of prejudices where we are convinced that Chinese restaurants serve chat (the author lived in Montreal for five years before deciding to eat in a Chinese restaurant). The Chinese, the blacks, the Indians, the fags: prejudices fuel the ambient ignorance. Everything that does not resemble us – and even more – is threatening… So: mocked, insulted, despised.
Little Pleau’s father has a homosexual brother. A striking scene in the book: the author’s father surprises his brother “kissing” his boyfriend, in the basement. He will violently kick him out, because he fears that this example will contaminate Jean-Philippe…
In his entourage, in his family tree, the shadow of violence still looms. His father lacks words, he compensates by punching walls.
Jean-Philippe Pleau, now grown up, is what we call a class defector. Neither comfortable in his new social stratum, the bourgeois codes of which he has not mastered, nor quite welcome in the one from which he comes, where he is seen as an upstart, a snob.
Never in his place, therefore. An example: at Laval University, Pleau works like a madman in an A&W restaurant. He has to work to pay for his studies, his apartment… Unlike many of his privileged classmates. One of his classmates will say to him, horrified: “Why do you stink of fried potatoes? » And at the restaurant, we make fun of his studies in sociology a little: “At A&W, it’s the smell of university that sticks to my skin. »
PHOTO ROBERT SKINNER, THE PRESS
Host and author Jean-Philippe Pleau
For this book, Jean-Philippe Pleau investigates his own childhood as a journalist-anthropologist. He calls on his family, long-lost friends, former girlfriends, those who taught him, and the archives of the local newspaper. He even brings in his child’s medical records…
The look is tender, but with a lucidity that hurts.
Tender, because Pleau sees his parents, his family as victims of an unequal world, products of a society which creates those left behind who are pulling the devil by the tail and who have not had access – by lack of education – of the ideas, culture and comfort that allow one to escape one’s fate.
Lucid, because he bluntly explores this childhood that shaped him. By diving into the dark sides of his childhood memories. Even before the book was released, members of his family threatened to sue him.
The strange word that covers this column is a word that Pleau has long been ashamed of, Anishquadate, the contraction of the phrase “To come until date”, pronounced by his father repeatedly, meaning “until NOW “…
Said quickly, in joual, “Coming to date” therefore becomes Anishquadate…
It was only by studying sociology and by working with the anthropologist Serge Bouchard that Pleau understood that this Anishquadate was the tip of an iceberg of a popular culture that did not deserve to be despised, speaking people we (almost) never talk about.
It is the meeting of books that will begin its migration to another environment. Jean-Philippe Pleau’s description of libraries is wonderful, both that of his town and his high school.
For this book, he returns to visit his high school. The library has been relocated, there is now a music room there. Still: it’s the same old door that’s there…
And as he puts his hand on the door, he remembers Madame Alix, the librarian, who introduced him to books. From this place of refuge where he was fleeing intimidation. Where he discovered through books that there was perhaps another world than his own.
And there, upon touching the door, Pleau breaks down, he cries.
I’m telling you all this, you who probably haven’t read the book, you may think that Pleau despises his past, his loved ones, his parents. However, I swear to you, not at all.
On the contrary, this book is the book of a guy almost 50 years old who becomes capable, after a life of torment caused by his childhood, of looking at his environment with tenderness…
And to love him.
Serge Bouchard will say to his co-host one day: “Stop looking at your childhood as a pile of crap, be proud of it…” Pleau will end up listening to him.
Moreover, one of the most beautiful chapters of Rue Duplessis is called “Let’s Be Clear”. And it only contains a four-word sentence: “I love my parents.” »
There, Jean-Philippe, reading those four words, it was me who broke down.
This book, Rue Duplessisit’s the truest thing I’ve read in a long time.
1. Read “Journey of an immigrant from within”