Carte blanche to Émilie Bibeau | An oasis of fraternity

With their unique style and their own sensitivity, artists present their vision of the world. This week, we give carte blanche to Émilie Bibeau.

Heatwaves, French elections, Céline’s return, Kamala’s arrival, yellow corn in the great heat here and Philippe Katherine all blue in the pouring rain in Paris, the summer was far from ordinary!

And it is impossible to ignore the gigantic sporting events that have made the planet tremble…

From the Euro to the Olympic Games, there was sport everywhere, all the time and for all tastes!

You would have to be somewhat insensitive not to have vibrated, even just a little, in the face of this avalanche of strong and unsuspected emotions…

I admit, I had chills all summer and these events revived in me the memory of the summer of 1998 when, without my having it seen coming, I experienced a sincere and complete love at first sight for… soccer. What’s more, a love at first sight more surprising than I would have believed…

I was spending the summer in Grenoble, France, with my Italian grandparents. It was a hot July, typical of this capital of the French Alps, and the “football” World Cup was in full swing. A sport that was not very popular at the time in Quebec, but triggered intense passions in Europe, where the whole country lived only to the rhythm of the “blues” and Zizou, nickname of the great player Zinedine Zidane.

France, like in a fairy tale where all the stars miraculously align, was world champion that year… at home!

“And one, and two, and three-zero! We’re the champs!” I’ll always remember that night, when the whistle blew. and confirmed the French victory 3-0 against Brazil, a tsunami of joy broke out all over the country. All over the city center, window shutters slammed, people were screaming, dancing in fountains, on window sills, drunk of joy and all united in victory around a very important issue simple, but so unifying. No more borders, no more religions, no more animosity… no more hate. It is impossible not to be contaminated by this frenzy and indeed, once caught up in this whirlwind, The fever seized me and never left me.

Since then, I have followed almost all the World Cups and European Cups., team jersey on body and cocktail in hand, obviously a pretext to get together and chat between friends.

Then, one summer evening, I attended a game in a Montreal park where my stepson was playing. While I wanted him to enjoy the summer running around in the grass, that it would make him happy and also that his team would score goals and that it would galvanize them, I mostly experienced a moment full of humanity. I sympathized with Greek mothers whose children were passionate about soccer, they told me that they were connected to Quebec culture, especially with the Bye bye of December 31st that they loved.

There was also this father who worked in landscaping and who explained to us the virtues of the linden flowers which grow in the trees around the land and, after the match, we started picking some of these flowers with people that I had never met before… Just like that, we exchanged and we bonded friendship with these people with whom we probably would never have come into contact.

And I remembered this impulse from sociologist Edgar Morin that I had seen on social networks where, faced with the rise of the extreme right, he strongly invited people to “create oases of fraternity” and, on a small scale, the soccer field in the park was a good example.

We were on a soccer field a thousand miles from soccer, in a meeting more complex and deeper than the simple pleasure of sport.

In these times when almost all of our life is algorithmic, when we are constantly offered content closely linked to our living environment and our own interests, suddenly, being called upon to exchange with people who are not in our immediate circle, who do not have the same interests as us, leads us in a way, what I think is sorely lacking in our times: nuanced realities And feed our curiosity.

It is also, for children, a school of democracy and tolerance. Because in soccer and in team sports in general, in addition to being paired with young people from different social classes and backgrounds, they quickly learn that everything is experienced as a team. Victory, but also defeat. Being confronted with very strong emotions, joys and difficult moments, to live and share the talents and flaws of all, seems to me to be a very beautiful and good school. “Reality is to be taken or left, but we will have to deal with it,” André Comte-Sponville wisely said.

All connected like links in a chain, the attitudes and talents of each have an effect on the others. An awareness that we are small parts of a great whole and that everyone plays an important role in different positions. “All that I know for sure about the morality and obligations of men, I owe to football,” said Camus.

In soccer, and in sports in general, as in life, you have to deal with the human experience, the one that involves this strange mixture of competition and solidarity. Of communion and compromise.

Even the great Marguerite Yourcenar, to my surprise, noted this reflection: “In football, I see an angelism. I find people, men in the sense of humanity, in a purity that nothing stops and which moves me enormously.”

I also see in this balloon, so accessible and universal, a small object that crosses time and space, whether in the street, in a park in Quebec, on a beach in Brazil or in the suburbs of Paris… And which, like the summer we have just experienced, has caused as many sparks in people’s hearts as hope in the hearts of children. who, in these “oases of fraternity” imprinted of humanity, dream of being the next Mbappé.

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