Near Country Geographies (Boréal, 2022, 258 pages) is a magnificent book. Its author, the poet and essayist Pierre Nepveu, “offers a certain reflection which is also an act of love” with regard to Quebec. “I have a great debt to this territory, this society, this nation, declares the writer in the introductory note, but any debt deserves to be questioned, any heritage requires to be weighed. Nepveu, who claims to be a “citizen, a poet”, accomplishes this task with elegance and depth, but if the poetic force of his subject is essential, its political relevance proves to be less obvious.
Fine mind, nourished by an extended literary culture which protects him against any dogmatism, Nepveu intends to explore the Quebec identity without polemical spirit. On several occasions, he is sorry for the Manichaeism that reigns in the matter. On the one hand, he notes, we find the idea of a national identity to be defended to ensure the social and political cohesion of the Quebec people; on the other, we plead for going beyond the national reference in the name of multiculturalism and particular individual identities.
Nepveu, whose attachment to Quebec and its history is beyond doubt, seeks to find a path between these two proposals, which he perceives as pitfalls, by trying to think of an identity that includes otherness in its nature itself.
In a very beautiful text in which he tenderly evokes the Catholicism of his childhood, the atheist writer speaks of the “faith” he retains from this experience, that is to say a form of trust in the world, a hope that reality makes sense. The Quiet Revolution, he says, was the work of Christian reformers who did not wish to get rid of this hope, but rather to free it from a stifling formalism to allow it to invest in a more concrete commitment passing really out of concern for the “neighbour”.
Nepveu finds, in this process, a “revolution of proximity”, a highlighting of the “concrete attention paid to people’s lives” which is also manifested, then, in progressive social policies, in a feminism now preoccupied by the stakes of private life, in an environmentalism that is both planetary and local, as well as in the enlargement of the figure of the neighbor to members of neglected minorities.
What is sometimes called “wokism”, and which Nepveu prefers to designate as “the ethics of benevolence and altruism”, would not be unrelated to “the ethical and symbolic heritage of a Catholicism of duty everyday life and the love of beings”, as reviewed by a Quebec modernity which would therefore not be limited to a march towards secularism.
Nepveu does not ignore the excesses to which this ethics can lead, in particular the penchant for censorship, abusive victimization, as well as the well-meaning rejection of the past and of Western civilization. The strongest critique of this ethic, he notes, is that formulated by the sociologist Jacques Beauchemin in The society of identities (Athéna, 2004), according to which such a concern for all particularisms leads to an irremediable break-up of the national community, a potentially deadly consequence for a small nation without an independent state like Quebec, already subject, like no other, to the pressure of the cultural Anglosphere.
This criticism haunts the pages of Near Country Geographies. Nepveu would like to find an answer capable of reconciling the continuity of Quebec’s identity as a common world and a generous openness to particularisms, but his proposals, rich from a poetic point of view, remain vague and insufficient on the political level.
Nepveu’s central argument is one of the great lessons of literature: identity, individual or collective, is not a fixed reality; one never really coincides with oneself. And to believe the opposite, that is to say to claim to know precisely who I am and who the other is, is to mislead oneself, to prevent oneself from evolving and to expose oneself to all the political dangers.
Nepveu, therefore, rejects identity nationalism favorable to cohesion transcending particular identities and pleads for civic engagement based on benevolence and proximity through which our love of Quebec is expressed.
In Nepveu’s world, all Quebecers are poets capable of transforming their dispossession of identity into a treasure of creativity; the subordination of Quebec to Canada has no consequence; the fragility of French in America, if it exists, is more of an opportunity than a threat; outstretched hands are always seized with solicitude.
It would be beautiful, if it were true. Reality, unfortunately, does not conform to the poet’s dream.