The “Quebecness” of Jack Kerouac had caused a stir among us in 1967 at the salt of the week, at Radio-Canada (to see on YouTube). In this interview in French conducted by Fernand Séguin, the mythical writer ofOn the Roadfather of beat generation, replied (astonishment and discomfort!) in a rugged joual mixed with English. Many of the questions asked escaped him. The audience in the room laughed nervously, without deciphering why. Michel Tremblay was not going to launch his sisters-in-law than the following year. Popular speech remained taboo… The fact remains that the eternal Ti-Jean to his grandmother – the true beacon of his life – greeted the maternal humor there in a delicious way: “She sends you patarafes and hullabaloos. »
This famous exchange took place two years before the death of Kerouac at 47 years old. From the great alcoholic and brawling writer who burned the candle at both ends, Quebecers had hardly appropriated the legacy. Born in 1922 in Lowell, Massachusetts, to parents raised in Bas-du-Fleuve, Jack Kerouac had grown up between two languages, two shores, two music: traditional French-speaking folklore and the jazz of the old South that he loved. His existence was floating and frenzied. He dragged his malaise, his friendships and his loves over hill and dale, with a fruitful stop at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. Kerouac will have described the zigzags of his road in a jazzy and spontaneous prose which drew many celestial tramps in his wake.
Formerly, his neighborhood of little Canada was populated by Quebecers who had settled there since “the great bleeding” of the 19th century.e century and the beginning of the XXe, as labor in the New England textile industry. From his childhood among crucifixes, legends, factories and evenings, he will have described the crazy colors through Visions of Gerard, The Town and the City And Doctor Sax. He who had learned English with difficulty only at six years old delivered his work in the language of the Yankees, without ceasing to communicate in French with his mother and to push coronations in his peaks of anger.
It took until 2016 to see published by Boréal, with the approval of the heirs, his unpublished texts in French marked by orality, Life is of homagean uneven but fascinating collection, including the poetic The night is my wife.
Kerouac had become a nomad, like our former woodsmen drunk on Americanness, but in a car (without ever having learned to drive), inventing the term “beatnik” to quickly deny it. The eternal uprooted spoke of interbreeding and cuts in transmission. His ancestors were Bretons, Mohawks, Quebecers, but his literary heritage sailed elsewhere. On the Road, translated in France with slang words, does not resonate in the musicality of its maternal idiom. It revolted the Franco-Ontarian poet and translator Jean Marc Dalpé and the art publisher Guillaume Martel LaSalle, who dreamed of a version in Quebec. So they teamed up with Daniel Brière and Alexis Martin, from the New Experimental Theater, to pay tribute to him in his mother tongue and mark his centenary, with a post-pandemic delay of a year.
I went to the Espace libre theater to see the fruit of these collaborations. In the basement, we witness the recording of a radio program on the fictitious CJAK channel with Alexis Martin and other presenters. Marie Brassard, among the guests, read us texts by female poets of the beatnik movement, who deserve to come out of the shadows. Above, we see films, including an adorable animation on an American-Mexican journey by Greyhound bus by the writer with his grandmother. Panels and archival documents recall his life and the soil of his stock. Kerouac, 100 years on the go! rides in Montreal on weekends until May 7. A translation workshop also invites visitors to transpose his works into his speech, to produce a book on an artisanal printing press.
In the evening, place at a colorful cabaret (changing from one show to another) mixing the circus, song, music, readings of his prose, humor. Didier Lucien hosts this variety show with crazy dynamism. Funny to see two actors interpreting Kerouac and Séguin in the famous program of salt of the week ! And when Jean Marc Dalpé passionately delivers Franco-Acadian poems, when Ariane Moffatt sings the song that she partly took from Kerouac’s text The night is my wife, the entire French-speaking diaspora in America seems to vibrate in unison. It rejoices the heart to know that the exhibition, the activities and the cabaret will circulate across Canada with the blues and the laughter of our cousins scattered across the continent. At 100 years old, Kerouac is finally back on the road. And in his language again…