The author was mostly standing. In the absence of a chair or table, he wrote bent over the top bunk bed. He didn’t have a pen, it was forbidden. He was wearing down the ends of his lead pencil, without having anything to sharpen them. At the top of each page stolen from the canteen, he wrote, in English, ” NOTotes for my lawyer », only way to have the right to put anything on paper. He didn’t know where his sudden fluidity of writing came from. Especially since he was coming out of a month-long hunger strike which had taken 25 kilos from him. He could write day and night, the bulb never went out.
“The fatigue came less from hunger than from the infernal noise that reigned in the prison,” he said. At all hours of the day, there were prisoners to bang headlong on the metal walls of the cells or to improvise deafening rhythms of tam-tam. Others screamed their terror or despair until exhaustion. Still others opened their veins and triggered a bewildering uproar with their actions. A black man set his clothes on fire and thus tried to immolate himself. Another threw himself head first from the second floor of our section. A third was beaten to death by guards in his cell. »
This is how the most widely read Quebec essay in the world was born. The one that caused a scandal when it was published 55 years ago. The one whose title alone, today, can put an end to journalistic or academic careers, scandalize the CRTC, push an English school board in Montreal to affix a sticker to hide the offensive word in each copy of a textbook.
Pierre Vallières and his comrade Charles Gagnon occupied this cell in the New York men’s prison, nicknamed The Tombs, Le sepulcre, in September 1966, for having “troubled the peace” by demonstrating in front of the UN building in favor of the independence of Quebec. The two prisoners are mainly accused of having organized, earlier that year in Montreal, attacks by the Front de libération du Québec.
Vallières therefore darkens the pages “with the feverishness of someone who knows that he can be deported at any moment and who takes advantage of every minute of free expression that he still has left”. It thus lays in two months 90% of a work which will make 540 pages at the printer. Two-thirds of the slips are already out of jail when the extradition to Montreal occurs.
Panicked at the idea that the last third will be seized by Quebec police officers, who themselves read French, Vallières offers a barter to the American immigration agents who have come to seize him on leaving his prison: he will not physically resist this news. arrest if officers turn over the remaining pages to his attorney. If these agents had not kept their word, reports Vallières, the book would not exist. The author is absent from the launch, on March 14, 1968, because imprisoned and on trial for the attacks attributed to him.
Vallières held on to his title, but the idea was not new. As Daniel Samson-Legault reminds us in his meticulous biography of Vallières, The dissidentat Québec Amérique (which I warmly recommend), the expression had been used before him by Marie-Victorin, the journalists Jean Paré, Yves Michaud and a few others to describe the condition of French Canadians.
Vallières uses it repeatedly in the book and uses it as a synonym for “oppressed”. Moreover, he associates it with all the victims of capital, including white American workers. “It was in English that this concept spontaneously formed in my head. White Niggers of America. Black Americans were the first, and for good reason, to grasp what could be, on the shores of the St. Lawrence, the particular condition of French-speaking Quebecers. »
He does not say which blacks he is referring to, but we know that the black American leader of the time, Stokely Carmichael, who will come to Montreal, has nothing to say about this semantic appropriation. Similarly, after finding the title very funny, Aimé Césaire, inventor of the concept of “négritude”, will say that Vallières had understood that it was not just about skin color. Vallières uses the term “slavery” with equal freedom, a condition that he says he finds in all the dispossessed. We are in hyperbole, not in nuance.
The book is all the rage. About 50,000 copies sold in Quebec, almost as many in the United States, not counting the German, Spanish and Italian versions. Suddenly, in 1969, the author, the publisher — the poet and future PQ minister Gérald Godin for the house Parti pris — and even the typist were accused of having, by publishing the book, committed sedition. A crime punishable by 14 years in prison.
The Minister of Justice of the Union Nationale, Rémi Paul, had all the copies in circulation seized, including that of the legal deposit at the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec. The prosecution will not proceed. The book will resume its career in 1972, once the October crisis has passed (during which the FLQs have their British hostage, James Cross, read it).
Should I reread it today? Only if we want to take the measure of the dispossession in which Quebecers were plunged in the early 1960s. his biographer, but even…). The biographical account of the young rebel remains poignant, that of his intellectual research, between Teilhard de Chardin, Sartre, Marx and Che, is tedious, but does not lack sincerity. His call for revolutionary violence, at the time of the tremendous growth of social, union, secular, cultural and political Quebec in 1966, was, even at the time, a mistake and a decoy.
The problem is not that white niggers of america has aged badly. It’s just part of the story. He’s in our rearview mirror. He has little — nothing? — to tell us about the Quebec of today or tomorrow. Its title, alone, resonates like a cry of freedom, like the audacity to say things with strong words, by diverting them or by doing them violence. A finger of honor to the censors of yesterday and today.
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