Our collective identity is forged by individuals willing to make themselves sick to pursue their necessary quest for art. The poverty through which local artists must go, perhaps one day, to obtain the “means” of creation is absolutely staggering for a society as well-off as ours.
On this April 18, a day of demonstration for the survival of the living arts, which are most certainly the poor and diverted source from which the entire industrial-cultural apparatus of Quebec draws to build itself, I cannot be among my people. Being abroad in a renowned institution, I represent Quebec in spite of myself in a state maneuver that is commonly called cultural diplomacy. To get to this point, I first had to work double time for more than ten years in rare poverty.
If, today, I manage to make a living from my art, this is not the case for several of the colleagues with whom I have worked over time, who nevertheless had no less talent than me and who ate just as much peanut butter.
This is because in Quebec, to succeed in making a living, even meagerly, from your art, you have to make three times as much with every penny as is done in any other sector of activity. You also need to know how to read and analyze company financial statements, know the Morin code, write administrative texts in dry forms, participate in benefit evenings for organizations that can only pay us poorly when we work for them. walls due to their chronic underfunding — organizations that we already support all year round by doing an enormous amount of volunteering —, going into debt, etc.
Breathless
The same goes for the community world. This other world without which our society would collapse and which, like us, is particularly out of breath.
Civil society is running out of steam. Artists are the heart of our collective dream. Looking at the priorities of those in power, there certainly does not seem to be any desire to elevate ourselves collectively, to feed the soul of a people, nor the stomach for that matter: even less the stomach of those who create this collective anima.
Do you think, dear elected officials, that how long will we be able to hold on to giving you a substance that will allow you to sit in the house of the people called the National Assembly? Because without artists, no identity, without identity, no nation, and without nation, no National Assembly. You all shout loud and clear — in different ways, bickering almost like children in a schoolyard — that you are there for the interests of Quebec. You “defend” national “visions” which underpin your policies, but ultimately, how can you claim all of this? The figures that you present to us over time are clear: you are not living up to your claims.
I would even say more: to see you put us collectively in debt to this extent to open a battery factory (which will not even belong to us?!), all this rather than supporting the living forces, which are literally at the end of their rope, forces alive from the artistic world which invents us, yes, nothing less, and from the community world which saves us from a monumental slide. In short, seeing you go, you don’t have to have a Papineau head to understand what your priorities are.
When a Minister of Housing says that “ [les pauvres] “only have to invest in real estate”, as if she were proposing that “the deadbeats just have to learn to run” and that she keeps her job, her seat, and what’s more, arrives to pass laws that weaken the people most at risk, laws that you all ratify together, it seems clear to me that you regularly give us proof that you are not interested in the common good.
It is difficult to write these words here, because yes, here abroad I am fulfilling a dream and I live in fear of speaking out and experiencing real reprisals from you for this. And I’m afraid, because it’s a dream that I’ve fed with great sweat and peanut butter for too long. Such a fragile dream which still today is too often built through 70 hours a week. And this dream that I am realizing is the dream of an entire people, in fact. That of having the right to be fully oneself, elsewhere, at the table among all the others. The right to recognition of being.
We need to get out of fear, because it is at the cost of our mental and physical health that we continue. There will come a time when this will no longer be possible and when these living forces will truly be exhausted. Besides, we are getting there. We can no longer do what we do for pinottes. And your battery factories won’t recharge us. But, I have no doubt, it will certainly be profitable for the children of some.
From where we look at you, while we create this identity until our hands bleed and continue to transform every meager penny into the vast collective wealth that you are sitting on, your battery factory seems to be draining us collectively. with all our means. My dearest wish is that my people keep their strength, no matter what they are working on at the moment, to at least ensure that you find us, when the time comes, on your path.