If Juliana Léveillé-Trudel had to rewrite Nirliit (La Peuplade, 2015), her first novel, finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal, with her eyes today, she would say many things differently, she says to the To have toseated in a cafe in Rosemont, Montreal.
The book, inspired by her personal experience in Nunavik, tells the story of a young teacher who sets up a day camp for the children of Salluit every summer. Giving free rein to her revolt, the narrator is indignant at the violence and fatalism of a people left to themselves, seeking in the laughter of children and the flight of a white goose tiny traces of hope and from light.
” Nirliit focused a lot on the shock that can cause the arrival in the North and the awareness of injustices. It was very — maybe too much — focused on tragedy and generalizations. Since then, my thinking has changed a lot. There were Indigenous rights movements, debates over cultural appropriation, the collective realization of the impact of residential schools. Above all, I spent a lot of time with the Inuit,” explains the author, born in Montreal in 1985.
Juliana Léveillé-Trudel remembers, during her first stays in the North, feeling lost in the face of the puzzle that the functioning of the community represented for her. “I found that everything was complicated, and that annoyed me. One day, I was ready to forfeit when the school principal left with the key to the gymnasium, which held all of our day camp materials. In five minutes, thanks to word of mouth, my Inuit colleague managed to find a duplicate. Alone, I would never have made it. I understood that it was me, basically, who made everything complicated, by sticking to my ways of doing things. »
Mutual learning
We have all fallhis second novel, focuses instead on the point of view of his narrator, back in the flamboyance of the tundra two years after her last visit. There she meets certain children from the day camp, Maggie, Sarah, Louisa, Elisapie and Nathan, whose adolescence is as nonchalant and assertive as it is slashed with secrets and wounds.
With modesty and respect, Juliana Léveillé-Trudel demonstrates how the amplitude of these dramas can only be touched upon by the gaze of the other and can only be repaired by those whom they affect. To pity, anger or impotence, the writer prefers compassion, gentleness and introspection.
There is something contradictory in the fact of wanting to promote and strengthen a community with means of intervention that only take place in English.
“Like my narrator, I have known children who have become teenagers. This passage is fascinating, regardless of culture, but in the Inuit villages, one can only be impressed by the ability of young people to get up again, by the strong will of a community not to let its dreams for the future waver . Like them, my character must cross this bridge towards adulthood, in particular by agreeing to mourn his mother. It is the young people, this time, who teach the young woman the tools to keep moving forward. »
The protagonist undertakes this second trip to offer poetry workshops in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit of Nunavik, to the students of the school; an idea also coming from a project by the author, carried out with Inuit living mainly on the island of Montreal. “When I conducted my day camp program in Salluit, it was rooted in the heart of the community. All the teenagers who worked there were from the area. It was later, when she started working for a school perseverance organization, that Juliana Léveillé-Trudel began to ask herself questions about the legitimacy of allophones in wanting to help Aboriginal people.
“There is something contradictory in the fact of wanting to promote and strengthen a community with means of intervention that only take place in English. As Quebecers, we are well placed to understand the importance of a language in building and maintaining a culture, and the relationship of power that a language can impose. With this workshop, I wanted to let the floor speak, to listen without trying to direct gazes or intentions. It gave magnificent works. »
Language as an alliance
For the past seven years, the novelist has been taking weekly Inuktitut lessons from a Parisian institute that teaches the language in particular to health workers working in the North. “I think that all Quebecers should know the basics of the Aboriginal language of the territory they occupy. It should be part of the school curriculum. Personally, it allowed me to better understand the culture of the Inuit, their vision of the world and even their way of speaking French. »
The passages in Inuktitut that run through the novel effectively open up the prospect of new paradigms, new ways of apprehending the world and anchoring one’s existence in what is most visceral, in what is most poetic: the territory and the emotions.
” quanikfalling snow.
Aputisnow on the ground.
Aniuthe clean snow that is melted to obtain water.
Pukakthe crystallized snow that crumbles.
Masakwet snow falling.
Matsaaqwet snow on the ground.
That’s all. Almost. Before, I thought Inuktitut had hundreds of words for snow. It made Mary laugh.
It’s a legend for Qallunaat. »
“Each word conceals a multitude of details because each word is constructed, observes the writer. There is a term for the different kinds of snow, but also for the different kinds of fear. I remember feeling like I was completely contained in the term Pingigak, which means to be afraid for someone absent, to fear that something bad has happened to him. A whole feeling that inhabited me existed in a single word. This language is so beautiful and so inspiring that it changes my relationship to writing. »