What do we want to allow or undertake, build or destroy, embellish or spoil? Where do we want to live and what concern, what love do we have for this territory where our lives are lived and shared?
Posted yesterday at 5:00 p.m.
The answer can begin with this other formula: born here or from elsewhere, whether from the North or the tropics, we have Quebec in common. This sharing is decided and defined at every moment, in every place: in such a street or alley of La Petite-Patrie or Limoilou, such a dairy farm between Sainte-Élizabeth-de-Warwick and Victoriaville, such a forest around Val-d ‘Now, such a building in Coaticook or Mashteuiatsh. This is where our sovereignty or our resignation first materializes.
What exactly does the formula mean: we have Quebec in common? First, it means that we choose to make this geographical and political territory the space of our lives, that we consent to it. Born here or arrived more or less recently, we could go or go again. […] The fact of staying here can certainly result from a lack of choice, be dictated by poverty and the inescapable constraints which make migration impossible or extremely difficult.
But it is likely that, in the majority of cases, this choice to stay obeys a certain attachment, the feeling that this territory is habitable, that a personal and family life, a job, a profession, hobbies, friendships, social ties and a decent civic condition, within the framework of the rule of law, are possible there.
The real question is whether I would live better and happier elsewhere.
Dwell, stay: don’t these words smack of Maria Chapdelaine, are they not the height of quiet permanence, of consent to inertia? On the contrary, it seems to me that a sedentary lifestyle appears more than ever today as an act, a challenge, a project. […] From the development of cities, the protection and exploitation of agricultural land to a North that inspires dreams but which remains inaccessible and too little known, the relationship with the territory concerns real lives and mobilizes a collective consciousness, it calls policies, opens up prospects. We talk a lot and rightly about contemporary migratory movements, but homelessness as a way of life is an exceptional choice. It is enough to know a little bit of the history of the Jews of Quebec to understand how much this people […] demonstrated in Quebec and especially in Montreal extraordinary aptitudes for the occupation of urban space. Both through the establishment of many institutions necessary for social life (education, health, community services, cultural and religious places) and through its artists busy painting or writing the city, the Jews contributed to bringing out an urbanity in which French-Canadian culture and literature remained somewhat refractory before the age of “coming to town”.
As Régine Robin has shown, particularly in her novel The Quebecerand Naïm Kattan, in Birth towns, migration is always the experience of a superposition of territories, by a palimpsest effect which reveals old layers of signs and referents under those who present themselves on arrival. I was struck by the account of Joséphine Bacon, who tells, in the documentary film my name is human, that when she arrived in Montreal from her Innu land of Pessamit, she walked the streets and neighborhoods of the city with the flair and happy curiosity of a hunter. The big foreign city thus allowed the traditional territory, signs and practices of the native country to surface. Isn’t this also the migratory experience of very many Quebecers who came to town from their regions: a superposition of references of which we find many traces in the poetry of Gaston Miron. […]
The territory is both a need and an opening, a daily fact that begins with the neighborhood and the very space of a culture and an imagination. It is there, concretely, that our physical reality and our quality as interpretative beings, sign decipherers, immersed in the otherness of the world, both in its material presence and in its temporal texture, are combined. It is there, on a site and facing horizons, that human faces, their enigmas, their concerns, their desires, their sufferings arise. I cannot conceive of my own poetic and pedagogical journey without this both existential and literary experience of the territory, life and books having never ceased to dialogue and mutually fertilize each other to constitute a plural Quebec reference.
Geographies of neighboring countries Poet and citizen in a plural Quebec
Pierre Nepveu
Boreal Editions, 2022
256 pages
Who is Pierre Nepveu?
Poet, essayist, novelist, he taught literature for 37 years, mainly at the University of Montreal, which awarded him the title of professor emeritus. His work as a critic and essayist is oriented towards the mutations and migrations of Quebec identity through his literature, situated in the broader context of the Americas.