Once a month from the pens of Quebec writers, The duty of literature proposes to revisit in the light of current events works from the ancient and recent past of Quebec literature. Discoveries? Proofreadings? Different look? A choice. An initiative of the Académie des lettres du Québec in collaboration with The duty.
Without “the epic of the porpoise”, or even “without a ship”, “what remains to say about a river which nevertheless legitimizes us in our own eyes? » asks Pierre Perrault at the opening of this unclassifiable book that is All islands. How, in fact, can we describe the Saint-Laurent – river, estuary, gulf at the same time – its dazzling beauty, because, yes, the Saint-Laurent is so beautiful; how can we describe its phenomenally rich ecosystems, yet threatened on all sides, not to mention its great waters, its stories and the beings who inhabit it?
It is difficult to talk about the St. Lawrence today without mentioning climate change which, as my colleague from ISMER (Rimouski Institute of Marine Sciences) Fanny Noisette once summed up for me, is leading to transformations in the major ocean currents. which in turn influence the water masses of the gulf and the estuary: thus warmer and poorer in oxygen, such water masses threaten biodiversity, the balance of life which thrives in the river as well as the existence of people and communities living from fishing. In return, and more than any other teaching, marine scientists, as I like to call them in order to bring together all their specificities under a single term, have also taught me that knowing, loving and saving nature often go hand in hand. .
The problem is that, caught in the busy whirlwind of our lives, we too often end up forgetting this maritime territory, near and far, secret and precious, yet guarantor of our future. I was discussing it recently with Anne-Marie Asselin, who was our head of mission during the Blue Expedition in 2022: it’s crazy how we are, almost everywhere, almost all the time, phone in hand , hyperconnected and at the same time completely disconnected from the ecosystems of which we are part.
However, this disconnection is perilous: our consumption choices, our daily behaviors, just like political decisions in terms of supervision and protection, affect these ecosystems of which we are a stakeholder, even if we never live there in flesh and bone. The greatest danger, Lyne Morissette, a renowned researcher in conservation ecology, told me, is our apathy.
During the Blue Expedition, we collected bags and bags of plastic waste collected in the wildest and most remote corners of the Gulf and its islands populated with flowers, plants and birds, all things sometimes fragile and threatened. I often thought, dismayed, of Commander Cousteau’s remark: “We protect what we love.” But how can we discover it and make it loved? How can we bring the Saint Lawrence into hearts and minds (which minds are also active bodies, part of a web of relationships with the world and the living), if not by means of this prodigious possibility offered by literature? and art when they make our imagination rub shoulders with other imaginations and lives?
The art of giving up
We undoubtedly know Pierre Perrault first for his documentary cinema, including the film For the rest of the world (1963), co-directed with Michel Brault and Marcel Carrière, is undoubtedly a pinnacle of the genre. If I have always had affinities with the Perrault poet of despair, the overlaps between the journey that is All islands and the territories that I encountered during our summer 2022 mission, under full sail, reminded me of a question that haunted me strongly in contact with the islands, birds and ghosts of the North Shore: where are the beings who could tell about these spaces, these abandonments and their almost erased stories?
Because it is these harsh, humble, relentless lives, sometimes reduced to “extremities”, and yet imbued with “delicacy”, that approach, in All islandsthe one who confronts his heritage of poverty with the call of the open sea and the desire of the sea. It is by renouncing the roads, cities, physical and imaginary routes heard, by being initiated and incited by the friendship of a “ porpoise” (beluga) that Perrault chooses to go to meet, necessarily poetically, “this archipelago which has more than three thousand islets, islands, peninsulas and rocks” and which Cartier “named Tous Isles”.
In this, All islands, initially published in 1963, allows us to dream, in fragments of shadows and lights, of the island territories of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, as well as the universe, sometimes in the process of disappearing, of its inhabitants, humans and plants. and animals. This is the very impetus of Perrault’s stories: to preserve vivid impressions, to transcribe and preserve the glossary of these multiple insularities by sometimes choosing, if necessary, the vulgar words, those “that make all the others blush”.
This is how the seer-poet, spurred by the call of the “too big sea” which “flows into [ses] veins, believing themselves to be infinite”, records events, observations and words which “give a face to the villages” and never cease to remind us that they alone conceal another richness – fullness, embrace, depth -, much greater than the ‘gold.
If All islands is deeply attached, not without blindness, to the humans of the St. Lawrence, modest fishermen, seal hunters, Innu “caribou nomads” and “river people”, it is that there is traced, initially, a poetic cartography of natural, inhabited, living, moving landscapes. Perrault makes the colors of his words, his places and his beings resonate with sound. From Anticosti, “flower with shipwreck petals”, to La Tabatière, bays, anchorages, capes, “sea gardens”, “algae forests lulled by ocean breathing” are revealed all at once. “calculots” from Île aux Perroquets, “moyacks”, cloudberries and other sea wolves. This, in addition to approaching, from Unamen Shipu (La Romaine), a space of transhumance, canoes, camps, hunting, dreams and words, all things deeply inscribed in the cycles of the landscape and the nature among the Innu.
These fragments of islands, seas and seasons thus allow us to see (in this case, to hear) the interior texture of the experience offered by discovery and encounter, a cinema without camera, without film, of which it only the voice would remain. From this book made of documentary poetry, stories and lyrical essays emerges a thought anchored in the enigma of time, oscillating between life and death, punctuated by the necessity of the seasons when the human being depends on them. here, whether for hunting, fishing, gathering, or even to conserve the precious heat necessary for survival.
What fades
The space half-opened by Perrault in All islands is also a drawer with a double bottom which reminds us of the importance of extracting the slivers of life from oblivion, for the benefit of memory. The book puts poems in dialogue with the long time of landscapes, the movement of all the rhythms of survival, but also with the lost times of “the discovery” of the writings of Jacques Cartier, “first captain of the river”, “the one who counted one of the most difficult countries of the sea, that of All Isles “.
Poems, therefore, of the gaze which seeks to grasp its own enchantment, poems of foam on the surface of Cartier’s stories, one and the other brought together, inviting one to marvel, while recalling the turnover of eras and generations, the possible disappearance of the natural and human worlds, the slim chances we have of adding some writing to speak of the light, the abyss of our lives, what we loved enough to want to preserve — or at least try to do so.
If Perrault understands that Cartier saw a world “that we will no longer see”, the reading of All islands forces us to understand, in our turn, that what Perrault saw and told has already been erased, or is even literally disappearing before his eyes. It is then impossible not to understand, indirectly, that we could in turn alter the “eternal song of the seasons” on which the perilous and essential protection of biodiversity depends. In the same way, it is impossible not to feel challenged by the destinies of maritime and coastal communities, since the book bears witness to the fragility of the era of “miraculous fishing”, of a concern for the sea and its resources. (which can be emptied), or the impacts of capitalism and trade on fishermen and their families.
Even more than being seduced by the fleeting appearance of the maritime and island territories of the “ultrast”, dreaming of the distant coasts and islands of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in the company of Pierre Perrault amounts to apprehending the whole wealth that can be contained in the discovery of a single bird name or in stubbornly refusing to “abandon an entire river […] to promoters more voracious than pirate sharks.”
Daydream while discovering All islands, it is perhaps above all stopping “to see, looking to understand, guessing to love all islands” and letting oneself be invaded by this contagious joy. It is a measure of the need to see works emerge that will continue to inscribe the memory and poetry of spaces, times and other lexicons of the Saint-Laurent and Nitassinan. Dive into All islandsit is finally to abandon oneself to the desire to draw other maps, those which never cease to tell of the strandings, the losses, the disappearances, the wisdom of nature, in order to pour out on every “skyscraper which swallows the morning people by the mouth of its elevators” an “incalculable love” and an “invincible and turbulent” poetry.