Fanie Demeule was twelve years old the first time she thought about writing a novel about her maternal great-grandparents; two Magdalen Islanders born in Havre-Aubert, expatriated to Montreal in the early 1930s, where they fell in love after a providential encounter.
“It’s my oldest literary project,” she says, laughing over a cup of herbal tea. “I already wrote about it in high school. This story has been circulating in veiled terms in my family for a long time. When I was a teenager, I knew nothing about the Magdalen Islands, but the few elements I had about their history already seemed like perfect ingredients for a novel.”
However, once her writing career had begun, Fanie Demeule was aware that she did not have all the tools to write this great tale of exile, love and tragedy. “Of course, I knew that writing a historical novel involved exhaustive research, but beyond that, I had not yet mastered the writing technique that would allow me to achieve my goals, which was to tell this reality of the time in a more contemporary way. I wanted to wait until I had enough experience to embark on this adventure.”
So it was when she saw the call for a writing residency in the Magdalen Islands, offered by Langues Pendues productions in 2021, that she knew the time had come to fulfill her childhood dream. “I found myself walking every day in the village where my great-grandmother grew up.” As a source of inspiration, it’s hard to do better.
Research driven by attention to detail
Makeshift teeth tells the story of Laurena, a young woman whose future seems hopeless, on the island of Havre-Aubert, ravaged by the economic crisis that plagued the early 1930s. Born the seventh daughter of a large family, she is, according to legend, endowed with divinatory powers. Haunted by dire premonitions, she leaves her family to set sail for Montreal, hoping to change the course of her destiny.
On this new island where incessant noise rubs shoulders with the stale smell of coal, tar, manure and paper, Laurena struggles to get back on her feet. She quickly lands a job as a housekeeper in a rich mansion in Westmount, which occupies her time as well as her mind. When she falls under the spell of Émile, a fish delivery man from the same village as her, she is however forced to leave her position, and to imagine a new life as a wife and housewife. But the will of fate will leave her little respite…
As experienced in the effort as her character, Fanie Demeule has taken on a colossal workload to deliver a credible story anchored in the reality of the time, thus complying with the rigor and precision required by the historical novel. “I have a deep admiration for people who make it their career,” she says.
The writer applied for a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec (CALQ) for this writing project, which was initially supposed to take a year to complete. However, the novel actually took three years to complete. “Every time I arrived at a new chapter, I was assailed by questions. I had to check the configurations of Montreal’s neighbourhoods at the time, the information that my protagonist could have read in the newspaper. It was like boxes that opened and expanded to infinity. At the same time, it was fascinating. The exodus from the Islands also gave me a lot of trouble, because even though it was a significant period, it is very poorly documented. I had to do a lot of patching together.”
The Fanie Demeule touch
If her research was carried out with a concern for truth and historical coherence, the novelist allowed herself much more freedom in developing the narrative framework of her Laurena, embroidering her destiny from real anecdotes relayed in her family, inserting her own doubts and questions into the head of her character, notably about the consequences of our choices on our individual trajectories and the limits of agency.
The author’s pen is also clearly recognizable in the aura of magical realism that envelops the story and the imagination of the characters, populated with legends, superstitions and supernatural circumstances. Fanie Demeule has delved with delight into traditional Magdalen Islands tales, reappropriating them to better bring them to life through her story. “I knew from the start that Makeshift teeth would be sprinkled with the imagination of the Islands. Oral culture is still so important, so alive there. There are several events around that, and it is part of the identity of the inhabitants. Laurena’s gifts — which are a product of my imagination — are also really important in her dramatic arc, and it was a way for me to put her journey in my hand.”
The writer also takes obvious pleasure in handling maritime language, and in exploiting all its colour and poetry. In the voices of her characters, celebrating becomes barbocher, the lighthouse is said the light and the appeasement is embelsie. “I knew a little of the Magdalen Islands vocabulary from having heard and read it. I was also lucky to have the help of the glossaries that already exist, including The salt of words. I had important editorial choices to make from the start. I thought about narrating my novel in the “I”, through Laurena’s voice. I also thought about it being made up entirely of letters exchanged by the characters. I quickly realized that maintaining this Madeleine breath throughout the novel was difficult, and could sound false. So I opted for an omniscient narration focusing particularly on Laurena, while inserting correspondences that reveal the voices of the characters, but also the mentalities, ideologies and ways of telling stories of the time.
In addition to these different levels of narration, the historical novel benefits from a contemporary style, both in terms of form and writing, which is thus immersed in intertextuality. Enriched, as mentioned above, by Acadian legends and tales, the text is also crossed by references to the tales of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, to the speeches of Kateri Tekakwitha and to the poetry of Emily Dickinson and William Blake, among others.
Through these excerpts, we feel a kind of literary connection being woven between Fanie Demeule and her great-grandmother, who was truly an avid reader. “Knowing this allowed me to use literature to bring the reader into the universe and mind of my character, to advance in the story from her inner life, and, indeed, to echo my imagination.”