Interviewing an author and hearing him quote Georges Bataille (1897-1962) is not or is no longer so common, and in fact quite rare. If the interview is about garbage disposals and the author being interviewed speaks with authority, having himself been a garbage collector for two decades, we reach the level of exceptional exception when the name of the French writer and philosopher comes up.
“The most revealing thing about waste is its invisibility,” says Simon Paré-Poupart, who has just published Garbage! Diary of a garbage collector, at Lux. Our over-consumerist society does not want to see what it produces and ends up throwing away. It buryes outside cities. It sends recycling to the other side of the planet. It puts the worker who hides it on the margins. Georges Bataille spoke of “the cursed part”. Waste is our cursed part. The one we do not want to see, the one that confronts us with what we do, with what we are.”
Simon Paré-Poupart, now in his late thirties and a new father, became a garbage collector at the beginning of the century to pay for his studies. The “Sisyphean work of consumer society,” as he calls it, paid almost twice as much ($16.19) as the minimum wage, then set at $7.30. The average wage has roughly doubled again since then.
The recruit continued his studies in sociology and then obtained a master’s degree in international administration. He still kept the job that now occupies him three days a week. “For twenty years, I have hauled nearly 70,000 tons of waste, and that has necessarily shaped who I am,” says the incipit of his essay.
“The job was profitable, and I quickly saw a coherence with what I am,” the author adds in an interview. I had read Germinal, by Émile Zola, and The workbench, by Robert Linhart [qui raconte son expérience d’ouvrier dans une usine en 1968]. I’ve read about unionization and I’ve tried to unionize a company myself. I saw a lot of resonance between what I was reading and what I was doing. I also find that on the left, we’ve become very disconnected from workers.”
50 tons per day
Discussions with his master’s professor Alain Deneault, a philosopher of economics, convinced him to write in the “I” to speak of the “we”. Unless I am mistaken, his testimony is quite unique in the world.
“The book came from reactions showing curiosity and interest in my world. As they say in journalism, I understood that there was a subject. In working-class circles, there is a trivialization of what we do. I also noticed that many drainers do their job out of concern for mutual aid, as a public service, while sacrificing their bodies.”
That’s an understatement. Mr. Paré-Poupart explains that the very athletic mixed martial arts champion Georges St-Pierre was also a garbage collector, but “an average garbage collector,” according to the testimonies he received.
A private company truck from Quebec and its proletarians on the run can collect up to 50 tons of waste per day, while elsewhere in the world the norm rarely exceeds 20 tons. In France, garbage collectors collect 6 tons daily in mechanically raised wheeled bins.
Mr. Paré-Poupart wouldn’t really want that. He sees pleasure in the work of carrying bags all day. And then, the international standard of large rolling bins would prove incompatible with our winters, he says, unless collections are cancelled on storm days.
“I am careful not to get injured, but it happens. I have had surgery and been hospitalized because of the oil changes. The first question I ask people when I train one is: “Do you like it?” If they don’t like it, it’s a lot of sacrifices. At my age, 38, I am often asked if I am going to retire soon. I am seen as being at the end of my career, like a professional athlete. However, in our team, there is a 57-year-old man, who surprises me a lot when I watch him go.”
The drainers here are still mostly “native,” another Quebec exception, but diversity is slowly taking hold. The profession attracts people with atypical backgrounds, failed athletes, of course, outcasts and ex-convicts too. The book talks about a guy who paid bail to get drainers out of prison, hired them and deducted this debt with interest from their salary.
A collective fault
Simon Paré-Poupart uses writing to bear witness to his experiences and obsessions. Life and stories merge, reflection and action intertwine, and what is experienced by the body is analyzed by the mind. Here again, the reference to Bataille is justified.
The book on our cursed part is organized around short chapters to explain the choice to become a garbage collector (first part) and what collecting garbage means (second part). It discusses children’s passion for garbage trucks, types of waste, relationships with citizens, winter, heat waves, nighttime and smells.
The content and the form correspond. Mr. Paré-Poupart can quote novelists, sociologists and philosophers while poeticizing the nauseating daily life.
“When I met him, Ti-Christ, Christian by name, had the strength of Samson and the face of Brad Pitt,” writes the author in one of his beautiful portraits of companions. “His angelic face and childish kindness may have provoked the devil. Ti-Christ, in any case, was exposed to the worst temptations and he gave in to vices. He fell into coke up to his teeth. Always short of money, dancing in the evening in gay bars, he lived in a semi-slum in Laval West, all crooked, his life in tatters, always in a trance. The guy had trouble keeping his job as a garbage collector, that’s saying something!”
Above all, above all, garbage becomes a sort of total social object, where the foundations of our extractive, productivist, over-consumerist society are concentrated. As soon as they are thrown away, objects disappear from the concern of the person who possessed them and no longer wants them. “I have not spent a single day without running to the truck and throwing a plasma screen into the tank,” he writes.
The garbage collectors collect everything from paint cans, solvents, medications and construction waste that should go to the ecocentre. Simon Paré-Poupart has already found photos of naked employees at their party Christmas and even gold jewelry forgotten in a discarded furniture drawer.
He himself is constantly collecting objects instead of making them disappear. His father-in-law wants a cooler, he finds three in the trash. He furnished his first house “with a run of bulky items in Mascouche”. He defines himself as a freeganeor the one who lives off the waste of a throwaway society by consuming what is free (free) and vegan to denounce waste.
“It is a philosophical, ethical, economic and political position,” he writes. “The only one that seems consistent to me after twenty years of filling landfills with garbage.”
The book ends with thanks to Professor Deneault, to the editor Mark Fortier at Lux, to his wife, Laurianne, and finally to his companions of truck of draining. “My colleagues do not know, for the most part, that I have written a book on the environment,” says the final text. “I do not know if they will hear about it, and if it will interest them.”