The cultural journey undertaken on the occasion of the centenary of the writer Jack Kerouac ends with an examination of the current vitality of Franco-American culture.
Jack Kerouac was born on March 12, 1922 in Massachusetts and, exactly one hundred years later, his Franco-American community still survives and is even experiencing a certain resurgence of vitality at this time.
In 1901, nearly half (45%) of the population of French-Canadian origin lived outside Quebec, either in the English-speaking provinces of Canada or in New England, where the immigration of approximately one million people s extended from about 1840 to 1930.
In the 2010 census, 2.1 million citizens of the United States indicated that their ancestors were French-Canadian, but the descendants of Kerouac, Cormier, de Montigny and company could well be ten million today, or more numerous than Quebecers, according to some estimates. In Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, more than 20% of the population has roots that go back to the French-speaking north.
This is the case of Professor Susan Pinette, who teaches in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Maine. His mother (a Bouchard) and his father, Mr. Pinette, come from the Madawaska region.
“My family has lived in the United States for several generations,” she explains in English. My parents are French-speaking and speak Brayon to each other, but when I was two years old, the doctor recommended that they stop speaking French to me so that I could learn English. It is a common thing in the community to promote integration in school and in society. »
Susan Pinette ended up reconnecting with her mother tongue by mastering what she calls ” continental English », until studying in Paris and doing a thesis on Diderot and Rousseau in California. The University of Maine then offered him the opportunity to join Franco-American studies.
She now directs the programs of the Franco American Center. There is also the French Institute at Assumption University in Worcester (Massachusetts), the Franco-American Center in Manchester (New Hampshire), the Franco Center in Lewiston (Maine) and other archival repositories.
“Archives are important for the memory of a community that still remains hidden,” said Ms.me Spruce. Americans understand the importance of 19th century immigrationand century through Ellis Island, the main entrance for immigrants from Europe. The French Canadians arrived by train, by car, even on foot. This unique experience of immigration has been erased from collective memory. This community has been silent and silenced. »
In any case, there is nothing comparable to the cultural impact of the Jewish or Italian communities of New York, constantly portrayed in films, TV series or books, from Francis Ford Coppola to The Sopranosfrom Woody Allen to Philip Roth.
If we force the professor to name a symbolic work among all of Franco-American literature at the heart of this series on the road, from Peyton Place to Frenchtown, she chooses the book Bland (the eclipse in French) by Robert Cormier. In this novel, the young Paul Moreaux discovers that he can make himself invisible, a gift inherited from his ancestors. “This story of invisibility seems to me to symbolize the Franco-American situation”, summarizes Mme Spruce.
Survival and discrimination
In Subterranean Kerouac (1998) discussing the writer’s fluid sexuality, Ellis Amburn writes that French Canadians were “despised as foreigners” because they “spoke a patois” (Joual), lived in ghettos “on the verge of paranoia and married each other”, and that, “unfortunately, their narrow-mindedness and their racism are found in Kerouac’s novels”. He adds, “For the despised Canucks, survival has become a mystique. They called it “survival”. »
The concept dated from the XIXand century sums up the resistance of French-speaking and Catholic culture to the English-speaking and Protestant majority. “When Kerouac was born in 1922, Lowell, like other industrial towns, was home to different communities speaking several languages and practicing different religions, but with the Irish and French-Canadians as the dominant groups,” says author David Vermette. The years 1920-1930 mark the peak of this importance with the constitution of a small elite, governors, judges, schools, hospitals, churches, newspapers. Kerouac himself came from a rather middle class background. His family did not live long in a small Canada. »
David Vermette devotes his life as a researcher to the history of his community of origin. In particular, he published the sum A Distinct Alien Race (2018), subtitled The Untold Story of Franco-Americans, Industrialization, Immigration, and Religious Conflict. The title picks up an ambiguous phrase used by a Boston newspaper a century ago, in a race-obsessed society, to describe the officially “white” population, enjoying civil rights, but despised as “Latin”, “poor and ignorant,” papist and just good at exploiting in the factories.
Mr. Vermette considers himself part of a “small movement” renewing this field of scholarly study, but also of popular interest. “When I started to give lectures in certain circles about twenty years ago, the mastery of French was proportional to age: the oldest spoke it more than the youngest, he says. Today we hear more and more young people speaking it. »
His eight immigrant grandparents came from French Canada, Bellechasse and Sorel in particular. Many settled in industrial communities in Maine, where French was spoken only at the turn of the 20and century. Deindustrialization has forced a new migration to cities, including Boston, where David Vermette was born in the 1960s, into families who no longer mastered the language of their ancestors. He himself learned French as an adult, compensating for the defeat of survival with rebirth.
Nation and denomination
Designation ” Franco-American seems increasingly used by scholars, while the community has also been referred to as that of French Canadians. We also see derivatives of the type French Canadian Americanor simply Canadian-American.
David Vermette wrote two long articles dealing with the designation on his excellent specialized blog: the first entitled “There are too many names for us”; another announcing: “There is no name for us”. He concludes in an interview that “no appellation seems perfect”.
Professor Pinette points out that the Library of Congress classification, now universally used, only introduced in 2008 a specific rating for authors designated as Franco-American. She herself will speak about the most famous of them at a conference next week in Lowell as part of the centenary celebrations of her birth. She was giving a course on her work last semester. She started by asking the class who knew him before enrolling in the class. None of the students raised their hands.
” There is a buzz in Lowell, in literary circles or in the Quebec media around Kerouac, but not in mass culture, she says. Students do not know the beat generation. »
She adds that studies on Kerouac are much more interested in his literature, his style, than his origins. “The author is dead, isn’t he? she says, using a formula from the French Theory (Barthes and Foucault).
The first biographies indeed barely broached the subject of his French-Canadian roots, or mixed them with French origins. By contrast, Quebec exegetes have accentuated the importance of these roots and in a way attempted to “Quebecize” Kerouac.
Professor Pinette evokes the famous interview with Jack Kerouac at the salt of the week in 1967, two years before his death, in Lowell, where his long journey had brought him back. Seen and re-examined from Quebec, it is a tribute, so to speak, integrating. From the Franco-American point of view, the meeting rather accentuates the differences.
“We hear the audience in the studio laughing a little when he speaks and we feel a little uncomfortable, and he searches for the words in French, says Mme Pinette, who opposes the “deterritorialization” of Kerouac. He is Franco-American, like me. He has lived in English all his life, his French is rusty, he speaks like an uneducated peasant. It’s a bum. We see it there. He is neither Quebecer nor American: he is both, he is Franco-American…”
This report was financed thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund.The duty.