“At the moment, besides cancer, I am really privileged. I find myself really lucky, ”drops Caroline Dawson, a breathtaking phrase of generosity, given the circumstances. Lucky, really?
“My boyfriend is a doctor, I live on the Plateau, I am a CEGEP teacher and I am paid despite the illness. I am no longer part of the social class that my parents were part of when they arrived, ”she says. The writer appears on screen with a beaming smile and a scarf on her head. Background Zoom : the sumptuous Stockholm library, one of her places of refuge when she lived in Sweden.
Last August, the young forty-something announced on Facebook that she had learned of the presence in her body of an aggressive tumor – an osteosarcoma – of 25 cm, which she will (not so) affectionately nickname Goliath. The year 2021 was until then a year blessed by the exceptional destiny of Where I hide, her first novel published in mid-November 2020, which draws heavily on her own journey as a young refugee, who arrived in Canada from Chile when she was only 7 years old.
A story full of strong family ties, clenched silence in the face of adversity and little dull shames that will have upset thousands, including Prime Minister François Legault who recommended it on his social networks in March, before the playwright Michel Marc Bouchard defended him in May at the Combat des livres de The more the merrier, the more we read !.
“Books generally last six months in Quebec,” recalls Caroline Dawson, herself bewildered. His has not yet finished neither his media life nor his life in the bookstore. So far, 17,152 copies have found buyers – one title has reached best-seller status by surpassing the 3000 sales milestone.
How to explain this success ? “Maybe it’s because the book is written in I and it’s the story of a little girl. It’s easy to blame a 50-year-old immigrant gentleman. But to a little girl who wonders if Santa Claus is going to get on the plane, it is less so ”, observes the one who wanted a text as accessible as possible.
PHOTO CHLOÉ CHARBONNIER, PROVIDED BY CAROLINE DAWSON
Caroline Dawson, author of Where I hide
I wanted a simple writing book. I had in mind the idea that my mother, who reads French well but does not come from academia, could understand this book. I have worked a lot to simplify certain passages, to illustrate certain things in order to find in the hearts of people what will amaze them or hurt them.
Caroline Dawson, author of Where I hide
Not just a beautiful story
A half-smile crosses Caroline Dawson’s face. It is that there is inevitably something ironic in the small reading report of the Prime Minister, of which the woman of the left that she is is not the most fervent partisan. “A beautiful story of a family which did not have it easy,” he wrote in a strangely euphemistic turn, an advertisement which nevertheless allowed Where I hide to “reach out to a lot of people [qu’elle n’aurait] could not join otherwise ”, underlines the author with sincere gratitude.
It remains that François Legault hides – voluntarily or not – certain aspects of this novel as tender as it is hard, which shows without make-up the violence of poverty in which many immigrants must float. “It has been a bit of a complicated book to write, because there is both anger and gratitude in me. I can’t be that angry, because I still arrived here as a refugee, we were welcomed anyway. But I think that reading Legault is ideological. He wanted to see a beautiful story of immigrants. And obviously it’s a little tiring when they wave us around and say, “Here’s how to fit in.” ”
The avid reader Caroline Dawson knows enough about literature to know that the impact of a book is as much about its quality as what it captures with the times. “I think he came at the right time in the collective conversation, not to reconcile everyone, but perhaps as a first step,” she says of this novel in which the systemic racism and the under- media representations of racialized people are not just concepts, but realities that his characters experience even in their bodies.
He arrived at the moment when we dare to ask these questions and it is perhaps there, the light. If there are so many antagonisms at the moment, it’s because we dare to ask questions, and obviously it hurts.
Caroline dawson
“Our true nature”
During the most recent edition of her radio log that she presents on the program of Pénélope McQuade, on the airwaves of Here Première, Caroline Dawson confided in preferring to the circumvented formulas with which cancer and its consequences are often referred to. the frankness of the sentences which name all that the disease causes of suffering, distress and fear.
“I even find myself tiring being that person,” she adds, laughing. The other evening, she was chatting quietly in the living room with her husband. “Then, all of a sudden, I think of something and I say to him: ‘If ever I am no longer there when Paul [leur fils] is going to be 15, don’t forget to tell her this. ” She laughs again. “Sometimes it’s heavy for nothing. It’s heavy for nothing, but stronger than her. Even in the face of the worst, Caroline Dawson refuses to close her eyes. “Cancer is my reality, and my job as a sociologist is to describe reality. It annoys me when you don’t look reality in the face. ”
And what is reality? After having administered her sixth and last cycle of chemotherapy – she is in the fifth – Caroline Dawson’s oncologists will rule on the benefits of surgery. “The clinical signs are encouraging, so we mentally celebrate a little bit. »Short pause.
But at the same time, death, she sits next to me every day, all the time. I don’t like it when you pretend she’s not there.
Caroline dawson
Caroline Dawson would have every reason in the world to think only of her navel. No one would hold it against him. However, she insists again to testify to her luck. “As a sociology teacher, the first thing I tell my students is that there is no human life possible without the presence of other human beings. So it moves me when I think of the people who take care of me or when I think of the health care system. It’s still crazy, the money that is spent to keep me alive! It moves me a lot that we collectively made the decision that the person who falls, we are not going to force them to mortgage their house. It moves me because I think it is there, our true nature. ”
Where I hide
Caroline dawson
editions of the commotion
208 pages