It is by digging into memory, and inscribing it in today’s news, that Les Correspondances d’Eastman celebrates its 20e anniversary, after two years of a complete or partial interruption linked to the pandemic.
Still located on the enchanting site of the town of Eastman, bordered by Lac d’Argent, this year’s event brings together several headliners who will approach the theme of memory from different angles. And it is in the La Marjolaine theater, where the Correspondances were born, 20 years ago, that they are being held this year.
In this context, the journalist Marie-France Bazzo will receive the historian Gérard Bouchard in a major interview. They will together lead a reflection on the collective memory of Quebec, in particular on the way in which it changes over the years.
At the end of the line, Gérard Bouchard takes as an example the way in which a movement of historians is today questioning the triumphant discourse surrounding the Quiet Revolution.
“There’s a whole generation of historians working on the assumption” that the Quiet Revolution was in fact a “disastrous legacy,” he says. Similarly, the dark role played by an authoritarian Church could be reviewed in the light of its role in the survival of the Francophonie, he raises.
History is therefore not an exact science, he agrees. But to revisit it, or even rewrite it, historians must submit themselves in all cases to a rigorous and proven methodology. Thus, the place of women in history could take on new proportions. “It’s a job that is being done at the moment,” says Martine Delvaux, who will also be interviewed by Vanessa Bell, as part of a major interview with Correspondances d’Eastman. “We try to put women back in their place, to make them appear in history. It’s not that they weren’t there, but they were covered up. Their role has been minimized in favor of conquests, wars, political life, as if what women did did not count. In an interview with Correspondances, Martine Delvaux will discuss the writers who have shaped and influenced her, from Marguerite Duras to Nathalie Léger, including Jamaica Kincaid and bell hooks.
For her part, the writer Dominique Fortier will participate in a round table during a literary café, on the theme of the great voices that precede the work of the writer. For her, writing is a dialogue between the past and the present, and her own books unfold like a palimpsest, as if we were rewriting on a piece of parchment where the previous text had not been completely erased.
Eastman’s Correspondences also scheduled a few music shows. Catherine Major will present for example the show Motherboard, where she deals with the memory that the fetus keeps from its mother’s womb, notes Étienne Beaulieu, director of Correspondences. And the I Musici ensemble will accompany the reading of poems by Hélène Dorion.
Les Correspondances d’Eastman is held at the La Marjolaine theater from September 9 to 11.