To understand yourself, sometimes you have to see yourself in the eyes of a stranger.
Quebec is a “small nation” in the sense that Czech writer Milan Kundera understood it1. That is to say, a nation whose existence is not self-evident, which must defend itself in the face of history and justify its difference.
But what is a Quebecois? This debate will last as long as Quebec, and I do not intend to settle it. You don’t make people angry on a public holiday.
A few consensual elements come back to define Quebec identity. Speak the common official language. Claim this identity yourself – “a Quebecer is someone who decides to be one,” said Pierre Falardeau. And finally, to share this territory.
This column aims to explore this aspect that we take for granted.
A territory is not just a place that we inhabit. It’s also an idea that lives within us.
It is both difficult to explain and easy to understand. You have probably already experienced it. You are returning from a trip. You enjoy the brief lucidity of detachment. For a few moments, the familiar becomes foreign again. Quebec then seems different. It’s somewhere else, and at the same time, it’s home.
But this experience is accessible without flying. You can get a change of scenery without crossing the border. We can also be internal immigrants.
For example, you return to another region or another city after a long absence, such as Quebec. As you advance on the bridge, the arms of the river open up with a width that one would not suspect in Montreal. You can imagine the sea lurking downstream with its isolated coastal communities at the end. With a little imagination, you see in advance the journey of the first settlers who braved the elements – with the help of the First Nations, established long before – to erect camps, found towns, create a new world.
As you walk towards the countryside, you drive on a row which reveals this unique layout of the territory. Quebec has nearly 12,000 ranks, writes Louis-Edmond Hamelin, great geographer and inventor of “nordicity”. Instead of bringing homes together to defend themselves in the event of an attack, they were lined up. As Hamelin summarizes: “a front row along the Saint-Laurent, a row behind […] then several others2…”
This sprawl is also a crowding. The river being in a southwest–northeast axis, the cities were founded in the hollow of the Saint Lawrence valley, where the climate was less harsh and the land more fertile.
But Quebec, writes Hamelin, is also a vast expanse to the north. The idea of a hostile, abstract and almost infinite territory is part of our myths. He pleaded for a reappropriation of winter and its beauty – even if Punta Cana is pretty, no light equals that which splashes the whiteness of the snow.
Few people will venture into the Far North, and that is understandable. The journey is long and expensive. But that does not excuse the lack of curiosity of too many city dwellers for the rest of the territory.
How many know Plattsburgh better than Rouyn-Noranda? How many have never been to Gaspésie or the North Shore, outside of the tourist circuits? How many know more about the founding president of the United States than about the man who was the first to lead a Quebec government – Mr. Chauveau, if you don’t have access to Google?
A divide opposes Montreal to rural regions, and it is widening. True, the phenomenon is observed elsewhere. But it is more worrying for a fragile nation like Quebec. And it is aggravated by the fact that this territory is both vast and poorly occupied.
Listening to Ferland or reading Ferron makes you feel Quebec. The same could be said of a trip to the end of Routes 138, 132 or 117.
When we move away from home, we gain perspective which helps us to better see where we come from. The past is more apparent too. We can detect its traces there, starting with the churches. Despite the obscurantism of the clergy, people were able to achieve an exceptional destiny there, as Carl Bergeron recalls in The Great Mary or the luxury of holinessa tribute to Mary of the Incarnation.
A trip to Quebec also reveals its neglect. It is estimated that 40% of the built heritage has been destroyed since 1970. In certain villages, the most beautiful view of the river can be found at the drive-thru…
As Marie-Hélène Voyer denounces in The habit of ruinsthe rampant ugliness of materialism is a rampage of beauty that borders on self-hatred.
This territory deserves to be protected and simply to be known. As the poet Pierre Nepveu writes in Geographies of the nearby country“it is here, concretely, that our physical reality and our quality as interpretive beings, decipherers of signs, immersed in the otherness of the world, both in its material presence and in its temporal texture, combine.”
No matter where we go, we discover a part of this society to which we belong, a part of ourselves, an element of the answer when we are asked abroad the usual question: “Where are you from? -YOU ? »
1. The quote comes from a speech given by Kundera, published in the journal Debate in 1983 then recently republished by Gallimard in a collection entitled A kidnapped West.
2. The northernness of Quebec – Interviews with Louis-Edmond Hamelinwith Daniel Chartier and Jean Désy, Presses de l’Université du Québec, 2014.