Mélikah Abdelmoumen was born in Chicoutimi in 1972. From 2005 to 2017, she lived in Lyon. She holds a doctorate in literature from University of Montreal and has published numerous articles and short stories,as well as several novels and essays, including disasters (2013) and Twelve years in France (2018). She was an editor at Groupe Ville-Marie literature. Baldwin, Styron and me was published by Mémoire d’encrier this winter. She is the editor-in-chief of the journal Quebec letters.
I am, since autumn 2021, the editor-in-chief of the journal Quebec letters, an institution in our literary field. As is the case with all cultural journals, QLmust fight with the means that are those of culture in a society like ours. There is therefore, for each of our four issues per year, a limited number of pages, a budget to be respected in order to be able to continue to live and to properly pay those who work and write for the magazine.
We must constantly bear in mind our mission and, if you like, the identity of the journal, its role: to defend Quebec literature, to report on what is happening there, to discover its new voices, to hold a substantial critical notebook, to do justice and homage to the founding voices, to let different generations, different social groups, different variations of what a Quebec author or a Quebec author is today express themselves… and as far as I’m concerned , as editor-in-chief, discovering what I don’t know and even making room for what doesn’t suit my tastes but which is valid, interesting, promising, which touches on important issues today .
The problem that my colleagues Nicholas Giguère, Alexandre Vanasse, Mégane Desrosiers and I quickly had to face is the following: all that cannot fit into four issues in paper format of a hundred pages per year. Many people would like to be welcomed and counted in QLbut we do not have the means to accommodate everyone.
How do I reconcile this harsh reality with what I see as my duty? How not to think that reality and my idealism can never agree? How not to end up saying: “Sorry, we can’t welcome you all, that’s how it is”?
think outside the box
It happened instinctively. Something like: “Mélikah, think out of the box, think out of the box, use your imagination. And I have colleagues who think the same, and who accompany me there.
This led to the creation of a post from the editor-in-chief, which we publish eight times a year online, on the body of work of an author or author who does not have the recognition that he or she deserves and for whom we have not had enough space in the pages of the paper magazine.
It worked, when an author wrote a superb text on what it’s like to live with the more than silent media reception of a first novel published in the midst of COVID (after our reflex to say: “sorry, but we don’t can’t afford to put it in the magazine, we’re overbooked ), think with the colleagues to rather create a new space for these voices on our website, entitled “Free Opinions”, and propose to the author to inaugurate it.
This fall, it will give a literary show in which 20 authors will collaborate on a large text from all their short texts.
It takes a bit more work, it takes a bit of headaches, and we still haven’t welcomed everyone we feel it’s our duty to welcome, but at least I I have the feeling of having broken the chains wrapped around me by a dominant discourse, supposedly more pragmatic, on reception.
The heart of the metaphor
Running a journal is not running a country or a state. I know it well. But the heart of the metaphor, here, is the question of the welcome and the automatisms that we have developed (or that it suits some people that we develop) so as not to think of it otherwise, so as not to lose a little of ourselves. or what we own (a scarecrow that we wave before our eyes so that we don’t think outside the boxes).
However, I know that many of us are ready to lose a little of ourselves, or of what we have (and even many of us already do so), out of solidarity. But it would seem that in our great dialogue of the deaf on what welcoming is, we have not yet found a way to discuss by putting ourselves on another plane than the one offered to us, all the time, everywhere…
We should be more audible in public discourse. Let us convince those who hesitate, or who have never thought of it, to try an experiment: to put themselves in a position of doubt in the face of certain majority formulas in the media and political space. Attempt to deprogram. To imagine what it would be like to be above all for welcome and solidarity, and to look for ways to make them possible, achievable. Collectively wondering if it would really cost everyone so much and everyone losing a bit of what we have, shaking up who we are.
I would like us to ask ourselves whether solidarity, as a driving force for reflection and the search for solutions, might not be just as powerful, if not more so, than the stubborn protection of oneself and of what one possesses.