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As a poet, as an academic, as a biographer of Gaston Miron, Pierre Nepveu has had, throughout his work, only one major subject: Quebec. But how to define this important relationship linking him to his nation and his people?
“My love of Quebec is not nationalist if one means by that that I would place the nation above everything, that I would be unable to recognize its flaws, in the past as in the present, or that I would be obsessed with its difference, its distinction, its specificity”, he writes in the opening of Near Country Geographies, while hastening to add that Quebec remains in his eyes a “unique case”, particularly given its linguistic situation. A unique case calling for “constant concern”.
By drawing on his own journey – “It seemed important to me to link ideas to moments in my life, to show that ideas have a genesis”, he explains -, the writer, who describes himself as a “rooted cosmopolitan”, thus depicts both the Quebec that lives in his heart and the one that, under his eyes, does not always change while improving.
PHOTO PHILIPPE BOIVIN, THE PRESS
The writer Pierre Nepveu
Strong book of the breath of a poet who embraces wide, this essay is thus transformed from chapter to chapter in a celebration of the salutary beauty of the territory, in a worried reflection on what Quebec has sacrificed by liquidating without distinction its Catholic heritage, in a short history of literary translation in Quebec as well as in a plea in favor of a conception of Quebec identity that would place its literature at its heart.
But it is also out of concern that Pierre Nepveu wanted to map Quebec as he sees it. A Quebec that would truly consider the richness of the contribution of all those who are called minorities, confides in an interview the 75-year-old author, tired of being accused of playing the game of Canadian multiculturalism, even that we call him wokebecause its vision of Quebec is “open, pluralist, inclusive”.
My concern stems from the current public debate: I find that we have gone from a progressive nationalism, that of the 1960s, to a nationalism that can be described as identity-based and which bothers me. The question behind this is the question of pluralism and what is annoying are the nationalists who see the nation at all costs as something unitary.
Pierre Nepveu
An ethic of neighbor
The However, the strength of Pierre Nepveu’s essay derives less from his commentary on our here-now than from the singularity of the trajectory he recounts. Born in 1946 in the Petite-Patrie in the heart of a typical French-Canadian family of the middle class, the poet quickly took a trajectory different from that of the other intellectuals of his cohort.
Example among many: in his twenties, while many of his comrades flew to the mother country, Pierre Nepveu preferred to accept a contract at McMaster University in Hamilton, where he discovered a passion for reggae (!). In the 1970s, he co-directed the literary translation review Ellipseat a time when the translation of Anglo-Canadian works into French, and Franco-Quebec works into English, was of little interest to anyone.
French Canada’s quest for identity will certainly have coincided with that of the adolescent that he was, but Pierre Nepveu’s gaze on his society and on literature will have been that of a thinker concerned with what lies on the periphery of his field of vision. And if he enthusiastically embraced the struggles of the French-speaking majority for emancipation, it is always with this awareness that any majority should beware of those it risks abandoning in its blind spot.
It is in this same spirit, by bringing its nuances to certain collective myths, that he regrets that “many people of his generation” share such a ferociously anti-religious vision of our existence in common, that it banishes almost all possibility of spiritual life.
I am not religious, but I am bound to note that there is a spiritual experience that has accompanied the Catholic religion, which is often underestimated. The rejection of Catholicism becomes a way of discrediting all the experience of meaning therein. For me, there is an impoverishment there. There was in our Catholicism an ethic of neighbor, which is now completely evacuated, in the name of a conception that I find restrictive of secularism.
Pierre Nepveu
A culture of caring
There always remains, however, for those who wish to extract themselves from themselves, literature and poetry. “Literature is an attention, a listening to what is outside of us, to what is closest”, says the one who signed in 2019 The space caressed by your voicea moving collection on the mourning of a loved one.
But when I talk about proximity, I’m not talking about the prosaic banality of everyday life, but about something that would be like a call to go beyond. I think that the nearby world is a bearer of transcendence.
Pierre Nepveu
Without subjecting literature to “lessons of benevolence and altruism”, Pierre Nepveu speaks of poetry as a school of the gaze, citing a landmark book by the American poet Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World (1973). “She taught her students to look at what was around them, she nurtured in them a culture of caring. What is close is not necessarily visible: we are often distracted. Poetry for me is important, because it allows us to discover this closeness. »
In a chapter structured around a walk on the trails of Mont Saint-Hilaire, along Lake Hertel, Pierre Nepveu recalls a poem by Emily Dickinson, who likens the winter setting to “cathedral melodies”. “That’s the enchantment of proximity: it’s feeling that the place where you are can always transport you beyond. »
Near Country Geographies
Pierre Nepveu
boreal
256 pages