The Quebecois novelist and playwright of Lebanese origin Abla Farhoud died on December 1, after having requested medical assistance in dying, after a short illness. Arriving from Lebanon at the age of six, in 1951, she brought the reality of immigrant women to life through her books, at a time when this dimension of Quebec was less known to the public.
After other stays in her country of origin and in Paris, Abla Farhoud returns to Quebec, and sees her first play, Qwhen I was grown up, staged at the Women’s Experimental Theater in 1983. Her plays were subsequently produced throughout the Francophonie.
“She was who she was,” says VLB’s editor-in-chief, Alain-Nicolas Renaud, who knew her well. She was a feminist and she had her life experience. […] She was also very animated by the psyche of men, that of her brother for example, in her last novel. It was sometimes quite brutal, very macho. Through this prism, through her exploration of the monologue of her male characters, she touches on questions of feminism through human relationships. “
But it is often as an immigrant writer that Abla Farhoud has been approached here. “Farhoud’s work is dominated by the wound of departure and the impossible quest to reconstitute the migrant subject,” Jill MacDougall wrote about him in an article by The theatrical directory, published in 2000.
” In the novel In the bright sun hide your daughters [finaliste au Prix littéraire des collégiens], she saw migrations in a particular way, ”continues Alain-Nicolas Renaud. She demonstrated that the problem was not so much to come back to the country as the trauma of having left, he explains.
At the end of the 1990s, Abla Farhoud told critic Raymond Bernatchez that death was the driving force behind his writing.
Understanding death
“If it weren’t for death, I wouldn’t write,” she said. All my work is aimed at understanding this elusive thing. Understand all the deaths, not just the physical deaths, but also the small deaths made up of illness, missing friends, lost countries and loss of contact with reality. I don’t accept death, no death. For me, this is the fundamental question. If it weren’t for death, we wouldn’t be living the same way. “. Through this, writing was for her a quest for beauty, a spark of life, she said.
From the end of the 1990s, Abla Farhoud published several novels. In the first, Happiness has a slippery tail, she said to the journalist of To have to Marie-Andrée Chouinard having “wanted to grasp the truth of a foreigner who can neither read, write nor speak”. His latest novel, The Last of the Snoreaux, that the criticism of To have to Natalia Wysocka described as a “pearl of humanity”, appeared on VLB in 2019. She explored there, through the story of her own brother, the themes of old age, madness and oblivion.
Regarding writing, in 2017 she confided to journalist Laila Maalouf that she was committed to it in the hope that her readers would recognize themselves in what the human being has most fundamental. She also said that it was only by writing that she could try to understand something in life. “But,” she sighed, “I’m finishing my book and I haven’t understood anything yet, so I’m starting another one!” “, Noted Friday the team of the Ville-Marie publishing group, in a press release marking the death of the writer.
Before dying, Abla Farhoud has time to put the finishing touches on a last novel, Havre-Saint-Pierre, forever, which will be published by VLB éditeur over the next year.