Janette Bertrand is exactly as you imagine.
The most famous nonagenarian in Quebec barely opens the door to her bright residence in downtown Montreal when I already feel a bit like my grandmother. But in reality I am with one of the figures of Quebec culture who has contributed the most to changing, for the better, the fate of his society.
Mme Bertrand notices that I’m hobbling a little, because of the left leg that I’m missing, asks me a few questions about my handicap and, without me realizing it, I start telling my life to the one that I came to interview – a role reversal that usually horrifies me to no end.
However, I shouldn’t be surprised: getting people to talk about their most intimate things is the art she has been working on for longer than I have been in the world.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, THE PRESS
Janette Bertrand
” After Everybody talks about it, a few weeks ago, we went out with the mayor,” she tells me about the traditional meals to which guests of Sunday high mass are invited. And during this supper, Mme Bertrand did not hesitate to kindly express to Valérie Plante his complaints regarding the sidewalks of Montreal and, more generally, the difficulties that travel in this city represents in winter for people with reduced mobility. We both know something about it.
Her dream: that the mayor accepts her invitation to go for a ride in her wheelchair in order to see what she has to face when she leaves her house.
Just a girl
In addition to her shaky balance when walking without a walker, Mme Bertrand, who I would have a hard time not calling Janette, doesn’t look 98 years old at all. The adjective “incredible” is used indiscriminately, but there is indeed something purely incredible in his liveliness of mind, in his humor and in his knowledge of the issues that drive current affairs.
Colleague Léa Carrier’s recent report on the masculinist resurgence alarmed her greatly, and isn’t there something deeply distressing about her having to experience yet another episode of this kind? But as she says so well, we cannot end “8,000 years of domination of women” by men without resistance. If the show still existed, it would certainly have a rich subject to explore at the dinner table. Speak for the sake of speaking.
Mme Bertrand was born in another era – I raise my eyebrows when she slips into a phrase that Lionel Groulx taught her – but she is undeniably a woman of our time.
A woman, feminist, who has not said her last word against the patriarchy, which will of course have been the fight of her entire existence. A fight involves many advances and almost as many reversals. Change diapers? Such was her destiny as well as that of all women in Quebec, recalls the warmest of rebels in My life in three actshis autobiography launched in 2004, of which a new expanded edition has just been published.
My brothers had everything, everything, everything. They could take Dad’s car, they had pocket money, they took the traditional course. They were gods, my brothers. I was – that’s what my father said – nothing but a girl. There are many who accepted it, being just a girl. I said no.
Janette Bertrand
So she made it her mission to improve the lot of women by improving her own. “It was selfish, deep down,” she emphasizes. This, you will agree, is a very humble reading of his contribution.
Believe in humans
Janette Bertrand is not slowing down. Two weekends ago, she spent several hours meeting her readers at the Montreal Book Fair. Right after our visit last Wednesday, she was expected somewhere downtown for a shoot. The omnicommunicator multiplies the interviews, while her place in the pantheon of the builders of modern Quebec has long been cemented.
PHOTO HUGO-SÉBASTIEN AUBERT, THE PRESS
Janette Bertrand in interview with our journalist
“It’s because I’m aware that there might be something that people can take from what I say,” she explains. Me, I’m a thief, I grab what I need from reading, from the cinema, from the theater. It’s to go get things that we read, that we go out. Sometimes you don’t find anything, but other times you find a sentence that will mark your life. »
What makes her happy today? A box of May West brought back from the supermarket by her young lover, Donald, 22 years her junior. A shopping trip with her eldest daughter, Dominique, who is 75 years old (the youngest of her great-grandsons is 1 year old). Go see your “boyfriend” Debbie Lynch-White play at the theater.
But not slowing down is also for Janette Bertrand a way of honoring the gift she received, at the start of adulthood, by surviving – almost a miracle – tuberculosis, after 10 months of what we called great cure.
“I was sure that in the fall, the leaves would fall and I would die,” she remembers, recalling the other young patients she saw leaving, feet first, with the morgue truck. “So when you stay alive, after coming so close to death…” She won’t finish her sentence, but her ellipsis will say it all.
Janette Bertrand does not believe in God. “But I believe in humans. I believe we only have life. I believe in it very strongly. And that’s why I live so intensely. It’s that we have to live it, this life, until the end, because I won’t have another. »
My life in three acts – New edition
Free expression
480 pages
Three quotes from our interview
About his empathy
“I discovered by meeting others that I never judged and that in the public, they knew that I was not going to judge. I was just trying to understand. But understanding is not judging. And to understand is not to approve. It’s a beautiful gift that life has given me, not to judge, but maybe it’s because I didn’t want to be that myself. »
HAS about the benefits of age
“The wonderful thing about living a long time is not that you become wise, but that you gain perspective. I always blamed my mother for not loving me, but she wasn’t capable of it, I understand that better and better today. However, you cannot say to yourself, when you are young, “I will understand later”. That’s laziness. »
About his friendship with Abenaki artist Alanis Obomsawin
“Alanis Obomsawin told me: “What you learned at school is wrong.” She was the one who taught me, who opened my mind, who told me: “You stole our land, you wanted to kill us and you didn’t succeed.” I was troubled. Troubled ! I went to my history books and that wasn’t what was written. It was the opposite. [Notre prise de conscience par rapport à notre rapport avec les peuples autochtones], this is a huge step forward. »