With Fortresses and other refugesa very beautiful collection of three stories which focuses on the mechanics of memory, this is the third time in seven years that Rafaële Germain has looked into the subject of memory.
” Yes I know. We will have to stop, move on to another call, ”responds with a smile, the one we knew in the mid-2000s as a columnist at The Press and best-selling author of novels chick bed.
Today, Rafaële Germain mainly works as a television editor. And she sometimes writes in-depth and delicate books on memory and recollections, a subject that has fascinated her for a long time, but which is now tinged with her personal experience.
An infinite present, published in 2016, was already inspired by the illness of his father, the journalist Georges-Hébert Germain, who died in 2015 of brain cancer. And the chances of life wanted his mother, the legendary cultural press officer Francine Chaloult, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in June 2022, to have had her first symptoms during the last year of her father’s life. It was therefore normal that all this “percolate” into his thoughts.
Of course, when both of your parents died of illnesses in which memory was affected, the relationship isn’t the same. It would have been weird to talk about the memory, but to act as if all that didn’t exist.
Rafaele Germain
His mother was already very affected by the disease when the editor Danielle Laurin proposed to Rafaële Germain to participate in the III collection of Quebec America, which consists for the authors of telling three memories. The author was even already at the stage of cleaning up the basement of the family home, which was overflowing with writings, photos and objects accumulated for decades.
“My mother’s memory faded super fast during the pandemic. As his memories disappeared, I came out of the basement. It never ended, it was really excavation! There was already a kind of archiving of memories that was happening even before the book came into my life. »
Dust off the memories
Her mother’s childhood, of which she has very precise images, so often told to her, her own childhood, of which her memories are more fleeting, her mother’s last year of life, “a fortress ravaged by a storm”, writes -her: from these very personal stories, Rafaële Germain tries to answer many questions that torment her. “But it had to resonate beyond my experience to make it worth putting down on paper. »
Can we inherit the memories of others? What makes one memory imprint on us and not another? Are memories just a fiction of reality? These are just some of the subjects covered implicitly in this book, very concentrated and moving at times, which she above all wanted to be honest and “in the feeling” – she reveals herself a lot, for a rare time. .
“I have a natural modesty, but in this project, I told myself that I had to show myself completely naked at least once. Not jump for half an hour there! But pass in the decoration. It was honest to go there. »
The past brings us back to the present and Rafaële Germain, who saw her parents gradually lose their memories, wondered which of hers she would like to take with her in the end. His response: “Things that are there now. But can we “choose” the memories that are deposited in us?
“We can choose to dust off things from time to time. I often have this image of museum curators. I do that sometimes, interior conservation. It’s a personal archiving work, but afterwards, it’s how you’re going to carry them, these memories. »
Watch out for the world
Rafaële Germain deploys in Fortresses and other refuges a poetic and colorful writing, neat and lively. “Ah, writing is such a joy. I would just do that! », says the one who sees herself less as a « creator » than as an observer. “A translator, let’s say. By applying this kind of attention to the world that she began to develop in 2019 in For memorywhich she wrote with Dominique Fortier.
This is going to sound corny, but there’s poetry in everything, whether it’s a snowdrift or someone else’s thought. Transcribing a breath of wind, a bird’s flight or the act of remembering is music, it’s a movement of colors.
Rafaele Germain
The more we “are” in her existence, the better we remember, she believes, moreover. “That’s what remains, that moment when I was there enough to have taken a kind of interior photo. »
Rafaële Germain hopes that her book will “walk discreetly”, that it will “float here and there”. It is also by the band a funny and endearing portrait of his mother, a larger than life character who took advantage of every moment of his life with relish. She who didn’t much like introspection, what would she think?
“I think she would be a little exasperated. That she probably wouldn’t recognize herself. That she would be upset too, because it’s not complacent. But she would be happy too, when I wrote the book about my father, one thing she said was: “But we don’t talk about me”! It wasn’t a career plan, I really didn’t want to be the girl who wrote books about her parents. But we got there. »
Fortresses and other refuges
Rafaele Germain
Quebec America
126 pages