To celebrate its 325e anniversary, the city of Rimouski has chosen to assemble a brand new giant Adirondack chair, facing the river, to allow visitors to be photographed in front of the sunset. However, in front of this chair, a church, the largest in Quebec, they say, witness to the history of the city, has been padlocked and abandoned to itself for years.
Marie-Hélène Voyer sees in this anecdote the disdain, even the ignorance of Quebecers towards their heritage, which she develops in her last essay The habit of ruins. The coronation of oblivion and ugliness in Quebec, which appears in Lux.
Here in Quebec, we want something new, always new, even if it is of poor quality or excruciatingly ugly. As such, the disturbing series of photos Model homes, taken by Isabelle Hayeur at the end of the 2000s, widely cited in the book, is eloquent. It presents these false castles, “neomanoirs”, built of perishable materials, inspired by Walt Disney or the European Middle Ages, erected in the suburbs of Montreal. These areas prefabricated in series, like pasteboard decorations, may be struggling to hide a more modest story, which we prefer to forget.
In a later photographic series, A life without history, Isabelle Hayeur documents “the disappearance of all this agricultural land transformed into sanitized suburbs around the Quartier DIX30”. “In short, we prefer to raze the built heritage in order to build tailor-made fictions. Fictions inhabitable and payable over twenty-five years, ”writes Marie-Hélène Voyer. “We invent false nobility and false monumentality,” she adds in an interview. She sees in these obsessions of the nouveau riche “something of a collective self-shame, as if modesty became a defect. Our humble origins are the object of a shame, so we have to raze everything. “
There is no shortage of examples to support this elegy of forgotten stones, the most recent in memory being the fate reserved for the Maison Chevalier du Vieux-Québec. But beyond a string of names of destroyed houses, it is our nonchalance towards the past, our blindness towards these lives that have inhabited places before us, that she denounces with this literary essay, which she also describes like “a love letter to the land”.
Without mercy on the state
“The more I think about it, the more severe and ruthless I am towards the Quebec state and its nonchalance. The most recent case of Maison Chevalier is shameful. To have sold off Maison Chevalier, in the heart of Old Quebec, the only house of the period that you could enter and that you could visit! ” she says. Meanwhile, “we are being told of Blue Spaces, this sort of patriotic museum. It’s almost criminal. The State should have a duty to set an example. And on the citizens’ side, we must mention our anger ”.
It is currently a question of limiting the damage. Since the civil engineer Yves Lacourcière, whom she quotes, said recently that we lose 40,000 buildings annually and that 20,000 are disfigured. “It is estimated that 40% of our built heritage has disappeared since 1970” , she says.
Professor of literature at the Cegep de Rimouski, Marie-Hélène Voyer was born on agricultural land in the highlands of Bic. Her father had built the fieldstone house in which she grew up with the help of a mason himself.
Was it the fire that swallowed up the neighboring farmlands of her birthplace that made her aware at a very young age of the perishable side of her history, of our history?
Young, however, she had a taste for new things and the city. “I fled this place,” she admits in an interview. Once the family farm was burnt down, the house sold and modified, Marie-Hélène Voye had to resort to poetry to transmit to her children the black box of memories of her childhood.
The black box of our memory
“I had nothing more to bequeath to my children from this space where I was born,” she says. This is how his collection of poetry was born Expo Habitat. Because with the places that disappear, stories and tales are also extinguished. “We don’t live in empty shells,” she says.
In these stories also sleeps the history of communities, the social fabric that has cradled Quebec today. Marie-Hélène Voyer evokes all these emptied, forgotten villages, whose foundations are today covered with wasteland. Like the village of Saint-Nil, near Matane, which she tried to find on a summer day. Saint-Nil is one of those inland villages that were closed by the Government of Quebec and the Bureau d’aménagement de l’Est du Québec starting in the late 1960s. gave rise to the popular uprising Operation Dignity. In all, 96 communities in Quebec were closed, and 64,400 inhabitants were displaced in the surrounding cities, in large proportion in low-rent housing.
“It’s tragic what happened,” says Marie-Hélène Voyer. Last summer, I went in search of these ghost villages. I was looking for the site of Saint-Nil, but I did not find any trace of the village. I thought I had lost my way. Then, on a forest dirt road, there was a lady working. […] Not far from there, in the brambles and brush, a tree was growing in the middle of the foundations of his grandfather’s house. What a tragedy for a child! His memory is confiscated. However, the lady herself remembered having played with other children “on the foundations of these demolished houses”.
To resist the onslaught of bulldozers, Marie-Hélène Voyer sees only citizen mobilization as a solution. In order to save what is left.