In a recent commentary, Louis Cornellier castigates my views and discredits my ideas with mockery (The duty, January 8). The position he occupies, eminent, nevertheless requires finesse. Sure of his credo, he thinks I’m one-eyed to capture Quebec in passing. He ignores the beam that obstructs his gaze.
The columnist’s position
Like many commentators mired in dated conceptions of the Quebec condition, the columnist is disconcerted by what is happening in Quebec, among Quebecers of French-Canadian heritage in particular. Instead of trying to understand what emerges, he judges and condemns, based on faded explanatory schemes, those of a Maurice Séguin for example, what he dislikes in what arises. He is thus worried about the fact that French-speaking Quebecers, young people in particular, stop seeing themselves as poor little losers, dominated and oppressed, unaware of the alienation that inhibits their capacity for emancipation. Likewise, he refuses to accept that his people serenely turn away from the tragic representations by which powerful interpreters have historically constructed them as an imagined community and that, strong in having revolutionized their ways of being, they aspire to answers different to the three questions that have plagued them for a long time: where do we come from, who are we, where are we going?
As a researcher, it is these answers in the making that interest me. I do not have to determine whether they are carriers or disastrous. I am not an inquisitor, but an investigator. My function requires me to be open to the new by trying to discern what is hatching. This task includes an exploratory dimension widely admitted in the article.
my reading
What did I say that was so shocking?
I hypothesized that Quebecers of French-Canadian ancestry, drawn by a youth tracing its route between memory and distance, were in the process of decolonizing themselves, that is, of getting out of the paradigm of lack for define themselves and consider themselves over time. For the past twenty years, in any case, this has been my reading of things: Quebecers — I am sticking to French speakers — have been experiencing a kind of silent revolution, in terms of their relationship to the Self and to the Other, which leads them to configure the parameters of their collective identity differently. They notably became indifferent to the idea according to which, contrary to the Others, they would form a society – a nation if you will – unfit to give themselves a brilliant career, which Garneau believed by prescribing their survival. They have also become insensitive, or less receptive than before, to the idea that Quebec, to be in the world, had to do like the Others, that is to say, mimic its neighbors, join them in their politics and imitate them in their historical trajectory, which the quiet revolutionaries offered them by inviting them to equivalence or independence.
Put an end to the image of the Other posed as the horizon of the Self; stop conceiving of themselves as a bitter failure to be redeemed in the present, as if they had missed all their rendezvous with History; and no longer disavowing who they are, but on the contrary fully endorsing their particular political culture—pragmatic and liberal, progressive and conservative, reformist and tranquil—these are the pillars on which French-speaking Quebecers intend to build the horizon of their prosperity.
Salute or cry?
Should we salute or cry this new switch? My role is not to judge and reject, but to discover and welcome. More exactly, it is a question of noting the referential metamorphosis in progress, of describing its particularities and of showing how the identity regime that it inaugurates turns out to be different from the previous ones, without being totally foreign to it.
In a burst of lucidity in relation to what he observes within our society, Mr. Cornellier admits that I may be right in my deciphering, that is that Quebec (French) is in the process of revising its Reference. He is disturbed by it, however, especially since he associates the ongoing process of decolonization of French-speaking Quebecers with sacrificial behavior on the part of his people, the supreme stage of collective subjugation in his eyes, but also with the relegation of the idea of independence, which for him is the natural epiphany of Quebec.
I did not explicitly address the issue of Quebec’s political status in my text. I contented myself with suggesting that the decolonized posture of French-speaking Quebecers, which hinges on the idea of interdependence, could bear witness, among them, to an assumed confidence rather than an expression of consummate resignation.
The possibilities for the future of our society remain numerous and exciting. Recognizing this is not displaying bland contentment. It is to be aware of the fact that Quebec remains an open project that no catechist should endeavor to close in defeatist lament or romantic imploration.