Courage has fascinated me for a long time. I’m not talking about the courage to get up in the morning or to face the inevitable and rewarding trials of existence. I’m talking about the one that consists of giving up one’s own life or facing the pack against common sense, braving the worst and going back again.
The courage to put the collective cause before oneself and one’s own, to fall from Charybdis to Scylla (in English, we say ” jump out of the frying pan into the fire ), ride sandworms, be steeped in hope or despair, move forward in the storm, with a flower in your buttonhole. In courage, there is the word “rage”. As Nelson Mandela said, “I learned that courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to overcome it.”
Courage comes from these two sisters, teenagers of Syrian origin who swam to save the inflatable boat of migrants in the Mediterranean. The moving film The swimmers (Netflix) tells their story of boldness, tenacity and courage as one sister still faces justice for helping desperate innocents.
It is curious that physical courage is so widespread in this world and moral courage so rare.
But we don’t make films about every inspiring story that tells of heroic deeds. And yet, journalist Mélanie Loisel offers us around thirty of these stories with her series of interviews, They are living the century. From hashtags to revolutionsa unique book that allows us to understand the world beyond the borders of Quebec and its “receptive capacity” so dear to François Legault and Paul St-Pierre Plamondon.
The crises currently shaking the planet deserve our full attention as privileged people in nations where democracy is not threatened, but where people drag their feet when it comes to voting.
Of the hashtags to revolutions
Some people invented a hashtag. unifier (#BalanceTonPorc, #BlackLivesMatter) which led to riots and even revolutions, notably that of women who burned their veils at the risk of their lives in Iran (Women, Life, Freedom — Jin, Jiyan, Azadi).
In her interviews with survivors and pivotal activists from the hottest corners of the planet, some of whom were forced into exile, Mélanie Loisel offers us a kaleidoscope of strong emotions and heartbreaking testimonies.
Earlier, it’s Sophie Beau, at the head of a humanitarian rescue association helping migrants lost in the Mediterranean Sea, aboard theOcean Viking, for nine years. “In recent years, there have been many trials against people who helped migrants. Imagine, it was a question of solidarity crime! » indignant the founder, who must constantly fight against the political obstacles of dehumanization in her path. She sometimes counts 23 different nationalities on the rescued makeshift “boats”.
The question is therefore: where do these migrations come from? They come from our collective way of life. We have exhausted the continents, the African continent especially, we are exhausting our resources, we are beyond our comfort.
Sometimes it’s Omar, this young Syrian tortured from the age of 15 for daring to shout the word “freedom” in a demonstration. The four years that followed, including three in prison, would put him through hell. When he came out – thanks to his mother – he weighed 34 kilos and he had suffered the worst abuse that one could imagine without warning. The cruelty of his executioners is unbearable.
Omar is now exiled in Sweden and lectures as co-director of the Syrian Emergency Task Force. Sometimes, it’s the story worthy of a Spielberg film of a young poet in the jungle of Myanmar who becomes leader of a powerful rebel army. Earlier, the testimony of Roweida, a Rohingya refugee with her young child in a camp in Indonesia who lost her husband and her young brother at sea during their flight from Bangladesh, from another camp where she was born and where her parents live always. What she describes is simply inhumane. If you have seen the movie Ru, about the exile of the family of the Vietnamese writer Kim Thúy, it looks like it, but over 25 years. And this sentence at the end of his tragic story: “Instead of surviving, can we live? »
The humans whose experience is recounted here are neither statistics nor figures that fuel ideological debates; they give a face to the lives flouted at random in the great game of Risk.
All concerned
Mélanie Loisel and I are sitting in a downtown café on this bright day of Good Friday. A demonstration passes on rue Sainte-Catherine: “No salary, no intern!” » Even if the police are present, no one risks being tortured or deprived of their rights. The 43-year-old journalist has listened to so many horror stories in the name of freedom; helplessness was his spark plug.
And yes, courage. The word came up each time, when speaking with this exiled Malian activist who had to leave her three children and her husband behind, with this Yazidi raped and sold seven times as a slave, or with this Russian journalist (Marina Ovsiannikova) who brandished a banner against the war in Ukraine live on TV and today lives as a refugee in Paris with her two children and the prospect of an eight-year prison sentence awaiting her in Russia.
Courage is the first of human qualities because it guarantees all the others.
“The word that kept coming up in all my interviews was hope,” Mélanie tells me. Compared to the book she wrote in 2015 — They lived through the century. From the Shoah to Syria: 62 witnesses tell their stories —, the globetrotter who studied international relations and visited most of the countries at war notes that the conflicts have degenerated in ten years. “Not only in the Middle East, but also in South America, in Haiti, in Ukraine. And it impacts our lives. Everything is interconnected. » In fact, the percentage of asylum seekers is constantly increasing in Canada.
“There are only a handful of 25 men out of 8 billion humans who hold power and create chaos,” notes the journalist. All the women talk about feminism in this book, whether they are from Colombia, Congo, Syria or Hong Kong. We can never stop fighting. My commitment is to speak out for the oppressed and those left behind. The indifference to what is happening on the planet makes me scream. »
And meanwhile, on another channel, reality TV Survivor Quebec begins its second season on an island in the Philippines…