François Ismert is dead. As far as I know, no one has mentioned it.
When there was an antenna equivalent to that of France Culture at the Radio-Canada banner, this man gave us, as a director, a number of remarkable programs.
It is to François Ismert that we owe, for example, the first programs of Serge Bouchard. The anthropologist occasionally wrote texts in The duty. Ismert wanted them read. When he heard Serge Bouchard’s hollow voice on the phone, he invited him to read them himself on the airwaves, as part of a program called Fragments. Then he ordered other texts from him. This is how Bouchard, along with Bernard Arcand, came to a radio career of known importance. Jean-Philippe Pleau told me that, without François Ismert, his friend Serge Bouchard would never have had the importance that everyone recognizes in him today.
The public owes Ismert several other shows, including Debate and In what world are we living ? Ismert directed the show Passages, animated by the philosopher Georges Leroux. There, we could follow with horror, thanks to the participation of the journalist Paul Marchand, the limitless expansion of the delusions of identity nationalism in this theater of blood and wars that had become, at the beginning of the 1990s, the former Yugoslavia. How had individuals come to accuse others of the incredible crime of being born?
With some friends, we recorded, on simple cassettes, these emissions. They seemed important to us. They were indeed. They also allowed us to discover literature and its ramifications of meaning. Very often, we let ourselves be carried away by the voices of exceptional readers. After having heard Sylvie Drapeau read Italo Calvino there, I have never been able to immerse myself in a single page of the great Italian writer without hearing him speak to me. Among the other engaged readers, there was a dazzling young man, Wajdi Mouawad, to whom Ismert introduced the great texts of Greek tragedy. Mouawad has remained faithful to him since that time.
At the end of the 1970s, François Ismert had been heard first from Vancouver. He offered, like a true radio craftsman, reports on the war that was tearing Cambodia apart. In 1983, he produced a series of programs going up the Mississippi, while remaining impassive to the cries of the haulers who, from that time, were trying to derive such programs destined to probe the world in its meanders. François Ismert strove to understand, while telling the peoples, their stories.
In 2003, when Radio-Canada’s cultural radio station was dead, Ismert ended up being nailed to a pole. His radio station, ours, was replaced by a musical mix. He was, so to speak, fired. But bureaucrats use another word instead. They “thank” the one who is driven out.
François Ismert flew to Europe, where he was from, to continue living, to travel. He held odd jobs offered to him by Wajdi Mouawad, who in the meantime became a major figure on the theater scene.
In his latest book, Word kept, a kind of very eloquent story of the first days of confinement in times of health crisis, Mouawad willingly stands on the sidelines of what is happening in his society. He writes so as not to persist in looking “at the news rehashing at the window”, to escape at least for a few hours “the attraction of the media”. In the middle of his nights of writing, in his desire to get out of the current spiral, he at one point evokes François Ismert. He speaks of it as a “marveled vagabond”.
Of Wajdi Mouawad, it is only question these days of the fact that he has, once again, seen fit to hire Bertrand Cantat to ensure the creation of the music for a show for which he is responsible. To some, the former singer of the group Noir Désir appears forever deprived of the right to be at least a musician in the public square, regardless of whether he has served a prison sentence for having dealt fatal blows to his companion, Marie. Trintignant. In a statement, Wajdi Mouawad believes that it is not up to him to take the place of justice. The pirouette seems a little easy. But I’ll let you be the judge.
Humanity is in any case almost always more complex than it appears. There is no sun without shade. And the day does not exist without the night.
Perhaps there was more light in the discreet support that Mouawad offered to Ismert than in his too brilliant support to Cantat. Perhaps there was still more grandeur in Ismert’s free work, conducted in the shadows, than in many radio or television broadcasts backed up with hype and stardom. Who knows.
One thing is certain, in an era that so easily confuses light with lightning, it seems easier to see everything from the perspective of good guys and bad guys, like in a James Bond film where they clash, in an orgy of garish colors. and cartoonish figures, monochrome worldviews. When the education ministers of France and Quebec commit, hand on heart, to counter the erasure of history – with a capital H, nothing less – in the name of a celebration of “progress », We know that it will not be a question of appealing to favor the discussion around Kant or Condorcet. These ministers don’t think, they fight. So that afterwards, it seems normal to these people to decree that the school is the scene of an education affirmed from the outset as having to be chauvinistic, as indicated by the Deputy Prime Minister, Geneviève Guilbault.
In this season when the night draws its curtains too early on the light of day, we become the spectators of a bad theater: that of an ignorance which gives itself flattering airs of grandeur.