The parallel world of books

My undeniable optimism towards the future of Quebec comes from my long exposure to its literature, I am sure of it. In the sense that I live a bit in a parallel world and much more complex than the big anxiety-provoking headlines that I don’t always understand when I stick my nose out of a good Quebec book – essay, novel, poetry, whatever.

Back from two weeks in France where Quebec shone at the Paris Book Festival as guest of honor, I am catching up on current events by returning to these same debates that have existed since well before my birth. The survival of French, the impact of immigration on our destiny, and as usual, we bicker over statistics.

This week on the show All one morningcolumnists Dimitri Soudas and Émilie Nicolas commented on the recent study by the Office québécois de la langue française on language in businesses – this irritant hello-hi –, but also the next action plan on French from Minister Jean-François Roberge.

Émilie Nicolas criticized the indicators used to prove the decline of French, namely the mother tongue, the language spoken at home and the first official language spoken. “When we measure the strength or weakness of French with the indicator of the mother tongue, what we are saying is that if you were not born French-speaking, you will never be French-speaking enough,” said -she said, emphasizing that her colleague Dimitri Soudas, who nevertheless speaks French very well on state radio, would, according to these indicators, contribute to this decline.

But let’s return to literature, which is my specialty and my main indicator of the vitality of our culture – the issues are different for music, cinema or television, sectors more hit by the steamroller of digital giants.

The writer Mélikah Abdelmoumen, director of the magazine L.Q. (formerly Quebec letters), launched this week on social networks a list of authors from Quebec who are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, exasperated to hear once again this speech presenting immigration as a threat to the survival of Quebec culture .

As Internet users added names, the list quickly grew: Kim Thúy, Sergio Kokis, Caroline and Nicholas Dawson, Abla Farhoud, Yara El-Ghadban, Rodney Saint-Éloi, Alain Farah, Lula Carballo, Maya Ombasic, Wajdi Mouawad , Dany Laferrière, Mani Soleymanlou, Aki Shimazaki, Olivia Tapiero, Karine Rosso, Adib Alkhalidey, Ying Chen, Dimitri Nasrallah, Edem Awumey, Naïm Kattan, Régine Robin, Ayavi Lake… We could go on like this for a very long time, and that’s a lot better, because around forty years ago, the list would have been much shorter.

Moreover, in the 1990s, faced with a phenomenon that was gaining momentum, that of these feathers coming from elsewhere or who recounted a journey different from that of “native” French Canadians, we wondered if it was was truly Quebec literature, if it was part of the grand project of a national literature, and as humans have a strong penchant for categories, these books were often placed in the section of “migrant literature”. Some disgruntled people also saw it as a fashion, and as thieves of literary prizes (in a logical continuation of “job thieves”, I imagine).

The proof that we are moving forward, and that I still see the glass half full, is that today we would not have the idea of ​​confining Alain Farah, Kim Thúy or Lula Carballo to “migrant literature”. It goes without saying now that these are Quebec authors who contribute to the influence of our literature – without forgetting that some of these writers are sometimes literature professors who teach our classics.

Scrutinizing the list of names on Mélikah Abdelmoumen’s page, I noticed that I had read three quarters of these writers, not out of the goodness of my heart or to “open myself to others”, nor to respect diversity quotas, but simply because they were part of the Quebec literary re-entry at one time or another. That through their books, written in French (and often in Quebecois), and not in their mother tongue for many, I understood intimately how Quebec was changing, the richness of the baggage of my contemporaries, the burning news of our issues, the passion for this territory, and our common places. All this very far from an idealized past or nostalgia for the country of our parents, in a changing and moving present, full of challenges. I thus saw Quebec through multiple prisms and perspectives, it was sometimes hard and lackluster, but necessary, always enlightening and inspiring.

And all these books over decades have only fueled my confidence in a collective future, and also caused me, I must admit, a cognitive dissonance with the dark and catastrophic speeches about our survival.

What do you want, reading in large doses configures the brain differently.