Every Tuesday, The Duty offers a space to the artisans of a periodical. This week, we offer you a text published in Quebec letters (LQ), No. 194 (September 2024).
My mother was in love with Michel Jean. At the end of her life, before dementia took over and prevented her from understanding what those two-dimensional figures moving on the screen meant, before she completely forgot what a television was, she watched the news bulletin presented by him every day.
He was from Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean, like us, which pleased Mom, and she found that he didn’t present the news like everyone else: he had more character, he was committed to what he said. She knew he was a writer, but she had been unable to read for a long time. TV was her main window on the world… and on “the handsome Michel Jean.”
One day during the pandemic, when it was really starting to decline, in the middle of lockdown, I shared my sadness on social media. Michel—to whom I had confided that my mother was the president of his Saguenay fan club—recorded, in this studio where she had so often watched him give news of the world, a little capsule addressed to her, Camille, personally. He thanked her and told her to hold on. He sent it to me so that I could show it to him. It is one of the greatest gifts that anyone has given my family and me.
Ditch
I was saying that I knew that Michel Jean was a writer without knowing much about his work. Why? There is the fact that, when he began publishing in 2008, I was living abroad and that, when I returned, in 2017, his work had not yet experienced the impact that would change everything, with Kukumher eighth book. But there is also the fact that between Michel Jean and me there was something like an invisible border, a small gap.
It was only after she became editor-in-chief of Quebec lettersand faced with what I considered my responsibilities, I realized to what extent our places, his and mine, were defined around this little gap. And there has always been in me this adolescent temperament, which rebels against borders, limits, boxes.
I have read all ten of Michel Jean’s books. Special Envoy surprised me: a series of autobiographical stories in which the author talks about what his job as a senior reporter made him discover, go through, and risk, which report on the crisis situations he witnessed — in Haiti at the time of Aristide’s fall, in Kuwait at the start of the Iraq war, in Sri Lanka after the tsunami, but also here, in Quebec, after a terrible bus accident in Les Éboulements.
I also devoured A life to love, where, in an apparently vegetative state after an accident, the narrator retraces his entire existence (a coming-of-age novel that can only be written in the silence of a body that has become a fortress) before plunging me into detective novels, featuring the great reporter Jean-Nicholas Legendre, A world as dead as the moon, Tsunamis, The beautiful melancholy.
I understood that, long before KukumMichel Jean had written novels on the indigenous question: Atuk, her and usbut also the incredible The wind still speaks of it. There is also Tiohtiá:kewhich revolves around the issue of homelessness among First Nations people in Montreal and finally, the magnificent Qimmik, where we find all the social, literary, historical concerns of the writer. (The opening of the book is one of the most beautiful things I have read in our literature.)
Although Michel Jean is best known for his work on issues of indigenousness, his work is part of a long journey in which questions of identity and our relationship to our own history, to our own identity, have always been present.
Immersion
The kind of “total immersion” I attempted with Michel Jean had the effect that, when I finished, I felt exiled, displaced, lost. So I tried to prolong the journey by talking about this author’s work, but above all, I wanted to continue my work of sabotaging the divisions between literary cliques.
I wanted Michel Jean to have his place. A place earned for him by fifteen years of hard work, first in ignorance and, since Kukumin a light which, if it brought him closer to a large readership spread across various countries, also earned him, let’s call a spade a spade, being snubbed.
Snubbed, yes, in those circles for whom “popular literature” means being sidelined. A bit by reflex and probably without malice, I agree. And most often without us realizing it. I am proof of that. But it is never too late to wake up.
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