A few months before his death, a father under the yoke of an illness crushing his memory begins to call his son Maurice, when his name is actually Philippe. Maurice was his brother. Homosexual, like his son.
Posted at 8:00 p.m.
In the middle of an old photo posted on social networks, Philippe one day sees a face that looks disturbingly like his own: his late uncle Maurice, at the heart of a demonstration, demanding that the police leave the gay community alone. He soon finds the writings of this man whom he has known too little. Writings documenting his arrival, at the dawn of his majority, in the Montreal of all permissions.
Alternating between chapters narrated in the present by a Philippe who fled the suffocation of the city for the wide open spaces of Alaska, and others narrated by a Maurice discovering the exhilarating pleasures of his freedom, secondary roots celebrates first of all these families, made of friends, that marginalized people often choose.
But Vincent Fortier also recalls, with the sensitivity of someone who refuses to oppose two equally essential forms of transmission, that even when other significant relationships make up for those, incomplete, that have linked us (poorly) to our parents, the feeling of a loss remains. Although his father, to whom he speaks directly, is dead, Philippe continues to aspire to a real dialogue between them.
Driven by a salutary duty of memory, this second novel is one of the too rare stories recording the stain on the face of our history represented by this wave of police raids that hit the gay bars in the city center of the metropolis, upstream from the holding of the 1976 Olympic Games. Its festive scenes nevertheless provide the book with its most invigorating passages.
Cross portrait of two men who find at the other end of the continent the soil of their real emancipation, secondary roots promises all who need to hear that it is possible, albeit difficult, to embrace who you are. But escape his lineage? No one has gotten there yet.
secondary roots
Vincent Fortier
Del Busso
192 pages