There is something inherently pleasurable about frequenting the feminist bookstore co-founded by Camille Toffoli, L’Euguélionne, in the heart of Montreal’s gay district. The shelves are overflowing, it’s a bit chaotic. I walked through the door to the sound of reggaeton and quickly noticed a lot of those leftist books in fashion, the Natasha Kanapé Fontaine and the Dalie Giroux of this world.
But there are also books that you won’t come across anywhere else, about ecofeminism, even anti-feminism, and self-produced zines too. I did not shy away from my pleasure in hanging out there, arrived a little early for our meeting, leafing through the serigraphs near the cash register, which embody something like a thought of care and empathetic mutual concern, pleasantly put in images, in pictures.
We settled in the back room, Toffoli and I, on upright chairs in a small, equally busy room, while his colleague on the floor brought him an unsolicited coffee. “You’re too thin. »I have often wondered what fences made what we call a safe space sure, maybe it’s just a filter coffee machine surrounded by piles of feminist books.
Toffoli published his first book instead this year, Corsair girls, Editions du remue-household. A book noticed, loved, that I must have seen passing 50 times all over the place, I told him straight away.
“I just heard that it is going to be reprinted. On this Friday in December, as the sun was finally shining its winter after the endless cold rains in November, I sat down with someone who represents a rising figure of Montreal feminism, but who gives the impression of not being seated. ‘worry about it, who is working, who is moving forward, who is thinking.
Everywhere in his book, however, it is not about this famous, well-meaning Montreal that is in question, and that is why it should be read so urgently. Rather, we discover her wanderings, which give the impression of a thousand happy coincidences, alone in her tent to fail a little, in the heart of deep America, alongside methheads in a rather shady park, or among friends in a Quebec too forgotten by a thousand and one snack bar not at all frequented in irony by the youth in the wind of the trendy districts of the metropolis. We discover her as a witness to the world, constantly questioning herself, in the tradition of James Baldwin, and in a feminism on the fringes of academia.
There is this desire to bring people together at home, to take the time to meet to broaden her horizons, the will to reach out, to question herself and truly form community. While I was in the very womb of what some would see as the wokeness living in Montreal, I rather spoke to someone who likes to chat with everyone, without worrying too much about political allegiances. Quite simply because everyone has a voice that must be heard. The alleged confinement of safe space on itself: very little.
“The private is political”: this is something that will come up often in our conversation, his whole life seems to be woven of reflections, without partitions.
But “living in a will put into practice by a set of ethical principles does not work”, and hard not to agree with it, there is always something artificial in this far too abstract approach. This is why she seeks rather to ask herself questions about the care lavished on her by her former mother-in-law, which the reader will remember for a long time, or even that she likes to wonder what feminist implementation operates a participant in a rodeo. . Intersectionality, this buzz word in today’s leftist circles, is thought to be a cross line between the oppression of women and economic marginalization.
But neither does she try to bring everything under one roof, issues of racial inequality are not addressed in her book. “It’s a blind spot in the book,” she admits. Happy blind spot, I would say, since it seems difficult not to fall into a certain utopianism when all the struggles merge into one. This is what makes the strength of this essay: it talks about those about whom we do not talk enough, knowing how to stay within the limits of its current expertise.
There are institutional challenges, in his thinking, which are extremely strong, especially in the current context.
Family, real estate, career: what’s left if we take that away? “Not much, it seems, sometimes. “The pandemic has revealed it to us, she underlines to me, by bringing us back to the lowest common denominator of the social, when everything very often revolved around the idea of” family bubble “and renovation of the house. . How many men, she points out to me, less inclined to invite a friend for a walk, have found themselves completely friendless when the arenas were closed? She asks this meaningful question: with whom would we take vacations, if we gave ourselves the right to take some with someone other than a lover, a family? This is the question of friendship.
Reading it and talking to it I detected a certain patience, a slow activism. While respecting the approach of those in a hurry to justice, it actually defends something more daily, invested in small things, as they say, housing cooperation and the slowness of a bicycle trip. Certainly, she writes and works to change the world, but at the rate of the world, and not at the rate of her personal ideas. Doesn’t this last kind of change, anyway, almost always degenerate into violence, beyond the simple clash of ideas? Go through the bookstore, to see.
Corsair girls
Camille Toffoli
Editions of the commotion
120 pages