I recently shared the stage, at the Montreal Book Fair, with a host of colorful authors, gathered under the theme of “liberated speech”. Indigenous voices, a trans voice, an anti-capitalist voice. Without a doubt, we were in tune with the times of the Quebec left. Then, as an unexpected revelation, came to the microphone Rachida Azdouz, who read us an excerpt from her recent book, Healing the past, thinking about the future – Racism and anti-racism.
The end she was reading was not directly related to the theme of the book, she warned us, branching out instead towards a criticism in order of those who like to lecture her about feminism, say, more traditional. Seeing Jennifer Lopez and Shakira swinging their hips on a pole, in a recent Super Bowl halftime show, Azdouz didn’t see a gesture of emancipation and body taking, as is a trend. feminist. Rather, she saw a neoliberal recovery of the female body for the benefit of a male audience, quite simply. She was reading her excerpt and getting angry on stage, I was won over despite the fact that I usually identify more with the feminism she criticized, because precisely, her speech had nothing to do with the air of the time, I found myself liking what I was hearing.
Questioned by the host Émilie Dubreuil after her reading, she mentioned a similar passage, but on the issue of racism, a little further in its pages. This is the story of a colleague, met at the exit of a pastry shop at Easter, both drowning in festive sweets, who quite simply wishes him a Happy Easter. A few days later, at the office, this colleague apologizes for a supposed racially insensitive misstep, because madam you are here, or you are that, lark. Azdouz, again, gets angry. And we follow it: racial hypersensitivity sometimes ends up creating problems instead of solving them, and that’s heartbreaking. Instead of a meeting between two human beings, she was entitled to what she designates several times in her book as an “identity house arrest”. What a good New Year’s wish: meet people, not assign them.
This is what is essential in this thinker, and which is too often lacking in Quebec essays in my opinion. Something unpredictable, pragmatic at the same time, a thought of nuance, the real one, which will not hesitate to question the theory of systemic racism applied in Quebec and in Canada when too generalized at each event of racism, but which at the same time will take an accepted definition of this concept, and will show by A + B that it is practically impossible not to see a clear application of it in the Indian Act. Yes, systemic racism exists, but Rachida Azdouz is a savior of debate.
When she had finished her intervention, I turned to the host, and whispered in her ear: “I think I’m in love. In love with a thought that does not care to be convenient, that does not care to make friends, to be in a gang or another, a thought that wants to think, period.
At the conclusion of her recent essay, she recalls a letter written by Joyce Echaquan’s spouse, Carol Dubé, on the occasion of Christmas last year. In this letter, he talks about forgiveness. The one who advances, the one who heals the past.
I asked Azdouz, after the Salon and after my enthusiastic reading, if for her forgiveness was the best way to look to the future.
“Yes, it’s clearly mine. We can forgive without absolving and without forgetting. I am aware, however, that forgiveness is an intimate affair, a personal choice, which cannot be imposed on a group; By that I mean Derrida’s forgiveness, the crazy, unconditional forgiveness, which consists in forgiving the unforgivable. We do it first for ourselves, to free ourselves from the spiral of resentment, to regain power over our destiny and not to become our own jailer. I insist on the word ‘power’, because forgiveness is also a question of balance of power. When a victim of a crime says to her attacker: ‘You took my child, you tore a limb from me, but you will not have my hatred as a bonus ”, it is the victim who has the last word. ”
I thought of my students, whom I will meet again this winter, to whom I compare two texts, one defending Jacques Derrida’s idea of ”forgiving the unforgivable”, and the other who refuses it. Each year the class is deeply divided on this issue, and each year I wonder if this gesture, forgiveness, is not one of the most fundamental ethical questions of our time. Refusing forgiveness erects dividing lines, yes, but some consider them politically necessary nonetheless. It is one of those fundamental, insoluble and promising questions that we would be wrong not to address in our holiday dinners, like, where we will never find 20 people who think the same, the author pointed out to me. at three weeks. Let’s bet what she says is just as valid for a dinner for five.
Heal the past, think about the future
Rachida Azdouz
Editorial
240 pages