The power of fiction, Michel Jean knows. In September 2019, the Innu writer and journalist published Kukum, the singular story of her great-grandmother Almanda, a striking woman, animated by ardent love and wounded by forced sedentarization. In a few months, the novel climbed to the top of the charts and seduced the whole of Quebec.
The dexterity, gentleness and transparency of Michel Jean have allowed readers to lower their barriers, to welcome the darkest parts of their heritage, to listen to what may seem too foreign, too far, too hard.
With his eighth novel, Tiohtiá: ke, Michel Jean continues to sow compassion, and this time is interested in those we no longer see; the many members of the First Nations – they would be more than 800, according to the Commission of Inquiry on the relations between the Natives and the public services – who wander, love, dream and die in the streets of the metropolis, too often in general indifference.
We walk in the footsteps of Elie Mestenapeo, an Innu banished from his community after the murder of his father, an alcoholic and violent man. When he comes out of prison, alone in the world, he buys a bus ticket and goes up the 138 towards Montreal, a city of concrete, noise and lights.
Without a home, without landmarks, Elijah finds himself wandering the streets, his soul in pain. Very quickly, he found himself in Cabot Square and befriended other Aboriginals: the discreet Geronimo, the generous Jimmy, who offered drinks and food to the most deprived, the endearing twins Nappatuk, Tracy and Mary, whose smile dazzling is matched only by kindness, and Caya, who analyzes everything with the lyrics of songs from her favorite band.
Inuit, Cree, Attikameks, all are like him adrift, far from the territory, theirs and their roots, all destroyed by the violence of a dehumanizing heritage, that of residential schools for Aboriginal people, acculturation and uprooting. Together, they rediscover a sense of community, mutual aid and filiation, and offer Elijah an anchor that will allow him to get his head out of the water and rebuild himself.
Michel Jean works in this tragic universe with grace, relying on a minimalist style, loaded with sounds, smells and images and devoid of pathos that would inevitably create a constraining distance.
On the contrary, although members of the dysfunctional tribe of Tiohtiá: kedo not have the narrative power of Almanda or the other heroes drawn from the author’s family history, they are all tinged with a familiarity, a light and an openness that offer themselves as a hand extended towards empathy and introspection.
Impossible to remain frozen in front of the fate of these endearing and deeply human characters, abused by cold, hunger and apathy, by a violence which tightens its grip through the generations. A window towards a fairer and more benevolent elsewhere, which it is up to everyone to leave ajar.
Extract from “Tiohtiá: ke”