Posted at 12:00 p.m.
Each sentence of Étienne Beaulieu is like a breath of enthusiasm, both written and spoken. The man I like to call Monsieur Essai in Quebec was overflowing with energy on the phone, on a freezing January morning, and I could almost see clouds of condensation accompanying his words, which I imagined uttered in the middle of a dense forest of his ancestors.
Beaulieu writes, “eight or nine essays”, he no longer remembers, Beaulieu publishes, directing the publishing house Nota Bene, and he has been defending this literary genre in Quebec for 20 years, whereas he has since fashionable for some time. However, he remembers less auspicious days for the essay, when he edited the journal Backlight, who had 50 subscribers, “or maybe 100, to be generous.” For 18 years, he went to the post office to send his magazines, to form a community, to dream of better days.
“It started with a book bought for 25 cents at the Coliseum of the Book, The line of risk, by Pierre Vadeboncoeur. He was reading that and said to himself, from the height of his 17 years, that was what he wanted to do. Unclassifiable writing, not novels, not poetry, prose patched up at times, he told me, quoting the self-criticism of the inventor of the genre, Montaigne, in short, free writing, which allows itself everything, on everyone the subjects.
I met him, like many Quebec essayists, at Serge Bouchard’s table on the radio at the time. Bouchard clearly fell under the spell of this zealous young man, who praised the trees of the forest behind his home, in Splendor at Beckett Wood. He defends a writing of nature, no doubt, something inspired by a world far from the big cities, where he does not “feel[t] not well,” he says. It only seems good where urban sprawl has not yet devoured the lungs of its thought.
His hope is that it is not too late for nature, and that something can be done about it. May his literature, through its circular and ruminant meditations, help with its almost archaeological search for meaning in the world in the soil on which we tread; helps, ultimately, to save Quebec from itself.
Culture can, in Beaulieu, serve as a safeguard for the colonial ambitions of those who believe themselves superior to the earth.
He does not offer a passive thought of forest meditation, far from it. When you meet him in nature, in his writings, on such an Appalachian trail with his daughters, or on a road trip on the North Shore, it is almost always in motion. The territory, at home, is alive, speaking, dynamic and has always been inhabited. It is enough to dig, to listen, almost to pray the rivers, the rocks and the tops of the trees; it is moreover there that his gaze naturally goes, when he is in town.
And as if by force of circumstance, this furrow he was already digging came to the point of necessity, in The dreams of the ookpik, which appears these days, to reflect on its relationship to the Quebec territory vis-à-vis Aboriginal issues. When I saw that his book took this angle, in a solo writing, I found it audacious, to say the least. A warning serves as the front page: “I declare that I do not belong in any way, near or far, to the eleven Aboriginal cultures of Quebec. All the passages concerning the First Nations and the Inuit have been approved by the persons and by the authorities concerned, namely Yves Sioui-Durand, Maïté Labrecque-Saganash, the Mativik council, the Maison et atelier Rodolphe-Duguay, Pierre Sioui. This page concludes by saying that all proceeds from the book will be donated to the Josephine Bacon Foundation.
The effort is made, fine. The question nevertheless arises: will this be enough? Is it possible for a white man to take this kind of step on his own, going up the rivers to the native toponymy that is too often hidden, without suffering criticism of appropriation? I do not know. I know, however, that my reading gave me the impression of an authentic effort to encounter the territory, in a self-criticism that does not fall into self-redemptive white guilt.
We come across pages, in his book, where suddenly there is a reproduction of a painting by an artist belonging to the Quebec canon, such as Suzor-Côté, Marc-Aurèle Fortin. Because it crystallizes the thought of a people, as perhaps nowhere else according to him. We were talking about painting, and he reminded me that the art that is best exported to Quebec, “apart from Céline”, is perhaps pictorial art, Riopelle first and foremost of course. Riopelle, let us remember, also came up against the need to think about territory in his work, in the second phase of his artistic life.
But Beaulieu does not always celebrate what he analyzes in the frames: such a colonial scene for example, or such a vision of agriculture as a Christian mission, against nomadism.
And this is surely what is most promising in his work, recent as well as less recent. It is, in his books, trying to think of what would be a world where we cohabit more than we dominate, where we collaborate rather than we compete. It is a matter of thinking slowly, far from quick and easy solutions, where nuance reigns, as the calm waters of the valleys always reign over the authoritarian heights of the self-proclaimed mountains.
The dreams of the ookpik
Etienne Beaulieu
Miscellaneous
128 pages
In bookstores February 2