“I carry the soup with a careful slowness, concentrating on the orange liquid waltzing gently in the plastic container”, says the narrator ofWe have all fall. With a cautious slowness, like that which one adopts when one carries soup: thus one could describe the patient, sober and scintillating writing of Juliana Léveillé-Trudel.
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Seven years after the great success of Nirilit (2015), the writer reconnects with Nunavik. The young woman from her first novel returns to Salluit to give poetry workshops to children. By the same token, she finds the kids from the day camp whom she took care of during her first visit. It was yesterday and yet here they are all already deep in the worries of adolescence, not to say adulthood, their carelessness eclipsed by premature fatigue. Behind her, in Montreal, her lover Gabriel waits for her without worrying, while she finds both a territory and people, with the desire to learn their language, in order to really get to know them.
Novel carried by a double movement thanks to which the interior life of its narrator dialogues with the arrival of winter which, outside, settles quietly, We have all fall accomplishes a small tour de force without showing off, in that it depicts a people in what is singular, without essentializing it, and bypassing the archetypes. Juliana Léveillé-Trudel manages to name the dramas that shake the communities of the North, but does not succumb to the trap of this pornography of tragedy which too often leads to this desire to show the harsh reality.
And if his choice to erase his own history behind that of his Inuit friends seems in part to respond to judicious ethical concerns, he also lays the foundations for a narrative led by allusions, whose poetry is based first and foremost on his respect for the silence. The sadness that smolders in the heart of its narrator can thus be guessed at first, like a footprint in the snow that would have been covered by a new light broadside.
Far from the perspective of a postcard, We have all fall is therefore a humble book, in all that this word has of power, in the sense that Juliana Léveillé-Trudel, through the intermediary of her alter ego, bows before this distance rich in light and mystery, impossible to abolish, that arises between a non-indigenous person and an indigenous person, between a man and a woman united by love, between a mother and her daughter.
The writer does not say that we should not take the necessary means to meet the other. Why don’t more Quebecers try to learn Inuktitut at least? she asks herself implicitly, outraged by our collective refusal to admit that real communication between two peoples requires efforts on both sides.
But despite this undeniably political tenor, We have all fall is above all a book that celebrates those ineffable things that bind human beings at the same time as they separate them. An ineffable that poetry, this universal language, sometimes manages to translate.
We have all fall
Juliana Léveillé-Trudel
The People
216 pages