What to do with hatred?

The first and last time I was interested in Eurovision was when Celine Dion won it with the song Do not go without mewhile she represented Switzerland in 1988. Even today, I do not very well understand the rules of this European competition, nor why Céline represented Switzerland while being from Quebec, but I understood that it was something big when René Angélil organized a press conference in Montreal upon returning from this victory, just before Céline’s international career took off.

Switzerland had not won Eurovision since Céline’s participation until this year, when Nemo, a non-binary Swiss artist, won for the song The Code. It would have gone ten feet over my head if I hadn’t come across messages of hatred towards Nemo, whose victory seemed to confirm the decadence and end of Western civilization, according to some. And all this in a tense contest where the Israeli candidate, Eden Golan, was booed, due to the atrocious war in Gaza which continues.

Talk about it well, talk about it badly, as long as we’re talking about it, right? I went to watch the finale on YouTube to find out if Nemo was that bad and, frankly, the artist did not steal his first place.

Watch Nemo’s performance in the final of the competition

The comments were just as nasty after the actresses of the film were awarded the Best Actress Prize at Cannes. Emilia Perez by Jacques Audiard, including trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón, whose mere presence in the group of award-winning performers caused a few cottages to howl, as if the wolf had entered the fold.

Tons of awards are given out annually to straight artists, but as soon as a member of the LGBTQ+ community wins one, it’s seen as an invasion. Nothing new.

In fact, I simply can’t stand reading hateful comments anymore, because I need to maintain a minimum of faith in humanity. So I try to avoid them as much as possible, but they always end up finding me, since the algorithms encourage them. I didn’t look for Nemo, but Nemo found me through his haters.

However, in the last week, I accepted being bombarded with hateful and insulting speeches, but in a completely different context: the Festival TransAmériques (FTA), where I saw two fascinating shows, Catarina and the beauty of killing fascists And Monitored and punished.

In Catarina and the beauty of killing fascists, a play by Tiago Rodrigues, a Portuguese family meets once a year to kill a fascist in order to honor the memory of a worker murdered under the Salazar dictatorship. Slightly absurd premise and, initially, we are more in the tone of comedy. But when the youngest, who is entitled to her initiation at 26, is frozen by doubt at the moment of killing the far-right politician whom the family has kidnapped, the moral questions multiply, which are reminiscent of The fair by Camus.

The play ends with the long monologue of the unbridled politician (in every sense of the word), who brings out the usual clichés about the homeland, the family, the return of women to the house, immigration and the importance of protecting women. values ​​of the “real” Portuguese. A dizzying logorrhea which ended up nauseating the public, where we heard “shut up!” » exasperated on the part of spectators or recruited actors, I would say a mixture of the two. This monologue invited this reaction, as if it were impossible to remain silent in the face of such a flood of nonsense, or perhaps out of fear that the show would never end if we did not react. This also confirms that in Portugal, and more generally in Europe, as in the United States and Canada, we are all experiencing the rise of populism. And that we have no choice in how we react to this.

I was honestly impressed by Monitored and punished, a show inspired by hate messages targeting Safia Nolin for years, directed by Philippe Cyr. I didn’t expect so much beauty from such ugly material.

A classic (and rather tragic) choir of around twenty people sings the insults written on social networks (publicly and privately) against Safia Nolin, in front of actress Debbie Lynch-White who plays her alter ego. I have never heard so many horrors (misogynistic, homophobic or racist) sung so magnificently.

The real Safia Nolin joins the actress on stage, they strip and have fun in a fake swimming pool, while the insults continue and escalate to death threats. We are treated to a few rare breaks when Safia picks up her guitar and sings her songs, which have always been sweet.

What is the mechanics of scapegoating? It is that of a group which grows against a person as a lightning rod for frustrations, because we can let off steam by cowardly hiding in a crowd, and comfort ourselves in our nastiness when it is shared. Please note that all the names of the people who contributed to the lyrics of this chorus are named in the show credits. We must give back to Caesar what is due to Caesar.

One of the main criticisms we hear of Safia Nolin is that she revels in the role of victim, so a show like Monitored and punished will confirm those who support this criticism in their convictions.

It would be so much simpler if Safia shut up and fade away, if she let herself be forgotten a little, if she moved on to something else. Once again, the victim is asked to keep quiet, supposedly for their own good. And the more she refuses, the more we push her.

Is the world going from bad to worse because we stop fighting more and more? This is the question I ask myself after these two shows. After also learning, in the same day, that Trump was guilty, that billionaire Robert Miller had been arrested and that the management of UQAM had reached an agreement with the students who camped on its campus for the population of Gaza. No matter what we think of these cases, it’s a bit of proof that when we do something, when we don’t give up, well, sometimes something happens.

For Trump, for example, I am one of the pessimists who thought that this trial could add fuel to the fire, but after this verdict, another part of me says to itself that if we no longer believe in justice, if we let them win bullies for fear of blows, we let things go. The goal of intimidation is to encourage fatigue, abandonment or acrimony. So to silence, and to leave room for the force of hatred, rather than the force of resistance to hatred. And in this resistance, I believe that art has a big role to play.