Why do we talk so little about poverty in literary and artistic circles? Rich question to which Benoit Jodoin tries to answer in Why don’t I writea first book which puts the intimate at the service of a call for those who have had an experience similar to theirs to speak out.
“I come from a world where the pleasure of the text, as Barthes calls it, is nameless nonsense,” confides Benoit Jodoin in Why don’t I write, a first book whose very existence contradicts the title. After years of remaining silent, in the silence of anxiety, the art historian finally abandons the mask he has worn since entering adult life, the one that allows him not to let us see what he really is: a person who grew up in poverty.
For a long time, Benoit Jodoin separated his night’s sleep into two naps, in order to make the most of his first waking moments, during which he is particularly efficient on an intellectual level. This shows how much you had to do everything you could to succeed in your studies and, perhaps, succeed in becoming someone else. But above all, do not suggest to him, as the well-worn formula states, that it is enough to want it to be in power.
“I think it is necessary to review the meritocratic myth on which the artistic world is based,” the 39-year-old author said in an interview. Although he recognizes that Quebec literature has historically featured poor people more than French literature, under the yoke of the bourgeois imagination, he nevertheless struggled to find, during his years of study, a literary mirror to his childhood of Beloeil. A youth that he describes with modesty, in order to avoid falling into what he calls “trauma porn”.
PHOTO MARCO CAMPANOZZI, THE PRESS
Benoit Jodoin
“And I think above all,” adds Benoit Jodoin, “that there is an imbalance between what we find in literature in Quebec, where poor people are actually present, and what the literary world is,” where to speak of its modest origins would still imply transgressing a taboo.
“I have in mind a literary conversation, during which a writer who spent her life in Outremont defended the need for literature to do violence,” he writes. We must point out the obvious: for many people, particularly those who are marginalized, the discomfort of everyday life is great enough not to seek it out. »
In order to fully enjoy the pleasure of the text, it is necessary to benefit from a minimum of comfort, thinks Benoit Jodoin. His brief experience as a college literature teacher will have enlightened him regarding the economic and emotional precariousness in which many students find themselves, obsessed with the idea of passing their uniform French test, necessary for their diploma.
“We couldn’t talk freely, emotionally, about literature,” he remembers. The students were nervous, stressed, terrified. There is so much at stake for them. In this situation, the pleasure of opening up by reacting to what they liked or disliked in a reading was not an option. There was no safe space for that to happen. »
Social classes exist
A story of the formative years of a young man who learned to play a character in order to go incognito within the world he wanted to belong to, Why don’t I write thus combines the tone of confidence with that of the essay to better shine its light on a number of questions that our present obliterates. Particularly that of the struggle between social classes, an outdated expression, and certainly criticizable, but which had the undeniable merit of clearly naming the fact that not everyone starts from the same point in life.
Why do we no longer talk about social classes? “Perhaps because it’s a conversation that quickly becomes personal,” suggests Benoit Jodoin. We have the impression when we say that someone has benefited from certain privileges that they don’t deserve to be there, or that everything has been easy for them, when of course not. Succeeding in the literary or artistic world remains a lot of work and effort for anyone. »
But taking a vow of poverty does not imply the same anxiety when we know that daddy’s wallet will be there to catch us and when there is no net under our feet. “There is a difference between bohemian life and poverty”, illustrates the one who, in one of the most stimulating chapters of his essay, testifies to his astonishing affection for books on personal growth, generally considered with condescension by intellectual circles. .
I can’t get rid of an almost conspiratorial idea: perhaps personal growth books are despised because they mobilize both the sensitive and the action, a duo of formidable effectiveness.
Benoit Jodoin in Why don’t I write
When they are not working stupidly just to make a pass on the palette of capitalism, these books “which dare concrete action can be very powerful when we want to get rid of a certain baggage”, specifies the author in interview. “I deplore the fact that the power contained in these actions which take action is not valued. »
Overcome shame
By publishing Why don’t I write, Benoit Jodoin therefore wanted to overcome the shame that had dogged him for a long time. “Shame is the feeling that is linked to the value that we attribute to ourselves,” he observes, “and this value is fundamental to engaging in the vulnerability of creation. »
He very much hopes that, as has been the case for several years, the stories of class defectors will continue to multiply, without falling into miserabilism or the over-aestheticization of what poverty is. That solidarity will be woven, through interposed books.
Class defector? In reality, Benoit Jodoin does not adhere to the term “class defector”. “No, because in this term there is the idea of a definitive passage, whereas I define it as a permanent process. I will always have this feeling of insecurity. When I see a homeless person, I still ask myself: Why isn’t it me? And I have no answer, other than the stupid one, to tell myself that I was lucky. »
Why don’t I write
Triptych
132 pages