Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec: Ways of Belonging 3031459350, 9783031459351

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Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec Ways of Belonging Dervila Cooke

Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec

Dervila Cooke

Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec Ways of Belonging

Dervila Cooke Dublin City University Glasnevin, Dublin, Ireland

ISBN 978-3-031-45935-1    ISBN 978-3-031-45936-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45936-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover Credit: Adrienne Bresnahan Photography credit for Anita Aloisio is Sabrina Reeves Photography credit for Akos Verboczy is François Couture Photography credit for Abla Farhoud is Mathieu Rivard Photography credit for Naomi Fontaine is Louise Leblanc This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

This book is dedicated to my daughter Ríona Cooke Burke, and to the bright and curious minds of children everywhere. And in loving memory of Margaret Burke Daniels, née O’Flaherty, because of her delight in the Irish language and in creative writing at school. And to my mother Ann Cooke, née Burns, and the memory of my father Paddy Cooke. They encouraged their seven children to learn other languages and experience other cultures. This is a legacy I intend to pass on.

Acknowledgements

Firstly, I would like to thank “my” authors in Québec. I “met” Naomi Fontaine online for a conference panel and virtual book club during the Covid-19 pandemic, and I was struck by her kindness, her intellectual curiosity, and her willingness to engage with questions. The smiling and genial Abla Farhoud invited me to her Hutchison street kitchen on two memorable occasions, and gave me hours of her time, mixing her thoughts on cooking and gardening into the discussion of her writing. I admire her work and spirit greatly. I particularly loved her lively emails where she expressed her appreciation for gifts of Irish whiskey-filled chocolate. Anita Aloisio has been unstinting in her generosity in providing material and opinions, and Akos Verboczy has been a prompt, cordial, and very helpful respondent by Internet. I am grateful to my husband Robert for steering the household ship when I could not, and for all the supportive soup. To my lovely daughter Ríona, I say Go raibh míle maith agat and Un grand merci! She is loving and kind and is a real treasure. She had to put up with lots of concentrated typing by her mother in her evenings and weekends for the final months of this endeavour. My thanks are due to the Délégation du Québec in London (UK) for a grant in 2016 to visit Montreal to pursue the project on autobiographical memory in Québec that turned into the current study. Prior to that, the Government of Canada’s Understanding Canada programme was vital in ensuring I could visit Montreal to attend a summer school on Québec culture and consult the BAnQ resources, when I was starting to explore the Canadian context, in the first decade of the 2000s. vii

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I was successful in a competitive Research Fellowship scheme at Dublin City University (DCU) that allowed me to draw this project together, and I am grateful to DCU for making this scheme available. I am also very grateful to the previous and current Heads of the School of Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies for their help with sabbatical leave, when the project grew and grew. I am indebted to Dr Jonathan Kearney of the School of Theology, Philosophy and Music of Dublin City University for the information on the sound of the name Abla in Lebanese Arabic, pronounced as Aablè, and for many other related matters. Kearney is a fount of knowledge on all things related to the development of Arabic over many centuries: anthropologically, socially, and linguistically. Lastly, I would like to thank the enthusiastic undergraduate students of French and Francophone literature at Dublin City University, who engaged so well with novels by Naomi Fontaine and with Indigenous issues in Québec. Her work opened their eyes to a culture and context that “spoke” to them. The essays my final-year students produced made it clear that they were in deepest solidarity with First Nations in Canada. They were particularly respectful and admiring of the struggle of the Innu people for survival and for self-affirmation. Their Irish context allowed them to sympathise with the situation of a colonised people, with all the language loss, and identity confusion that entails. However, they remained conscious of their own relatively privileged economic and political status as native English-speakers, and of their different relationship with the land.

Contents

1 Ways of Belonging  1 2 Naomi  Fontaine’s Indigenous Writing: Self, Community, and Society 47 3 Abla  Farhoud: Montreal Migrations and the Ghost of Lebanon 93 4 Anita Aloisio and Akos Verboczy, Children of la loi 101139 5 Conclusion: Inscribing Home in Québec205 Index223

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About the Author

Dervila Cooke  teaches in French and Francophone studies at the School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University, Ireland. She is the author of Present Pasts: Patrick Modiano's (Auto) Biographical Fictions (2005) and editor of New Work on Immigration and Identity in Contemporary France, Québec, and Ireland (2016), and of Modiano et l’image (2012). Cooke is also interested in ecocritical approaches and in hands-on environmentalism. She has published on approaches to Newfoundland’s overfishing crisis, in The Shipping News. As of 2023, she is expanding the sustainability focused aspect of her research. In 2021, she initiated and led the SeasonsPace sustainable local growing project (Dublin, Paris, Newcastle UK), funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

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CHAPTER 1

Ways of Belonging

Introduction This study looks at four case studies of creative practitioners in Québec from minority cultural groups and culturally mixed backgrounds. Three are of migrant origin or descent, and one is of Indigenous belonging. Most are writers (of literary works or essays) and one has primarily been a documentary filmmaker in her creative production to date. I probe the relationships between the case studies, and highlight the cultural critique and commentary (often sharp) that they provide for contemporary Québec society, as well as their individual aesthetics. Three quarters of the works were produced between 2015 and 2022, and all but one of the eleven main works analysed date from after 2007, highlighting their importance as products of Québec immediately prior to the quarter century mark. The exception is Abla Farhoud’s novel, Le Bonheur a la queue glissante from the cusp of the millennium (1998). The critical commentary in this study is therefore in many cases among the first of its kind. Through an exploration of selected testimonial and autobiographical accounts, the analysis sets the experience of Indigeneity in Québec as a long-oppressed minority group (despite ancestral establishment in what is now called Canada), alongside the situations of other linguistic and cultural minorities in Québec currently, and the experience of Québec itself as a minority within the linguistic and socio-political context of North America. I suggest that the comprehension of connections between related human experiences has © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Cooke, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45936-8_1

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the potential (a word I use advisedly) to be positively transformative of ways of living together in Québec and of the experiences of all its diverse inhabitants. Montreal is the setting of most of the works, since for three of the four cultural creators it was their childhood and adult home, while the less culturally mixed capital Québec city was more important in Fontaine’s formative experiences as a child and young woman. Key focal points of the case studies include questions around the relationship with the French language and heritage language, self-affirmation and insecurities, and more broadly the situation of the self in relation to the dominant culture and the foundational or other culture. Naomi Fontaine is of Indigenous identity, from a semi-rural reserve of the Innu nation in Québec’s Côte-­ Nord, and received her formal education in Québec city after moving there from the reserve at the age of seven. Farhoud immigrated at age six to Montreal from Lebanon in 1950, while Akos Verboczy (originally from Hungary) represents a much later wave of immigration in 1986. Anita Aloisio is the Québec-born child of immigrants from Southern Italy. Setting an Indigenous writer alongside writers from a migrant background might initially seem presumptuous but the discussion will be carefully nuanced, and is carried out with respectful intentions. The juxtaposition is intended to demonstrate the interconnected contributions of these cultural creators in the expression of Québec’s current modernity, and the different and valid ways of belonging put forward by each of them. In all cases, a humanist approach is of major importance in their thinking, and is potentially connective, despite individual differences. Aloisio’s 2022 Calliari, QC documentary foregrounding minority language issues in Québec takes care to give space and voice to the Indigenous Innu-language singer Kathia Rock, in an indication of the type of connective and connected humanist approach that links all of the four main cultural creators discussed. There is a focus on youth in many of the works chosen for analysis. At different points in their narratives, all four creative practitioners highlight youth and childhood as a time of questioning of self and society. This is a life-stage where linguistic negotiation and learning how to express oneself are to the fore, a time where there is reduced agency but also ongoing absorption of the paradoxes and inconsistencies in one’s environment. It is above all a time of thresholds that creates a matrix for the adult self. Some of the young people, like Farhoud and Verboczy, acted as cultural mediators for a parent, or for new arrivals within their community. For all

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the practitioners, contact with different cultures as children and adolescents is shown to be challenging and at times traumatic. All negotiate it in different ways, in highly specific contexts but with many commonalities. While the current study stretches far beyond an exploration of youth, the experiences in childhood and youth that are frequently foregrounded in the case studies at once magnify and condense many of the issues faced by writers of mixed cultural identity more generally.1 All of the cultural creators were young at different times in Québec’s history, although their life stories overlap. Aloisio’s parents were part of the post-World War Two Italian emigration to Canada. Arriving in Québec, they viewed it less as a nation in its own right than as part of Canada and the American continent, which represented an idea of freedom that was particularly important for them in the context of post-­Fascist Italy. Farhoud also came to Montreal at this time, and had a second arrival almost a quarter century later, after eight years spent between Lebanon and Paris between 1965 and 1973. She was part of the discussions about transculture and migrant writing in Québec in the 1980s and 1990s, discussed below. Aloisio and Verboczy were young idealists at the time of the 1995 referendum on Québec sovereignty. Despite their ideological differences, the debates of that period influenced their solidarity with Québec’s vulnerable status within North America. As Chap. 4 demonstrates, this is a vulnerability that many younger people who are not aware of this recent history do not comprehend. Fontaine, who was born in 1987, was exposed to the debates and findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada (2008–2015) when she was in her early twenties. Her work, first published in print in 2011 after previous blog publications, reflects the Indigenous resurgence in Québec and Canada.2 Fontaine is one of the strongest representatives of First Nations writing in Québec since 2011, and Farhoud, who died in December 2021, was one of the earliest and most cogent contributors to the field of migrant writing in Québec, although she did not always like to be put into that category. Several of Farhoud’s works, including her post-2011 writings, have not been adequately discussed to date, and this volume aims to address some of that gap. Alosio has authored two important films commenting on Québec’s 1977 language law, la loi 101 (Bill 101). In both films, her interviewees and narrators show an understanding of the reasons behind the law, which they generally support while wishing it were more nuanced. This more nuanced approach has not yet materialised in Québec. In fact, in 2023 a strengthening of Bill 101 came into effect with la loi 96,

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which has been highly divisive. Aloisio’s subjects express the desire for more celebration of the linguistic heritage of those who are not historically established Francophones or who have additional languages. Aloisio has also written a book of culinary travel writing that explores her Southern Italian patrimony, as well as an academic article and a master’s thesis, both on Italian-heritage identity in Québec. Verboczy is the author of the intelligent commentary in Rhapsodie québécoise (2016) translated into English the following year as Rhapsody in Quebec: On the Path of an Immigrant Child. In this series of autobiographical and sociological essays, he attempts to pinpoint his trajectory from Hungarian schoolchild to a citizen of Québec, as discussed in Chap. 4, with considerable emphasis on the Québec education system. Rhapsodie québécoise propounds the interculturalist model of dialogue between cultures through a common French language, and contains much less emphasis on immigrant heritage than either Fontaine or Aloisio. Like Farhoud, Verboczy enthusiastically embraces French as the language he finds most culturally inspiring. Nonetheless, both Farhoud and Verboczy are also drawn to engage with the idea of a lost homeland. Remembered place features strongly in their writing despite their feelings of belonging to Québec (or in the case of Farhoud to Montreal), as it does for the other two creative practitioners.3 All four cultural creators highlight particularly interesting ways of belonging. Françoise Camirand, a fictional alter ego for Farhoud in Le Sourire de la petite juive (2011) is happiest in the multicultural space of her Montreal street. It is significant that Farhoud describes Françoise as being from the historically established Francophone population, as she seems to be indicating that Québec could potentially have such a celebratory approach to its ethnically diverse inhabitants. It is also noteworthy that Françoise is a writer, in a suggestion of the crucial role of literature in creating openness to cultural diversity. Aloisio rails against the term “integration”, preferring a more fluid and self-asserted way of belonging, whereas Verboczy uses the term without complex. Fontaine is very vocal about the right to be Innu in whatever way one chooses. It is these individual but ultimately reconcilable ways of belonging that the study seeks to explore. School is often in focus in the texts discussed, sometimes as a place of acculturation that can be experienced painfully, though the imposition of an authority that can be blind to cultural diversity and individual needs, particularly in Aloisio’s 2007 documentary. However, some school educators are championed, as with Farhoud’s smiling Sœur Marguerite in Toutes

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celles que j’étais, who is an important vector for social empowerment from the majority population. In the case of the narratorial alter ego for Fontaine in her 2017 autobiographical novel Manikanetish, school holds centre stage as a forum for discussion and reciprocity between students and teacher, and as the locus of self-development, both for the Indigenous students and their Indigenous teacher, an alter ego for Fontaine. In the contributions provided by Verboczy, it is only when post-secondary level is attained that the most enriching processes of cultural transmission and critique start to occur, since some “culturally ghettoised” French-language primary and secondary schools in Montreal present a series of missed opportunities, despite much potential for mutual cultural appreciation. Stéphane Leclair and Judith Plamondon’s (2017) documentary film on Les Québécois de la loi 101, discussed in Chap. 4 along with Aloisio and Verboczy, also has a strong focus on schooling in Québec and the challenges of pluricultural education. Principal issues that will be considered include many instances of enriching linguistic coexistence but also questions of conflict and collisions of language. Personal and collective traumas are also examined, of war, separation, exile, patriarchal oppression, and cultural devastation. As noted, the question of return to a heritage “homeland” is discussed or expressed by all the creative practitioners, with the proviso that one can have several homes. However, the relationship with the heritage of the culture of origin is somewhat fraught in Farhoud’s case, not only because it was imposed on her but because its patriarchal aspects impeded her freedom to be who she wanted to be. Freedom to self-determine is an underlying theme in many of these cultural creators. Of the four, Aloisio and Fontaine’s positions are those that affirm the most strongly the wish for more cultural and linguistic liberty and recognition, despite solidarity with Québec’s minority status and with its struggle to maintain and transmit a sense of its French-­ speaking national identity. Farhoud’s characters thirst to be able to live life on their own terms, and there is a conflicted relationship with the heritage language of Arabic, through associations of patriarchal oppression of women in Lebanon. Verboczy seems more focused on responsibilities than on freedoms, at least on a societal level. He places most weight on the need for immigrants—and indeed all inhabitants of Québec—to be more conversant with Québec history in the aim of a common understanding of Québec’s vulnerable cultural and linguistic status.

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In terms of genre, the works examined include a strong emphasis on literary writing but go beyond it, or merge other approaches with literary aspects. Three of these creators have written or produced polemical essays or documentary work. Fontaine’s work in Shuni lies somewhere between personal testimony, creative writing, and the socio-politically essay form, while Verboczy’s social commentary in Rhapsodie québécoise is decidedly literary. Very deliberately, Verboczy includes intertextual references to other writers, as part of his project to emphasise the rich potential of interacting with literature across cultures. Farhoud’s work, as noted, can be viewed as an autofictional corpus overall, but there is greater or lesser emphasis on autobiographical content depending on the text, and fiction is shown to have its own truth and mentally transformative potential. Linking all the creators is an emphasis on testimony. Even Farhoud’s two main fictional alter egos in Le Sourire de la petite juive, Hinda Rochel and Françoise (from Hasidic Jewish and historically established Francophone cultures respectively) are testimonial in their approach, and Françoise provides the reader with her life story. The documentary films discussed by Aloisio create a space for her interviewees to provide personal accounts of their lives, just as Verboczy discusses part of his own life journey in Rhapsodie québécoise. A sense of the transmission of individual experience is therefore at the heart of the analysis in the present study. In each of the case studies, it occurs in a connective and pluralistic manner.

A Note on Scope, Process, and Structure This book is aimed both at specialist and general readers, including those who are familiar with the Canadian or Québec context and those who are new to it. It must therefore tread the delicate line between pedagogical exposition and scene setting and deeper levels of critical analysis engaging those who are already experts in the field. It is hoped that scholars, students, or other readers who are interested in a particular cultural creator or text (or comparisons between authors or texts), will find the in-depth analysis of individual works illuminating. Those who are more interested in the societal and overarching conceptual issues have been catered for in the introductions to each chapter that set out the societal and intellectual context, as well as in the remarks in the concluding chapter and in the present chapter. While these cultural creators share French as a common language, care was taken to ensure the main corpus of analysis included works by each

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practitioner that are available in English, aiming to bring their work to a wider audience, both for the non-academic reader and for scholars of comparative literature. In terms of the texts and works, the French versions are of course used, but English translations are given for quotations throughout.4 The works have been considered chronologically rather than strictly thematically. The aim of the chronological arrangement is to allow for a detailed analysis of each work, and to optimise the understanding of developments in each person’s œuvre. These developments are key for Fontaine and Farhoud in particular. Over the course of her first three works, Fontaine moved from experimental poetic prose to more straightforward testimonial autobiographical fiction to socio-political personal writing. Farhoud’s writing started with the performativity of plays—with a greater or lesser autobiographical or fictional focus depending on the work—and then moved to the even greater freedom and inventiveness allowed by her use of polyphony in novels with a multitude of characters, before finally turning to overtly autobiographical prose, enhancing the sense of personal testimony discussed below.5

From Transculture to Transculturality The epithet “transcultural”, which forms part of the title of this book, cannot be taken for granted. It has a long genealogy in Québec, where the concept of transculture was crucial in literary circles in the 1980s and 1990s. It was debated and promoted in the trilingual cultural magazine Vice Versa, which combined French, English, and Italian contributions— with some Spanish in later years—over the almost fourteen years of its existence in print from 1983 to the end of 1996.6 The founding creative forces behind Vice Versa came from the vocal and creative Italian community in Montreal: Fulvio Caccia, Lamberto Tassinari, Bruno Ramirez, Antonio d’Alfonso, and Gianni Cacci. The project of transculture aspired to the promotion of cultural hybridity and of de-essentialised identity, particularly in literature. For some advocators of the concept, including Lamberto Tassinari, who was one of its initial formulators, it was also a political vision of an attitude of openness to cultural porosity, which largely did not come to pass, as he lamented in a talk given approximately ten years after the magazine folded (Tassinari 2006). Montreal’s identity as a vibrant and cosmopolitan metropolis was a crucial matrix and catalyst for the vision elaborated in the discussions around transculture.

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The essays and literary works in Vice Versa advocated a pluralistic approach to contact between cultures, which the editors called “transculturation”, following the use of the term by Fernando Ortiz in an anthropological essay in Cuba in 1940. Their work contributed to theories of transculturalism and transculturality, terms that are sometimes used interchangeably, both outside of Québec and within it. Nuances between them can sometimes indicate a speaker’s emphasis on a mindset of being transcultural versus a transcultural state of being, but the usage is often blurred. Ortiz’s term of “transculturation” was novel at the time, and differed from the previously accepted term of “acculturation”. With its use of the prefix “trans”, it suggested that reciprocally transformative exchange between cultures could be societally enriching, as well as personally and socially positive for all of the parties involved.7 There was a slightly different focus in the study of transcultural psychiatry, where a unit by that name had been set up in McGill University in 1955 as a joint venture between the departments of psychiatry and anthropology, drawing on the works of German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin at the turn of the twentieth century. The focus of transcultural psychiatry was (and remains) on comparative study and an emphasis on individuals in their social and cultural contexts.8 Today at the time of writing in 2023, many different but overlapping perspectives use the term “transculturalism”. For example, Richard Slimbach writes that “transculturalism is rooted in the quest to define shared interests and common values across cultural and national borders” (Slimbach 2005, 206). Donald Cuccioletta summarises transculturalism in similar terms as “seeing oneself in the other” (Cuccioletta 2002). Preferring the term “transculturality”, in a 2010 edited volume linking Canada and its Americas, but using nonetheless very similar terms, Afef Benessaieh wrote that transculturality “offers a conceptual landscape for considering cultures as relational webs and flows of significance in active interaction with one another” (Benessaieh 2010, 11, my emphasis). She emphasises that it is a strong feature of contemporary society, or as she puts it, “a concept that captures some of the living traits of cultural change as highly diverse contemporary societies become globalized” (Ibid, 11). All of these approaches and perspectives have at their base the idea of contact across cultures, and all of them highlight its relational value and the idea of interaction. French historian and specialist of Cuba, Jean Lamore, described transculturation in a 1987 essay in Vice Versa as a series of constant

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transmutations, creative, irreversible, and never complete, a process in which one gives something and receives something, with the two parts of the equation coming to be modified: “La transculturation est un ensemble de transmutations constantes; elle est créatrice et jamais achevée; elle est irréversible. Elle est toujours un processus dans lequel on donne quelque chose en échange de ce que l’on reçoit: les deux parties de l’équation s’en trouvent modifiées” (Lamore 1987, 18). In 2006, Lamberto Tassinari wrote of the “trans” in transculture as emphasising the idea of crossings, passing through and across identity in constant metamorphosis, a continual loss-gain dynamic, an osmosis. As he put it in French, “Le trans” as proposed by Vice Versa signified “traversée, passage, métamorphose continue de l’identité: perte et gain sans arrêt, osmose” (Tassinari 2006, 23). While Lamore’s talk of transculturation highlights reciprocal transformation, which was indeed at the heart of Ortiz’s thought, Tassinari places more emphasis on crossings and on the notion of passage, with its connotations of movement into, through, and across. Yet the notion of metamorphosis or at least change is common to both (“transmutations constantes”, “métamorphoses continues de l’identité”). The notion of a transcultural Republic of letters, or “la république des lettres” (Caccia 2006, 31) played a vital role in the development of what in 1980s Québec became known as écriture migrante (migrant writing), discussed below (Lamore 1987; Nepveu 1989; Dupuis 2010). The concept of transculture in the literary sphere remains potentially productive and valid, given the mind-expanding powers of literature and its ability to allow readers insights (passage) into worlds and cultural experiences they might otherwise never have. This is the case with the young Hasidic Jewish girl Hinda Rochel Hertog in Farhoud’s 2011 novel Le Sourire de la petite juive, whose most enriching cultural encounters come from reading in French. Transcultural interaction as part of literary or creative endeavour remains vital and vibrant in Québec. As Catherine Khordoc has pointed out in a series of recent publications, creative writing in Québec, whether categorised as migrant literature or not, is becoming “worlded” due to its ability to cross, blur, and question national borders and identities with its content (Khordoc 2016, 2019). This has resonances with Vice Versa’s 1980s project of transculture. However, the vision of cultural mixing, sharing, and reciprocal transformation inherent in the transculture project does not always spill over into lived reality, as discussed in Chap. 4. From the late 1990s, no doubt helped by the spread of ideas via the Internet, the somewhat more neutral term of “transculturality” started to

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become adopted in Western postmodern cultural criticism worldwide, following the work of German philosopher Wolfgang Welsch, in his influential 1999 essay in English “Transculturality – the puzzling form of cultures today”. The concept of transculture became somewhat merged with it in Québec-based academic circles from this time onward. The term “transculturality” is now often used to describe a state that results from a specific process of transculturation, but also to denote a more general condition experienced by humanity, especially in the modern world, whether individually or at a societal level. Welsch’s use of transculturality describes a way of experiencing the world and sometimes a deliberate way of being. This is a focus emphasised by Richard Slimbach in the abovementioned essay entitled “the transcultural journey”, where he writes of “transcultural competence” (or a series of “competencies”), and “transcultural development” in the context of study abroad (Slimbach 2005, 206, 209). Welsch’s concept differs in its scope and focus from Ortiz’s concept of transculturation, which emphasised the idea of process. However, as with Ortiz’s term, Welsch’s usage has positive connotations and emphasises the reciprocally transformative potential of cultural mixing. It is worth citing Welsch’s concluding paragraph in its entirety here, as it shows his political hope for task-solving via a mindset, attitude, or state of transculturality, which for him emphasised common human connectors between cultures, a realisation of what links us and how the experiences of the postmodern globalised subject are intertwined. Earlier in the essay he had emphasised that for this it was necessary to be open to being transformed by other cultures: With regard to the old concept of culture I have set out how badly it misrepresents today’s conditions and which dangers accompany its continuation or revival for cultures’ living together. The concept of transculturality sketches a different picture of the relation between cultures. Not one of isolation and of conflict, but one of entanglement, intermixing and commonness. It promotes not separation, but exchange and interaction. If the diagnosis given applies to some extent, then tasks of the future – in political and social, scientific and educational, artistic and design-related respects – ought only to be solvable through a decisive turn towards this transculturality. (Welsch 1999, 205)

Despite the highly positive emphasis in Welsch’s formulation of transculturality, it remained more practically focused and less poeticised than

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the concept of transculture in Québec. In the last quarter century, the term of transculturality has evolved further, and has come to be used in the more dispassionate and broader sense of “culturally mixed”, to denote situations, encounters, mindsets, and even people (Slimbach in his 2005 article talks of “transcultural persons”).9 When using it to refer to people, the epithet needs to be sensitive and nuanced in its application, since it might not always be a qualifier they would choose for themselves. Importantly, the term can be applied to experiences that are not always initially joyful, although often intellectually or personally productive, and it is in this non-utopian and more neutral sense that most instances of its use occur in the present study. Finally, a reader or viewer’s response to an art form or event can be transcultural even if the person’s lived experience is generally not so. Again, this is exemplified by Farhoud’s Hinda Rochel Hertog. In her case, transcultural reading practice allows her a nascent liberation when she encounters different worlds through reading French fiction, which she does in order to escape her stiflingly monocultural Hasidic community. Marie Carrière notes that detractors of the term “transcultural” dislike what they perceive as certain flights of fancy associated with the concept, or any approach that suggests that transcultural experience is somehow unproblematic and by default beneficial (Carrière 2007, 29). Also writing in Québec, Sherry Simon notes a similarly overly celebratory tendency with the word “hybridity” (Simon 2003, 108). Simon Harel has also warned against clichéd discourse about poetic wandering and exile in relation to the term of “migrant writing” discussed below (Harel 2005). The discussion of transcultural practice in this volume avoids stereotyping, to show the nuances of each creator’s experiences, many painful, and some ultimately useful and enriching, both to them as individuals and to readers. The most basic meaning of “transcultural” is “across cultures”. The Oxford dictionary online consulted in early 2023 defines it as “relating to or involving more than one culture; cross-cultural”. The Larousse online dictionary entry for “transculturel” says that it refers to a social phenomenon that concerns several cultures, several different civilisations: “se dit d’un phénomène social qui concerne plusieurs cultures, plusieurs civilisations différentes”. As outlined above, literary and critical usage is more complicated. In his Dictionary of Critical Theory, Ian Buchanan says the term refers to “the movement of ideas, influences, practices, and beliefs between cultures and the fusions that result when [they] come together in a specific place, text, or contact zone. The movement of cultures is not

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always reciprocal or voluntary – indeed, a large majority of what is deemed transcultural is the product of colonization, diaspora of different types, and exile” (Buchanan 2018). Buchanan adds that “some examples are the product of the necessary compromises subjugated cultures make in order to survive”. Again, with the caveat that it may not be a self-chosen term, this has resonances with the dominated culture of First Nations in Canada. In Indigenous people’s creative output, but also in non-Indigenous production, writing from the perspective of more than one culture emphasises a negotiation where the local, the foreign, and the universal coalesce in different ways. Nonetheless, I limit the use of “transcultural” in my discussion of Fontaine’s work, since to my knowledge it is not an expression she or other Indigenous thinkers have applied to her œuvre.

Heterolingual and Translingual Dynamics Perhaps inevitably, given Québec’s situation as a minority language enclave within Canada and North America, relationships with French as a dominant language underlie the work of all four cultural creators. The main language that they use for public communication to those who do not speak their heritage language is French for three of the practitioners, and mainly French and English for Aloisio. All four use French authoritatively and with great intensity, and in the case of Fontaine often poetically. The relationships of all these creative practitioners to language are personal to them and to their societal context, and each is explored in its own specificity. However, there are some striking commonalities between Farhoud and Fontaine in particular, who are both inhabited by a nostalgia for a lost heritage language. More broadly, joys and discontents surrounding their heritage languages are important for Fontaine, Farhoud, and Aloisio. Highly interesting ways of including the heritage language and other languages, and sometimes playing with these snippets, feature strongly in the works of these three practitioners, who all display an emotional attachment to the language of origin. Verboczy displays a more muted relationship with his heritage language of Hungarian, insofar as can be ascertained from his autobiographical writing in Rhapsodie québécoise. Despite having adopted French as his main language, his authorial persona there somewhat surprisingly does not seem to consider himself gifted for foreign languages. He also notes that he is no longer able to write a letter in his original language of Hungarian without making a mistake. Yet Verboczy writes French with

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consummate and often playful skill. In Rhapsodie québécoise, he displays his clear mastery of his adopted tongue, often through the form of intertextual references written in French to literature and cultural production in French, Hungarian, and sometimes in English. Heterolingualism (or “hétérolinguisme”) is a term coined by Ottawa-­ based academic Rainier Grutman in the late 1990s (Grutman 1997), denoting the presence of foreign elements, including foreign words, dialect, or regional variations, in a text that is predominantly written in another language.10 It is a key concept for interpreting the scatterings of Arabic and Innu-aimun in the writing of Fontaine and Farhoud respectively. For both writers, non-French terms and expressions play a crucial role in their work, but qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Grutman noted that “foreign” words in a text, which are sometimes impenetrably strange, encourage readers to reflect on some aspect of the writing, usually involving consideration of different linguistic and cultural realities. In a later work, Grutman noted along with Dirk Delabastita that the role played by foreignisms in a literary text is less important than the number of these foreign or non-standard words. In their hermeneutic approach, concerned with structures of meaning that can be interpreted and inferred from the contextual associations through which they are revealed, Delabastita and Grutman suggest that foreignisms may acquire “a deeper significance with regard to plot-construction or even become a controlling metaphor governing character discourse and behaviour. Such effects may actually be obtained by using very few foreign elements, enough to distort the image and to require the reader to pay attention” (Delabastita and Grutman 2005, 17). In Farhoud’s case, foreignisms often have much to say about the culture of origin and her sometimes uneasy relationship with Lebanon. This is the case, for example, with the words for shame and whore that she cites in Lebanese Arabic. For Fontaine, the use of Innu can sometimes be a focus of connection or of self-assertion, promoting a shared sense of Innu-ness with her Innu reader, or leaving the non-Innu speaker temporarily on the sidelines. At other times Innu usage in Fontaine’s work can promote nostalgia, or denote a loss of connection to heritage. This can also be the case with Farhoud. “Translingual” is another “trans” that has become popular in recent years (Kellman 2000; Ausoni 2018; Kellman and Lvovich 2021). Like “transcultural”, it contains within it an element of transformation, especially when it refers to the practice of writing or interacting in a language that is not one’s initial or primary language (as with Samuel Beckett or

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Vladimir Nabokov). However, it can also be used to denote the act of writing or communicating in more than one language, in which case the “trans” element evokes more the sense of moving across and through languages, as with Aloisio. Aloisio’s use of multiple languages highlights her multilingual and translingual abilities and not any unsettling or unreconciled presence of a heritage language in her psyche. Aloisio’s practice echoes the trilingual approach of her forerunners in Vice Versa, including in the “Alliance Donne” Facebook page that she set up in February 2021. Its French and English inflections are neatly encapsulated in the first part of its hybridised Italian name (“Donne” means “women” in Italian), containing entries in whichever of the three languages seems most appropriate for a given context.11 Verboczy’s writing is translingual in the sense that French was not his language of origin. However, his writing in Rhapsodie québécoise is not translingual in the sense embodied by Aloisio, since he does not move across languages or engage with his language of origin there. He employs all the richness of the French language instead, as part of his commitment to Québec’s intercultural or interculturalist project and its emphasis on French as a common language. Since Farhoud and Fontaine are both somewhat hesitant in their written use of their languages of origin and use them sparingly in their works, the term “heterolingual elements” and the concept of heterolingualism are perhaps more appropriate for them than the term “translingual”. Farhoud spoke only Lebanese Arabic until she immigrated as a six-year-­ old and immersed herself in French language learning, but gradually lost her childhood language to the benefit of French, until she took up the study of the language as a semi-foreign tongue when she was an adult. Had she wanted to write in Arabic, there would also have been the complication of a different writing system and alphabet to contend with. In the case of Fontaine, the Innu-aimun language, also called Innu, had already been decimated through cultural genocide, although she can speak and understand the oral language well, due to exposure to it in childhood. Fontaine is currently working on improving her writing and reading skills, in order to reappropriate this partially lost language. Aloisio’s multilingual interviewees often switch effortlessly from Italian to French, when they find themselves in translingual situations or moments. Sometimes what is at stake is not simply code-switching but part of a strategy to challenge “hierarchies between languages”, to borrow an expression from Natalie Edwards (Edwards 2020, 18). Edwards uses the term “translanguaging” in a literary context in a monograph discussing six

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multilingual French and Francophone women authors. The authors chosen by Edwards all have a high level of knowledge of the languages they flow between. Each of them writes mainly in French—a colonial language for many of them— while incorporating significant amounts of another language or languages into their work. For Edwards, when the reader approaches a book through the lens of translanguaging, the domination of certain languages and the power ascribed to them, or inscribed in them, is questioned in quite a fundamental manner. She notes that “in the context of a highly centralized, colonial language, such a reading practice is all the more necessary” (Edwards 2020, 18). For the authors examined by Edwards, translanguaging creates “a dynamic, productive dialogue that emphasizes the practices of the contemporary multilingual individual” (Edwards 2020, 54). Edwards’ authors use translanguaging for various purposes, including self-affirmation, healing, and recuperation. Such an approach chimes with Aloisio’s translingual practice, and that of her interviewees. Moving confidently from one language to another delineates her speakers as powerful and skilful linguistic agents, although they would simply be categorised as “Allophone” in Canada (speakers of any language that is not one of Canada’s two official languages or an Indigenous language). The often-­reductive nature of this term, which can be seen by those termed “Allophones” as a form of cultural “othering”, is discussed in Chap. 4. A recently widespread use of the term “translanguaging” in a similar sense occurs in the domain of education, for example with thinkers like Ofelia García who use it in a verbal form to argue that bilingual and multilingual children, and indeed all children, should be allowed to “translanguage” in school contexts. By this, García means that pupils and students should be allowed to use their “full linguistic repertoire” when they are learning any subject (Grosjean 2016).12 For Farhoud, Fontaine, and Verboczy, unilingual French-language schooling weakened the connection with the language of origin, for various reasons. The general reluctance in Québec to give much public space to heritage languages played a part in this. However, in Aloisio’s case, helped by the commitment in the Italian-speaking community to preserve their language, she has the capacity to “translanguage” easily, in García’s sense of accessing her entire store of verbal communication tools. This was partly due to classes at Saturday Italian school, which Fulvio Caccia also attended in his day, before becoming a multilingual proponent of transculture (Caccia 2014). Aloisio’s use of Italian, French, and English on the website of Alliance Donne allows

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her and the others who post on the site to express whichever aspect of their linguistic identity suits a given context.

Intercultural and Multicultural Concepts and Realities Canada was the first country in the world to proclaim itself as multicultural, when in 1971 Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau announced multiculturalism as an official government policy. The policy was further strengthened in 1982, with an explicit recognition that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms should be interpreted with respect to the pluricultural heritage of Canadians. Multiculturalism was enshrined into law with the passing of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1988. In the statistical reports (Statistics Canada 2022a), for Canada as a whole, the census of 2021 shows the proportion of children of less than fifteen years of age with at least one parent born outside of Canada to be 31.5%, up from 26.7% in 2011. 23% of the country’s total population are or have been a landed immigrant or permanent resident, the largest proportion among G7 countries. For Québec in 2021, keeping in mind the large discrepancies between multicultural Greater Montreal and the less diverse regions, the proportion of recent immigrants was lower, at an average of 15.3%. This was down from a previous high of 19.2% in 2011 (Statistics Canada 2022b), but still represents a considerable proportion of its population.13 Political discourse in Québec on Québec as a pluricultural society seeks to distinguish Québec from the Federal concept of multiculturalism as a mosaic of cultures. To accept the mosaic model would entail a perception of Québec as just one of the many cultures of Canada, whereas Québec considers itself a founding presence in Canadian history. Instead, Québec uses the term and concept of interculturalism, which emerged in government discourse in the very early 1980s (Rocher et al. 2007). In this model, by deliberate contrast with Canadian multiculturalism, the emphasis is less on the rights and freedoms of individuals and more on dialogue between cultures, through the common language of French, although as Marie McAndrew points out, the two concepts often overlap in practice (McAndrew 2016). The four case studies of diverse cultural creators in this book explore creative production to show how some of that dialogue

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occurs, where it sometimes breaks down, and the as-yet incompletely tapped potential of Québec’s vibrant cultural mix. Interculturalism has been interpreted in various ways by different governments in Québec, without ever actually becoming law, or, as some contend, without being satisfactorily defined (Rocher et al. 2007; Carpentier 2022). In 2007, political scientist François Rocher and a team of researchers at the University of Ottawa and the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) prepared a report on interculturalism for the Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles (CCPARDC). Their report was an attempt to propose a satisfactory definition of interculturalism that would promote dialogue and rapprochement in matters of diversity and in the pursuit of a common project in Québec through the French language, based on an understanding of Québec’s historically French-speaking cultural patrimony. The following is my summary in English of the essential components the report presented as inherent to the concept, and which in practice remain aspirational to greater or lesser degrees: Interculturalism recognises diversity as one of the constituent characteristics of the inhabitants of Québec (“le peuple québécois”); it operates within the Francophone society of Québec that declares French to be the language of public usage and of citizenship; it invites all components of Québec society to participate fully in it as a collective project (“projet collectif”); it favours rapprochement, and accepts differences in a context of mutual respect between citizens of diverse origins (Francophone majority, Anglophone minority, ethnocultural minorities, Indigenous peoples); it does this through intercultural dialogue and awareness-raising of Québec’s common heritage (“patrimoine commun”); it aims to eliminate all form of discrimination, by promoting the presence of citizens of diverse origins in all sectors of national life, and by recognising citizenship and encouraging the exercise of that citizenship to its fullest extent (Rocher et al. 2007, 49). The closest that interculturalism has come to being legally enshrined in Québec was in autumn 2019 with the projet de loi 493, presented by Catherine Fournier, entitled “Loi sur l’interculturalisme” (ANQ 2019). While emphasising the need for “des relations interculturelles harmonieuses” (harmonious intercultural relations), the proposed law also stressed that Québec society is the reflection of its historical experience or itinerary, its “parcours historique” (ANQ 2019). This chimes with the idea of a common patrimony emphasised by François Rocher and the UQAM/University of Ottawa team in 2007. Québec’s history includes

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French Canada’s experience as an early colonial presence but also—since the British conquest in 1760—the cultural domination experienced by French-speaking Canadians, the majority of whom inhabit Québec, whose government seeks to protect their identity. Since the 1960s, the “parcours historique” of Québec has been a journey of considerable ethnocultural diversity, but also one of affirmation of secularism and equality between the sexes. These were aspects that Québec sought to bolster with its strongly contested loi 21 on secularism in 2019, discussed as part of Chap. 4 in terms of the question of values. In his 1999 essay on “the puzzling form of cultures today”, Welsch sees “interculturality” as inferior to the more reciprocally transformational concept of transculturality. He describes interculturality as the process that occurs when cultures bounce off one another like floating “islands” or “spheres”.14 This sense of collision has predominated in Québec recently, and not the notion of harmonious exchange that is often described by scholars of interculturalism as part of the dialogue between cultures that the discourse around interculturalism in Québec tends to emphasise. Aloisio and Verboczy engage with these collisions, from different but overlapping perspectives. Following on from the 1960s Révolution tranquille, a period of rapid economic and social transformation, secularisation, and modernisation, leading to diverse waves of immigration, Québec has absorbed into its collective identity the fact of containing a plethora of minority cultural groups along with its historical Anglophone minority and its established Francophone majority. In recent years, it has started to remember that French-speaking Canada and the wider Canadian domain were geopolitical entities established by settler-colonials, a term that Karim Chagnon points out is difficult to render in French, proposing the useful expression of “colonialisme d’implantation” (Chagnon 2019, 265).15 In brief, Québec views and presents itself as a highly diverse “société d’accueil”, and has become increasingly aware of Indigenous rights. However, its attention to Indigenous matters has only appreciably strengthened since the first decade of the millennium, prior to which there was a notable blindness to its Indigenous inhabitants. The term “société d’accueil” is difficult to translate, but can mean a society that welcomes newcomers, or even “hospitable society” more broadly. While this concept of “accueil” underlies the intercultural or interculturalist societal project in Québec, or at least its discourse, there are blind spots and sticking points. Chapter 4 of this volume looks at some of the young and young-at-heart people of

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immigrant and minority cultural heritage who do not feel adequately listened to in Québec.16 Chapter 2 looks at similar sentiments specifically among those of First Nations heritage, who despite being fewer in number through cultural genocide have a far longer claim to belonging to the land than any of the other inhabitants of what is now called Canada. The concept of “Québec values” has been highly emotive recently, particularly as relates to secularism and equality between the sexes, and tolerance of other viewpoints. The idea that these “values” are inherent to Québec society was highlighted by the title of a predecessor to la loi 21 in the form of a proposed law by the name of Charte des valeurs québécoises (Charter of Québec values), put forward by the nationalist and sovereigntist Parti québécois (PQ) in 2013. The proposed law followed the “accommodements” crisis of “Reasonable accommodation” of other cultures, in the first decade of the millennium. This debate and associated report by Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor focused on questions around dress and visible signs of religion, as well as prayer and religious holidays (Bouchard and Taylor 2008). While the Bouchard-Taylor report advocated an approach of “reconciliation” of “différences culturelles” as per the title of the Commission behind the report, an amplification of cultural differences was in fact evident in the controversial Charter of Values that emerged only five years later. The proposed Charter was dropped in 2014 after much controversy, due to what some surveys found to be approximately 40% of voter opposition (Dagenais 2014). However, much of its tenor was reiterated in la loi 21 (Bill 21), adopted by the Coalition avenir Québec party (CAQ) in 2019. La loi 21, also called “la loi sur la laïcité de l’État” (law on State secularism), and the associated debate have provoked much resentment and backlash among millennial youth in particular (see the discussion of Leclair and Plamondon’s film in Chap. 4), as well as among Muslims more generally. One 2021–2022 survey of 639 post-­ secondary students, recent graduates, and prospective students, completed by researchers from two Montreal-based universities, showed that 69% of those who wore a religious symbol were now likely to leave Québec to find work elsewhere (Marchand 2022; Elbourne et al. 2023). Global terrorism and retrenchment have affected Québec strongly. While, to date, the backlash against cultural difference has been less violent than in France, 2017 saw an attack in Québec city on the Islamic Cultural Centre, where six Muslim men were gunned down shortly after evening prayers, leaving seventeen children fatherless. In 2021, 29 January was proclaimed a “National Day of Remembrance of the Québec City

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Mosque Attack and Action against Islamophobia”.17 I have included a brief discussion of writers of Muslim heritage in Québec in Chap. 4, touching on work by Asmaa Ibnouzahir, author of Chroniques d’une musulmane indignée (2015), who immigrated as a young girl to Québec from Morocco. In this very personal series of socio-political commentaries, the author deconstructs the stereotype of the submissive Muslim woman and rails against the scapegoating of Muslims in general because of terrorist attacks by radicalised individuals. The 2017 work by Kenza Bennis entitled Les Monologues du voile also aims to humanise Muslim women in Québec, as does Saïda Ouchaou-Ozarowski’s documentary In Full Voice / À Pleine Voix (2021). In the early 2020s, societal tensions became exacerbated by another highly controversial law, this time providing a barrage of increased protections for the French language: la loi 96, adopted in June 2022 and in force from June 2023. Inter alia, the Bill ramped up requirements for proficiency in French for recent immigrants and for small businesses, and many saw it as unnecessary and divisive, particularly the inhabitants of Montreal. Aloisio expressed her dismay at this Bill, which she described as “devastating” (SMS conversation of 15 December 2022).18 The results of a survey in October 2021 by the Angus Reid Institute saw 77% of Francophones in favour of the law, with 95% of Anglophones and 67% of those categorised as Allophones against it. It was viewed by its detractors as punitive and “semi-racist” (Cardinal et al. 2023, 7–8).19 The law builds on its famous predecessor, la loi 101 (Bill 101) from 1977. Testimony from those who experienced la loi 101 at different stages since its application is the main subject of Chap. 4.20 While la loi 96 has worsened divisions between the historically established Francophone population and its Anglophone minority and recent immigrants, it has also been considered by Indigenous people as a missed opportunity to protect and promote their languages. Furthermore, Indigenous researcher Miranda Huron notes that it will make life considerably more difficult for those of Québec’s Indigenous people whose colonial language is English, such as the Mohawk people of Kahnawake near Montreal (Huron 2023). Huron notes that people in the Kahnawake area will be disadvantaged due to the new cap on numbers in English-language Cégeps (post-secondary college in Québec), and the requirement to focus on French at the expense of learning their own Indigenous language, as well as the fact that they must now take a standardised test in French, with

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no accommodation for different levels of proficiency, in order to receive their Cégep diploma. The gulf between Québec and Canada’s officially promoted self-view as open and respectful to all and the lived reality of minority groups was also evident in 2017 with the commemorations of Canada 150 and Montreal 375. These were boycotted by some Indigenous groups who decried the colonialist background of the celebrations. Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission had been set up in 2008. It produced its report in 2015, calling for more discussion and acknowledgement of the past, and a proactive approach to encourage Indigenous pride and to increase their impact as individuals and as a group. Since about 2010, there has been a resurgence of First Nations literature in Québec, discussed in Chap. 2. The context remains challenging, as evidenced by the 2021 discovery of bodies of Indigenous children who died in Residential schools, also discussed in that chapter. Dissemination of Indigenous thought via the French language is a relatively new phenomenon. New editions of previous works published in French by militant Innu writer An Antane Kapesh were brought out in 2019 and 2020, after the Truth and Reconciliation report of 2015. Fontaine notes in Shuni that she was shocked not to have known about Kapesh’s inspirational work until these new editions were published. She learned about them via her own publisher, Mémoire d’encrier, which also publishes Kapesh. Like Kapesh, other Indigenous thinkers in French in Québec such as Bernard Assiniwi, and Georges Sioui published in the 1970s and 1980s (in Assiniwi and Sioui’s cases with an historical and anthropological focus), but the pool is relatively small. As Isabelle St-Amand notes, there is a need for a revitalisation of thinking in the area. St-Amand suggests that one way of accomplishing this is to encourage interaction with thought by English-speaking Indigenous thinkers in North America, who have remained long out of sight in Québec because of the language barrier (St-Amand 2010). In his preface to the collection of fifteen essays by North American Indigenous thinkers writing in English translated to French by Jean-Pierre Pelletier and edited by Marie-Hélène Jeanotte, Jonathan Lamy, and St-Amand herself, Louis-Karl Picard Sioui noted the gaping lack of Indigenous material at all levels of the curriculum in Québec (Picard-Sioui 2018, 6). This 2018 collection made a major contribution to Indigenous studies in Québec. Indeed, interaction with these essays may have been a factor in the pan-Indigenous references to North American writers in English cited by Fontaine in Shuni in 2019.

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Migrant, Transnational, and Transcultural Creativity: écriture migrante and Beyond Despite tensions on the societal and political fronts with regard to the cultural other, literature in Québec has long been exploring connections with other nations through what Catherine Khordoc calls “diverse points of intersection – historical, cultural, linguistic, social, economic, religious, filial”, in writing that goes “beyond the confines of its national/provincial borders” (Khordoc 2019, 496). Khordoc writes that the current state of literature in Québec can in fact be seen as “inherently transcultural and transnational” (Khordoc 2019, 497). The concept of “migrant writing” or écriture migrante was a key factor in the diversification of Québec literature. Indeed, it contributed to what Khordoc calls its “worlding”, following on from similar perspectives by Katari Lemmens (2011) and Jeanette den Toonder (2008).21 Écriture migrante—a mixed form of writing enmeshing different cultures—started as a home-grown but foreign-­ inflected concept in Québec, initially formulated and advanced by the Haitian intellectual diaspora in exile there. It flourished in The Révolution tranquille of the 1960s, which was a favourable ground for the development of a national literature that soon realised that it was not monolithic, and leapt into the space of questioning around identity that this plurality opened up (“une jeune littérature ‘nationale’ qui, du coup, prend conscience de son caractère pluriel et des enjeux de l’identitaire”, Mathis-­ Moser and Mertz-Baumgartner 2014, 46). Écriture migrante became a sustained focus of interest in the Québec of the 1980s, overlapping with the transculture movement promoted by Vice Versa and sharing much of the same interest in migrant and culturally mixed voices (its “voix migrantes” et “voix métisses”).22 During its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, at the forefront of the discussion were Haitian writers and intellectuals like Robert Berrouët-Oriol and Jean Jonassaint who found sanctuary in Québec after fleeing the two Duvalier regimes (1957–1986).23 Today, literature by major (and fêted) writers such as Dany Laferrière, Joël des Rosiers, Émile Ollivier, and Rodney Saint-Eloi, or Marie-Célie Agnant—who was appointed as Canadian parliamentary poet laureate in 2023—all originally from Haiti—is firmly part of the Québec canon. So too is work by writers such as Ying Chen, Sergio Kokis, and Naïm Kattan (born in China, Brazil, and Iraq respectively). Five years after the end of the defining period of écriture migrante, Simon Harel

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noted that it remained an unavoidable entry point for anyone seeking to study Québec literature (Khordoc 2007; Harel 2005). The discussions and discoveries around écriture migrante vivified the Québec literary space, as Indigenous writing is doing today. Gilles Dupuis notes that one of the benefits of the interest in culturally and formally hybrid writing and the attention to minority cultures in the 1980s and 1990s was the gradual acceptance of Anglo-Québécois writers (a term not accepted by some) into the category of Québec literature that occurred around the turn of the millennium (Dupuis 2014, 26). Québec has many Black writers who are not of Haitian or sub-Saharan African immigrant immediate origin or descent and who write in English. A notable example is Lorena Gale (1958–2009), who was a Black Anglophone female writer who grew up in Montreal in a long-established Black family. Her provocatively titled play (in English, with some French) Je me souviens, first produced in 2000, followed Angélique, her acclaimed play about slavery in Canada, which premiered in 1998. H.  Nigel Thomas, born on the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent, immigrated to Montreal as a young man in 1968 and writes in English. Literature in English by established Anglophones from the historical settler population includes Montreal-­ focused work by Heather O’Neill who writes in English but knows French, and reads in the language. Others who write in English in Québec include Rawi Hage, originally from Beirut, who knows Arabic, French, and English but chooses the latter language. His 2008 novel Cockroach highlights many issues relating to transcultural experience as a young immigrant man.24 Dupuis also suggests that the current success of interculturalism as a concept in the political arena in Québec (or at least its popularity in terms of government discourse) occurred because of migrant writing and the fruitful debates that the notions of “intercultural” and “transcultural” opened up in the various communities making up Québec society today.25 He also discerns what he calls “transmigrance”, where immigrant writers and those from the historically established Francophone population inspired each other in style and theme. As just two examples of several, he cites the influence of Gabrielle Roy on Farhoud, for example, and Ying Chen’s influence on Guy Parent.26 Also significant is the attention to minorities by other minorities recently, exemplified by the writer of Haitian origin, Rodney Saint-Éloi, who set up the Mémoire d’encrier publishing house in 2003. With its innovative and varied catalogue, this publishing house brings together voices from the periphery and the centre, including

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staunch support for Indigenous writing. Fontaine, Kapesh, and other acclaimed Indigenous writers such as Joséphine Bacon and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, and the abovementioned collection of Indigenous thought from 2018 are all published there.27 Migrant writing is often seen as shifting and precarious in its aesthetics, whether through changes of focus or of narrative technique such as temporal and spatial dislocations. The expectations about constant virtual motion in écriture migrante are emphasised by the gerund form in French, which literally means “migrating”. Its narrative form is often unstable, non-linear, and disrupted, with a content that concerns many types of movement, back and forth, and across cultures (Pruteanu 2013; Mathis-­ Moser and Mertz-Baumgartner 2014). Within a particular œuvre, some of a writer’s writing might fit with this concept of migrant writing more closely than other texts by that author, and not all writers of migrant background produce such texts. Equally, as Khordoc has pointed out, some writers of non-migrant background do, although she uses “transnational” to describe the latter when cultural congruences are also involved (Khordoc 2016). Transnationalism, coined by Swedish anthropologist Ulf Hannerz in the 1990s, concerns “individuals’ and civil society’s movements across borders” and “how increased global connectedness affects those movements” (Tedeschi et al. 2022, 605, and see Hannerz 1996). The term “transnational” emphasises interaction between nations or nationalities, often on the level of the group. However, in discussions of literary writing it is sometimes the concept of choice for works that deliberately avoid categorising identity, nation, and culture along clearly defined lines, and I have used it occasionally. The term “translocal” sometimes also fits, since the ways in which humans inhabit physical space are key in several of the works under discussion.28 Nonetheless, for the accounts of experience by Farhoud, Alosio, and Verboczy, the term “transcultural” is often the better choice, as they focus on very individual, often emotional, experience of cultures, and on the individual creative practitioner’s blending of those cultures and passage between them. Another reason for favouring the term “transcultural” in such instances is that the works under discussion often emphasise transformation (from X to X + Y), whether in positive or negative ways, whereas “transnational” is often more connoted with linkages across cultures. However, both terms can be used for works that transcend and transform by breaking down divisions between cultures and identities.

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In 2002, Daniel Chartier saw “littérature migrante” as an overarching category defined by themes linked to displacement and hybridity and by what he calls “particular forms” of writing, which are often autobiographical (Chartier 2002, 305).29 It is true that many migrant writers do produce biographical narratives, and this is often part of their appeal (Bédard-Goulet 2020). However, from its inception, migrant writing was conceived as much more than a writing based on biography. In 1988, poet and writer Pierre Nepveu felt that Volkswagen Blues by Québécois writer Jacques Poulin, with its aesthetic of wandering, and its theme of travelling across North America with an Indigenous Métis woman was a metaphor for new directions in Québec literature and culture (“une métaphore même de la nouvelle culture québécoise: indéterminée, voyageuse, en dérive, mais ‘recueillante’”, Nepveu 1988, 217). In other words, one did not need to have a background of migrancy or exile to be part of this movement. Nonetheless, in practice, the term has rarely been applied to anyone who is not of migrant origin. In 2023, écriture migrante reached its fourth decade of existence as a concept. As we near the quarter century mark of the millennium, scholars continue to use the term widely, and there is still a valid body of theory around it. Writers who have recently started to publish in Québec like Kim Thúy from Vietnam, who brought out her first novel in 2009, are routinely given the label, and Montreal is still in many ways the capital of migrant writing. The category has nonetheless been the subject of “robust criticisms” (Khordoc 2019, 496). Along with the risk that the discourse can become clichéd (Harel 2005), the label itself has potentially ghettoising qualities, which are magnified by biographical and thematic expectations in the case of work by migrant writers. As Khordoc points out, there are perceived restrictions on the topics one is expected to write about if one happens to be a foreign-born writer living in Québec, and the biographical circumstances that are required in order for a person to be seen to qualify for the identifier (Khordoc 2016). Marie Carrière notes that prominent writers including Haitian-born Joël des Rosiers, David Homel (American-Canadian), and Fulvio Caccia (Italo-Québécois born in Florence, Italy) have refused the qualifier. It is significant that while Farhoud accepted the relevance of the category for her work, she stated that she did not wish to be pigeonholed or locked into it (Carrière 2007, 29). Farhoud’s work as analysed in the present study shows her to be an example of a migrant writer whose work both includes and transcends the

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expected concerns of the category, such as exile, nostalgia, cultural shock, transculturation, and cultural hybridity. Migrancy of many sorts—including geographical, mental, linguistic, and intra-urban nomadism—pervades her œuvre and underlies its overall literary approach. Her writing not only discusses exile, but highlights transcultural encounter while also exploring other very different types of “migrations” such as mental illness and the authorial mental reconfigurations involved in inhabiting a male psyche, which she often likes to do. Since Farhoud also often chooses to inhabit the consciousness of people from different cultural backgrounds to her own, her work seems to answer the call by Régine Robin to “sortir de l’ethnicité” (avoid a narrow focus on ethnicity). Robin’s call to action came in the chapter of the same name in Métamorphoses d’une utopie, a reflection on cultural mixing and on transculture (Caccia and Lacroix, 1992). Robin (born Rivka Ajzersztejn) was herself a migrant writer, as a French Jewish scholar and creative practitioner of Polish immigrant parentage, and author of the famously fragmented 1983 novel La Québécoite about wandering around Montreal as an immigrant on the margins of Québécois identity, which many see as the start of the migrant writing current. Literary narratives about cultural hybridity and juxtaposition of diverse cultures abound in the work of Farhoud. I argue as part of Chap. 3 that Farhoud’s Le Sourire de la petite juive embodies a highly transcultural approach, despite the fact that the young Hasidic girl of the title, Hinda Rochel Hertog, is not herself transcultural. Both of Farhoud’s main literary alter egos, established Francophone Françoise and her cultural opposite Hinda Rochel, learn about each other’s culture and are positively transformed by their encounter. Although Hinda Rochel’s life conditions and restrictive daily experience are unlikely to be radically transformed, she can nonetheless gain mental liberation through reading, and through comprehension of what connects her with the characters in her favourite novel, which is by Franco-Manitoban writer Gabrielle Roy, who moved to Québec. Since she reads in another language, this increases the cultural mixing available to her. This is a virtual migration of sorts, and metatextually echoes the mental migration and transformation that occurs when Françoise imagines the experiences of Hinda Rochel, and even comes to empathise with them and relate them to her own life story, despite the outward appearance of unbreachable gaps between them. As such, this novel extends Farhoud’s concern with transformations of many sorts.

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Farhoud’s work will be considered as an example of migrant writing that occurs in both in a thematic manner, informed by biographical experience but not restricted by it, and not as the more commercial category of “littérature migrante” that one might find in a book display. Despite the individuality of her personal aesthetic, her work has significant resonances with Fontaine’s brand of Indigenous nomadic writing, in that both writers express the importance of subjectivities that are free to self-invent and to re-invent, and that constantly do so.

Indigeneity, Positionality, and Multiple Worldviews I argue in Chap. 2 that Fontaine’s Indigenous writing to date shares many traits that have come to be associated with migrant writing, including themes of exile, displacement, and the loss and gain inherent in hybridity, and—at least in her first work Kuessipan (2011)—an experimental, shifting, and fragmented style. However, Fontaine’s work is most emphatically not migrant writing. Nor, I argue, is it unproblematic to call Fontaine’s Indigenous creative production “transcultural”, despite the many cultural crossings it foregrounds. For reasons of positionality, it is not my place as a non-Indigenous critic (who in French could be called allocthone as opposed to autocthone) to impose any potentially linguistically colonising term on an Indigenous writer. However, I will use the term “transcultural” in certain contexts when discussing Fontaine’s work, according to the rationale given below. Some non-Indigenous critics have used terms such as “transnational”, “transcultural”, and “cosmopolitan”, in order to emphasise the modernity of much contemporary Indigenous experience. This is evidenced for example in the 2010 volume edited by the non-Indigenous anthropologist Maximilian Forte, entitled Indigenous Cosmopolitans: Transnational and Transcultural Indigeneity in the Twenty-First Century.30 Frans Schryer’s chapter in Forte’s edited volume gives the example of the Alto Balsas Nahuas Indigenous people from Guerrero in Mexico, who “epitomise the indigenous and the local” (having their own language and customs rooted to place since the time of the ancient civilisations, but who also use camcorders, travel frequently back and forth between their home area, other parts of Mexico and eighteen American states—where they are often in contact with people from many different cultures—and have the additional languages of English and Spanish (Schryer 2010, 97). Forte emphasises in his preface that Europeans were not the first to practise

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cosmopolitanism, and that it is not the reserve of Western thought or practice. Despite not being fully comfortable in English, Naomi Fontaine is resolutely modern like the Alto Balsas Nahuas people, including through her use of the Internet for public communication via blog posts and presentations. In Shuni, she notes her irritation at the expectation by some members of the audience at a literary occasion in France that she should conform to their exoticised expectations of what an “Indian” should be. Forte’s work extends previous work by Mark Goodale discussing Indigenous rap in Bolivia (Goodale 2006), which like the cultural mixing of the Mexican Indigenous people discussed by Schryer could, from a Western perspective, be viewed as a transcultural practice. In similar vein, there are The Halluci Nation hip hop fusion band based in Ottawa (who call their style “powwow step”, and whose original name was A Tribe called Red), or Violent Sound from Northern Québec, near Labrador (who sing in English).31 In 2017, Jean-François Côté, a literary sociologist at UQAM devoted a monograph to Indigenous plays in Canada created since the latter half of the twentieth century. He sees both the cultural interaction of these plays with non-Indigenous audiences and texts and the non-Indigenous influences on these plays as transcultural. In his introductory chapter, he writes that with the creative upsurge in First Nations writers since the 1960s Canada has seen a transformation of aboriginal cultures at the same time as a transformation of the general culture of its societies (Côté 2017, 13). This presents what he sees as a remarkable instance of transculturation: “un cas remarquable de transculturation” (Côté 2017, 4). He describes transculturation as the process through which cultures come into contact and create other cultural entities: “ce processus par lequel des cultures sont mises en contact les unes avec les autres pour former d’autres entités culturelles” (Ibid). Nonetheless, and importantly, such experiences and practices could equally be discussed in other ways. Notions of displacement and alienation may sometimes fit (though should be approached with caution). Ultimately it is the Indigenous people themselves who are the arbiters of their own meaning and vocabulary. Even terms that might seem to be appropriate from an intendedly supportive Western point of view can be problematic. Jessica Janssen points out that Thomas King, the American-born Indigenous writer, thinker, and photographer who came to live in Canada in 1980, railed in the early 1990s against the use of the Western term

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“postcolonial” to describe Indigenous experience, since the term created a sense of victimhood (Janssen 2018). Almost twenty years later, Haudenosaunee writer and thinker Patricia Monture made similar remarks about the imposition of the concept of resistance on Indigenous thought and writing, since in many cases the term is “too simplistic” (Monture 2008, 157).32 Fontaine herself sometimes uses the term “resistance” to describe certain aspects of Innu experience, and this is her prerogative. Yet, as Monture correctly notes, Indigenous writing, including Fontaine’s, cannot be confined to that concept. Like Gerard Vizenor (2008), Janssen prefers—at least tentatively—the term “survivance” (Janssen 2018, 88–89). For Vizenor, survivance goes beyond what he calls “victimry” (2008, 1) to declare Indigenous presence, creativity, and continuance of stories. Fontaine’s work fits this paradigm of survivance, particularly as voiced in Shuni. The contributors to Forte’s book on Indigenous cosmopolitans are in the main not Indigenous. However, one of the authors, Julie-Ann Tomiak, in the chapter discussing transnational migration and Indigeneity in relation to urban Inuit in Canada was of Indigenous background, suggesting that she perceives the term to be of some relevance for her analysis (Tomiak and Patrick 2010).33 Another Indigenous scholar writing in English, Marina Tyquiengco used “Indigenous cosmopolitanism” as the title of a 2018 article about the Alaska Native Heritage Center. It seems that such Western-conceived terms may be of use to Indigenous people, when they fit with the reality under discussion. In terms of the study of Indigenous literature through French, non-­ Indigenous writer Isabelle St-Amand devoted a cogent 2010 article to the need for (and dearth of) theoretical and analytical tools (“outils théoriques et analytiques”), which would help give weight (“conférer un poids”) and legitimise the academic and curricular study of Indigenous literature through the French language (St-Amand 2010, 47–48). The long-­ standing gap of terms was partially corrected by the abovementioned collection of translated essays by Indigenous thinkers writing in English that she co-edited some years later (Jeannotte et al. 2018). Her point is well made, since the availability of such terms have helped to give Indigenous studies in English-speaking Canada an ever-increasing legitimacy in the world of literature and literary analysis and in academic circles: “une légitimité dans l’institution littéraire et dans le monde universitaire” (St-Amand 2010, 47). A shared vocabulary can help as a starting point on the journey

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of teasing out or deepening meaning and perspective, despite that fact that individual elements of it might later become contested. Also in Canada, Indigenous scholar Margaret Kovach wryly calls academic terms “10-dollar words” (Kovach 2015, 60), noting that Indigenous thinkers may sometimes find them useful to adopt, depending on the context, without damaging their personal authenticity. On the same topic of style and register, in 2008, Monture published a piece in the Canadian Woman Journal, emphasising her choice, as an Indigenous scholar, to write in non-academic ways, in order to avoid contributing to oppression and to have a wider-reaching effect on Indigenous women: “I don’t write like an academic. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t. Because that does not fill the silence that has existed between ‘Indian’ nations, our citizens, the women, and power” (Monture 2008, 154). This emphasis on personal transmission of thought and thinking in a direct and non-­ academic way fits with Fontaine’s approach in Shuni, which is nonetheless rigorously argued and highly informative about her experience as an Innu in Québec, and particularly an Innu woman. In sum, in the current absence of general use of such terms by Indigenous writers and thinkers, there is merit in being careful when using the term “transcultural” for the work of Naomi Fontaine, and to avoid describing her personally as a transcultural writer. This is despite Fontaine’s foregrounding of culturally mixed aspects of Innu identity—which her work accepts as a valid way of being Innu—as in the case of Christmas bingo on the reserve, discussed in Chap. 2. A non-Indigenous reader’s response to her work may be less problematically described as transcultural, however. It often seems appropriate to describe the practices of Farhoud, Aloisio, and Verboczy as transcultural, in instances that underline a sense of cultural crossings and of change. Again, these crossings may not always seem life-affirming at the time they occur, but they are always intellectually rich.

Personal, Interpersonal, and Transpersonal Testimony An emphasis on telling stories—often personal ones—links the approach of all four cultural creators discussed in the present study. For Farhoud, her drive to create and share personal accounts of life is focused on an intimate connection with the characters whose consciousnesses she

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inhabits. This is the case whether these consciousnesses are fictional or autobiographical. Over the course of Farhoud’s œuvre, the approach moved from autobiographical exploration (in plays) to fiction and back towards more openly autobiographical texts (prose), and then again towards a greater element of fiction, through the inhabiting of the consciousness of a male character, the mentally ill narrator in Le Dernier des snoreaux. In fact, speaking through Françoise, her writerly alter ego in Le Sourire de la petite juive, Farhoud seems to find the greatest freedom in imaginative writing, as discussed in Chap. 3. The storytelling of Fontaine, Aloisio, and Verboczy also emphasises personal experience, for reasons of testimony, and often aims to transmit knowledge and insights that have been gleaned from the collective past. Fontaine’s work has strongly autobiographical elements, and while Verboczy wishes to promote knowledge of Québec’s vulnerability in its struggle to define its nationhood, and to encourage a better comprehension of its multi-ethnic context and of the literature from all of its cultural groups, he too mixes autobiographical fragments from his life with the socio-political commentary. Although the work by Aloisio discussed here is not directly autobiographical, her perspective filters through. The fact that she personally narrated the voiceover for her 2007 documentary emphasises that she too is a child of la loi 101, like the speakers in the case studies she presents. Similarly, in the Calliari film, we briefly see her dancing to his music, as though to inscribe herself in the narrative, as part of a shared story. Aloisio’s work is not only interpersonal but transpersonal, since she works with interviewees to transmit their points along with her own perspective, emphasising the through and across elements of the prefix “trans” in this case. Fontaine’s approach is also concerned with bearing witness to the lives of others. Her direct, heartfelt approach echoes that of Indigenous thinker Patricia Monture, whose abovementioned statement that “I don’t write like an academic” suggests an emphasis on direct, personal language that comes from what is deeply felt. This is encapsulated in Monture’s subsequent lines as follows: “When I struggle and I cannot for the life of me write a sentence or have a complete thought, I write jagged lines and call it a poem. On those days, I am writing to survive. Some days, I resist with my words. I speak to power to take back our power, the power of Indigenous women. Other days I write dreams and hopes and prayers. They are the words of life and of living. My words are my strength. They are my women’s power. That question, what is Native literature, is simple.

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For me so is the answer. I am a writer. I tell stories” (Monture 2008, 154). This has resonances with Tanana Athabascan scholar Dian Million’s “felt theory”, in the influential article of the same name, which she subtitles “an Indigenous feminist approach to affect and history” (Million 2009). Importantly, Fontaine’s work is the legacy of an oral heritage (Boudreau 1993). As noted by the co-editors of the 2018 collection of influential Indigenous writing translated from English to French, a considerable portion of what is being said and talked about by Indigenous thinkers in Québec is of an oral nature. For example, their poetry and individual reflections are increasingly pronounced in public space (Jeannotte et  al. 2018, 12). These public utterances can occur literally in physical spaces of meeting or passage (community halls, conference rooms, or the street) or virtually, through presentations later published on the Internet in video or audio form. An oral though poetic quality permeates Fontaine’s own work to date. Affect is important for all the creative practitioners in this volume. While most of the narratives have a strong basis in fact, the question of the factual nature of the personal accounts is less important than their emotive or intersubjective impact: their emotional or personal truth. Perhaps as a backlash to the technologically focused and often solitary nature of modern life, there has been a growing interest in personal narratives. This has been accompanied by an increased attentiveness to the field of affect (or emotional response) in literary studies, for example with Jean-François Vernay’s notion of “psycholiterary” response (Vernay 2013, trans. 2016), and Maria Scott’s cogent study of empathy in literary fiction (2020). Farhoud plays especially strongly on affect, revealing emotion in highly confessional narratives, as does Aloisio, although affect in Aloisio’s work is engaged more often through attention to others. In Rhapsodie québécoise, Verboczy adopts a more detached position as an ethnographic observer, although even he is not immune to emotion. Fontaine shows empathy with her fellow Innus and much anger, along with the trauma of loss. Through their first-person narratives, all of these “self-creators” establish a bond through which readers become companions living through the vagaries of dual-culture lives, sometimes privy to racism, marginalisation, grief, and exile, but also to cultural enrichment, language gain, creativity, playfulness, and self-affirmation.

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National and Post-national Intersections La loi 96 includes the declarations that the citizens of Québec form a nation (“les Québécoises et les Québécois forment une nation”) and that French is the common language of the Québec nation: “la langue commune de la nation québécoise” (Publications du Québec 2022, 94). The term of “nation” was already present in the text of la loi 101 (Cardinal et al. 2023, 45), but la loi 96 unilaterally modifies Canada’s Constitution Act of 1867 in order to further emphasise Québec’s nationhood. In the context of transnational literature described above, and the fact that the First Nations of Québec also assert their nationhood within Québec, the question of who feels Québécois remains. There is also the question of how important, if in fact it is important, feeling Québécois is for the possibilities of harmonious coexistence aspired to by the notion of vivre-­ ensemble, a term often used by governments in France and Québec when referring to their multicultural societies. The notion of productive interaction is perhaps more significant than the simple coexistence of groups within society. Each of the four cultural creators write from the periphery in some way—some more peripherally than others—to make their mark on the collective consciousness, and to show how they belong to the land from which they write. In his famous 1988 essay L’Écologie du réel, cultural critic, academic, and poet Pierre Nepveu, considered that the existence of Québec as a nation was certain, whether or not sovereignty was ever achieved. He noted that the fact that nationhood has been acquired explains why he writes of “post-québécois” literature: “C’est pourquoi je parle de littérature post-québécoise: le fait québécois, pour moi, est un acquis. Qu’on soit indépendant ou non” (Nepveu 1988, 222). Yet even while he asserts “le fait québecois” (roughly translatable as “Québec nationhood” or even Québecness in this context), Nepveu also meant to point to something new with his term of “post-québécoise”, in particular the vibrant and culturally diverse production by migrant writers and other writers concerned with transculture, who were part of the relatively new nation of Québec. Emphasising the usefulness of a perception of literature as “migrante”, and the energy brought to literature in Québec by writers from abroad, and indeed by any literature that inscribed mobility in various forms, Nepveu wrote that the term of “migrante” when applied to writing emphasises movement, wandering, and multiple crossings (Nepveu 1988, 234). The subtitle to his 1988 work, Mort et naissance de la littérature

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québécoise contemporaine (Death and life of contemporary Québécois literature) counteracted his term of “post-québecois”, by speaking of the birth of something new. As outlined in the previous sections, the literature of Québec since at least the 1960s has been inhabited by transnational and transcultural connections. Indeed, as Jocelyn Létourneau argued in the early years of the millennium, Québec itself may be “postnational” (Létourneau 2005). The question of how Naomi Fontaine as a First Nations writer may wish to belong, or not, to a putatively and paradoxically “postnational” nation of Québec will be discussed in the next chapter. Chapter 3 deals with Abla Farhoud as a writer of transcultural and transnational works, concerned with questions of humanity beyond borders, with Chap. 4 returning to questions of the collective project of the Québec nation in its bid to maintain its French-speaking nature and to transmit its cultural patrimony.34

Notes 1. The present study is a companion volume to my volume on life writing in contemporary France, forthcoming with Palgrave Macmillan, where autobiographical and autofictional narratives by Franco-Algerian, Franco-­ Iranian, and Franco-Argentinian writers are explored. 2. As this study goes to press in 2023, Fontaine is in her mid-thirties, and Aloisio and Verboczy are ten to fifteen years older. Farhoud published Le Dernier des snoreaux in 2019 at the age of seventy-four, with a posthumous work meant to be in the pipeline. 3. In March 2023, Verboczy published his first novel, La Maison de mon père, also with Éditions du Boréal. This was published as the present study was entering its publication phase, and has therefore not been analysed here. Running somewhat counter to the predominantly here-and-now focus of Rhapsodie québécoise, it explored the narrator’s reflections during a return visit to homeland of Hungary, with some nostalgia and an emotional sense of place and filiation. 4. The decision about which authors to include was not an easy one. While the initial wish was to be as representative as possible of the various ethnocultural and Aboriginal communities in Québec, including those of Black, Arab, wider Asian, and Inuit backgrounds, it quickly became clear that it would be impossible to do this with any sort of balance or proportionality. In the end, I deemed it best to provide a detailed overview of the works of a particular author or in the case of la loi 101 in Québec of a particular topic, and not, say, to look merely at one text each by a wider variety of

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authors. In the main, this led me to choose texts by acclaimed authors who had produced a substantial corpus to date, but whose work has in many cases not had as full attention as they deserve. 5. For those who wish to look at a more thematically focused or broad-­ ranging swathe of creative work and at texts prior to about 2000, there are helpful starting points on textualising the immigrant experience in both France and Québec in the edited volumes by Susan Ireland and Patrice Proulx (2001, 2004). For a brief look at some fiction films from Québec dealing with cultural diversity, see the section on Aloisio in Chap. 4. 6. Vice Versa was a more cosmopolitan sequel to the equally trilingual Quaderni Culturali, which had a different scope. After a break of more than fifteen years—longer than its initial incarnation—Vice Versa was reborn online in 2014, in a multi-category blog form. Forty years on from the inception of Vice Versa in 1983, Fulvio Caccia and Lamberto Tassinari are again part of the editorial board, at the time of writing in 2023. Spanish is more prominent now as a fourth language, via the tab entitled “Ficciones” (fictions, also encompassing poetry), although the entries there could be in English, French, Italian, or Spanish, as with all the other tabs. It is available at https://viceversaonline.ca/ and the editors are given here: https:// viceversaonline.ca/about-­us/ Site accessed 28 August 2023. On the history and role of Vice Versa, see Dupuis (2010), Wilson (2012), Dumontet (2014), and Acerenza (2020). 7. Ortiz’s term of transculturation was coined during a period in which Cuba was determining a sense of nationalism through the concept of plurality of cultural identities and racial mixing in criollismo and mestizaje. The concept of transculturation had the merit of not simply assuming that one culture would dominate another, as was the case with “acculturation”. However, Miguel Arnedo Gómez notes that mestizaje, which denotes racial mixing, and roughly corresponds to the word métissage in French, has sometimes been criticised for its potential to marginalise Indigeneity and Blackness. Arnedo Gómez also remarks on a blindness to the Indigenous contribution to Cuban culture, or an actual downplaying of it, in Ortiz’s writings, for example when Ortiz ignores “the Spanish use of tobacco as a positive influence of native cultures” (Arnedo-Gómez 2022, 133). 8. Emil Kraepelin’s work on transcultural psychiatry reflects its age, and is now controversial, due to his views on eugenics, and his presumptions of European superiority in some instances. For a history of the study of transcultural psychiatry since 1955 at McGill University, see the university website: https://www.mcgill.ca/tcpsych/history Site accessed 09 September 2023.

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9. Dagmar Reichardt (2011) notes the turn towards a more sober academic usage of transculturality, as an umbrella term. 10. Grutman’s term of “hétérolinguisme” followed Meir Sternberg’s previous reflections on polylingualism in mimesis (Sternberg 1981). 11. Aloisio set up the Alliance Donne website at https://www.facebook.com/ AllianceDonne/about with the mission to bring together women in Québec who identify as being of Italian heritage and to offer “a platform to promote, highlight, and encourage the accomplishments and interests of such women”. Underlying many of their accomplishments is their linguistic trilingualism, or multilingualism, which Aloisio feels is not valued enough in Québec (Cooke 2020). Site accessed 28 August 2023. 12. García’s approach shares much with that of the Irish-born educationalist Jim (James) Cummins of the University of Toronto, whose celebrated work focuses on language diversity in the classroom and the importance for bilingual or multilingual children of being allowed to interact with their schoolwork in any way that allows them access to all of their languages. 13. The Statistics Canada map for the 2021 census released in October 2022 notes that “‘recent immigrant’ refers to a person who obtained landed immigrant or permanent resident status in the five years preceding a given census”. 14. Welsch’s formulation is as follows: “The concept of interculturality reacts to the fact that a conception of cultures as spheres necessarily leads to intercultural conflicts. Cultures constituted as spheres or islands can, ­ according with the logic of this conception, do nothing other than collide with one another” (Welsch 1999, 196). 15. Karim Chagnon’s preferred term is “colonialisme d’implantation” to translate the accepted English term of “settler colonialism”, in order to emphasise the notions of permanence and of “croissance” (growth). This useful translation evokes the spread associated with plants that have taken root or that self-seed. 16. Québec’s immigrant minorities have suffered from what Toula Drimonis calls “the gratitude attitude” (Drimonis 2022), by which she means the expectation that immigrants should be grateful for having been allowed to come to Québec, and the inadequate recognition in Québec society of the social and economic benefits that immigration brings. While Drimonis uses the term in relation to immigrants, it also raises the question of inadequate accueil (welcome) of anyone who is culturally different to the majority population. 17. By contrast with Québec, France has, to date, known a much more unsettling period of violence and urban unrest relating to perceptions and realities of exclusion and injustice in its multicultural society. There were riots across France in the ghettoised suburban housing estates of the banlieue in

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the 1980s and 1990s, leading up to the swathe of riots across France in November 2005. Jihadi violence in France has occurred since at least the mid-1990s, when a civil war was raging in postcolonial Algeria. In terms of Islamist attacks, some of the most notable dates and events include 1995 with the Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame metro bombing; the 2012 Toulouse attacks followed by the notorious Paris attacks of January and November 2015, then the Nice Bastille-day attack of 2016, and the beheading of secular teacher Samuel Paty by an eighteen-year-old Muslim refugee from Chechnya in October 2020. 18. Québec’s loi 96 has also been received with anger in places like the largely English-speaking region of Basse Côte-Nord/Lower North Shore. In 2019, Aude Leroux-Lévesque and Sébastien Rist’s documentary A Place of Tide and Time (known in French as Temps et marées) focused on the rural to urban migration of contemporary Anglophone youngsters growing up in small historic settlements in that area, a minority culture influenced by Indigenous and Newfoundland traditions. Many people in Frenchspeaking Québec do not know of the existence of these “Coasters”. 19. The results of the October 2021 survey in Québec on la loi 96 are available here: https://angusreid.org/bilingualism-­french-­bill-­96/Site accessed 31 August 2023. 20. The 1977 loi 101 followed the rise to power of the nationalist and sovereigntist Parti Québécois (PQ) in 1976 (for more on Québec’s independence movement, see Comeau 2010). The PQ’s accession came sixteen years after the start of what has been called Québec’s Quiet Revolution (“La Révolution tranquille”). This was a period of large-scale economic and social development in Québec, including secularisation and the adoption of the identifier “Québécois”, and is discussed in further detail in Chap. 4. 21. Catherine Khordoc describes her usage of the term “worlded literature” to describe writing that is concerned with “integrating global preoccupations”, “orienting” itself within the wider world, and “works that explore and reflect on the intricate and varied interconnections between different cultures or regions of the world” (Khordoc 2019, 496–498). 22. The bulk of theoretical publications that sought to define the initial stages of migrant writing occurred in the period between about 1984 and 1992. For a cogent introduction to migrant writing see Simona Pruteanu (2013, 2016). According to Gilles Dupuis, the major role of Haitian thinkers in the development of literary interest in migrant and culturally mixed voices in literature has often been underestimated (Dupuis 2014). He provides a useful genealogy of the first instances of the term “migrante” in relation to culture. Robert Berrouët-Oriol is commonly credited with inventing the term (Berrouët-Oriol 1987; Berrouët-Oriol and Fournier 1992), but

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Dupuis attributes the first instance to Haitian writer Émile Ollivier in 1984, and then to Jean Jonassaint and slightly later to Berrouët-Oriol, both of whom were also Haitian-born. As Dupuis notes, their work in the Dérives cultural magazine predated Vice Versa and overlapped with it for part of the magazine’s existence, and Dérives in its later manifestations had the subtitle “revue interculturelle”. 23. Robert Berrouët-Oriol was honoured in March 2023 as part of Black History Month in Québec. See the website here: https://www.moishistoiredesnoirs.com/laureats-­actif/robert-­berrouet-­oriol Site accessed 02 September 2023. 24. See Gregory Reid (2005) for an introduction to other English-language literature in Quebec. On the historically established Anglophones more generally see Martine Letarte (2017). 25. In Gilles Dupuis’ formulation in French, “le succès actuel du modèle interculturel sur la scène politique du Québec a été rendu possible grâce aux écritures migrantes et aux débats fructueux que les notions d’interculturel, puis de transculturel, ont suscités dans les diverses communautés qui composent la société d’aujourd’hui” (Dupuis 2014, 26). 26. Dupuis writes in his 2014 article that the phenomenon of transmigrance was confined to a short period at the end of the 1990s, yet it seems arbitrary to establish a cut-off point. Farhoud’s 2011 novel continues a strong debt to Gabrielle Roy, in the same dynamic of transmigrance. 27. Apart from Mémoire d’encrier, which publishes across cultures, the other main publishing house for Indigenous literature in Québec is Hannenorak, from the Wendake area, which is dedicated to Indigenous writing. 28. “Translocal”, coined by Ulrike Freitag in 2005, highlights the notion of space. It is often used to describe how “spaces and places need to be examined both through their situatedness and their connectedness to a variety of other locales” (Brickell and Datta 2011, 4). 29. Daniel Chartier (2002) sought to distinguish the current of “littérature migrante” from ethnic literature (which stresses cultural belonging), and from diaspora literature, literature of exile, or literation of immigration, although he noted that the categories often overlap. 30. Forte asks the following four intriguing questions in his 2010 introduction to Indigenous cosmopolitans: “What happens to indigenous culture and identity when being in the ‘original place’ is no longer possible or even necessary? Does displacement, moving beyond one’s original place, mean that indigeneity (being indigenous) vanishes or is diminished? How is being and becoming indigenous experienced and practiced along translocal pathways? How are new philosophies and politics of indigenous identification (indigenism) constructed in new, translocal settings?” (Forte 2010, 2).

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31. Violent Ground is a music group formed of two brothers from the Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach, a remote community on the border between northern Quebec and Labrador. See https://nikamowin.com/en/artist/ violent-­ground Site accessed 31 August 2023. 32. Patricia Monture taught at the University of Saskatchewan. Her death notice from that university notes that “Dr. Monture will be remembered as a passionate Haudenosaunee mother, lawyer, activist, educator, writer and scholar” and that “she led the way on ideas involving Indigenous theory, intersectional theory, governance, law, responsibility, and social and political inequality”. https://artsandscience.usask.ca/news/n/1800/ Obituary_Dr_Patricia_Monture_Department_of_Sociology (Site accessed 02 September 2023). In 2008, Monture wrote that “the authenticity debate is one form of containment. A second is the propensity to declare that Indigenous writings are acts of resistance. The characterisation of Indigenous writing as resistance is too simplistic. There is no doubt that some writing by First Nations is about resistance. But it is rarely limited to resistance as our lives are never just resistance. To focus solely on resistance is to place colonialism at the centre of the discussion” (Monture 2008, 157). 33. For a French-language introduction to Inuit literary history in Québec, see Nelly Duvicq (2019a) and for an English-language summary see her conference presentation (Duvicq 2019b). 34. “Premiers peuples”, or “Indigenous peoples” are the terms currently used to describe First Nations, Métis, and Inuit in Canada in the colonial languages.

References Acerenza, Gerardo. 2020. Le magazine montréalais Vice Versa: les opinions des lecteurs. Écho des Études Romanes 16 (2): 75–84. Arnedo-Gómez, Miguel. 2022. Fernando Ortíz’s transculturation: Applied anthropology, acculturation, and mestizaje. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 27 (1–2): 123–145. Assemblée nationale du Québec. 2019. Projet de loi numéro 493: loi sur l’interculturalisme. Québec: Éditeur officiel du Québec. Ausoni, Alain. 2018. Mémoire d’outre-langue: l’écriture translingue de soi. Geneva: Slatkine. Bédard-Goulet, Sara. 2020. Littérature migrantes: concept d’un champ littéraire excentrique. Interlitteraria 25 (1): 66–75. Benessaieh, Afef. 2010. Multiculturalism, Interculturality, Transculturality. In Transcultural Americas/Amériques transculturelles, ed. Afef Benessaieh, 11–38. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

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Bennis, Kenza. 2017. Les Monologues du voile: des Québécoises se racontent. Montreal: Robert Laffont. Berrouët-Oriol, Robert. 1987. L’effet d’exil. Vice Versa 17: 20–21. Berrouët-Oriol, Robert, and Robert Fournier. 1992. L’Émergence des écritures migrantes et métisses au Québec. Québec studies 14: 7–22. Bouchard, Gérard, and Charles Taylor. 2008. Fonder l’avenir: le temps de la conciliation/Building the future: A time for reconciliation. Québec: Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles. Boudreau, Diane. 1993. Histoire de la littérature amérindienne au Québec: oralité et écriture. Montreal: Éditions de l’Hexagone. Brickell, Katherine, and Ayona Datta, eds. 2011. Translocal geographies: Spaces, places, connections. Farnham: Ashgate. Buchanan, Ian. 2018. A dictionary of critical theory. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Caccia, Fulvio. 2006. Vice Versa. Le Québec et le projet d’une république transculturelle. In Le Projet transculturel de «Vice Versa», ed. Anna Paola Mossetto and Jean-François Plamondon, 31–41. Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon. ———. 2014. Transumanar. Vice Versa. 25 August. https://viceversaonline.ca/ author/fulvio-­caccia/. Accessed 30 August 2023. Cardinal, Linda, Bernard Gagnon, Virginie Hébert, and François Rocher, eds. 2023. Une langue, des voix. Débats autour de la loi 96 au Québec. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Carpentier, David. 2022. La Métropole contre la nation? La politique montréalaise d’intégration des personnes immigrantes. Québec: Presses Universitaires du Québec. Carrière, Marie. 2007. La visée transculturelle, un état de perte: le théâtre de Marco Micone. In 1985–2005: Vingt années d’écriture migrante au Québec, ed. Marc Arino and Marie-Lyne Piccione, 29–39. Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. Chagnon, Karim. 2019. Colonialisme, universalisme occidental et traduction. Traduction et politique(s) 32 (1): 259–278. Chartier, Daniel. 2002. Les origines de l’écriture migrante. L’immigration littéraire au Québec au cours des deux derniers siècles. Voix et images 27 (2): 303–316. Comeau, Robert, ed. 2010. Histoire intellectuelle de l’indépendantisme québécois. Vols 1 and 2. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. Cooke, Dervila. 2020. ‘Let me explain: this is who I am.’ Interview with Anita Aloisio, with Introduction. In Citizenship and belonging in North America: Multicultural perspectives on political, cultural and artistic representations of immigration, ed. Ramona Mielusel and Simona Emilia Pruteanu, 151–168. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Côté, Jean-François. 2017. La Renaissance du théâtre autochtone: métamorphose des Amériques 1. Québec: Presses universitaires de Laval. Cuccioletta, Donald. 2002. Multiculturalism or transculturalism. Towards a cosmopolitan citizenship. London Journal of Canadian studies 17: 1–11. Dagenais, Maxime. 2014. La Charte des valeurs québécoises. The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/fr/article/la-­charte-­ des-­valeurs-­quebecoises. Accessed 31 August 2023. Delabastita, Dirk, and Rainier Grutman. 2005. Introduction. Fictional representations of multilingualism and translation. In Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies (LANS-TTS) 4 [special issue on Fictionalising translation and multilingualism], eds. Dirk Delabastita and Rainier Grutman, 11–35. Den Toonder, Jeanette. 2008. La mondialisation de l’écriture migrante. In Migrance comparée: les Littératures du Canada et du Québec/Comparing Migration: The Literatures of Canada and Québec, ed. Marie Carrière and Catherine Khordoc, 19–36. Bern: Peter Lang. Drimonis, Toula. 2022. We, the others. Allophones, immigrants, and belonging in Canada. Montreal: Linda Leith publishing. Dumontet, Danielle. 2014. La revue Vice Versa et le procès d’autonomisation des ‘écritures migrantes’. Zeitschrift für Kanada-Studien 34: 87–104. Dupuis, Gilles. 2010. Vice et Versa, 10 ans après. Globe 13 (2): 187–194. ———. 2014. De l’interculturel au transculturel: les écritures migrantes au Québec. Revue japonaise des études québécoises 6: 16–29. Duvicq, Nelly. 2019a. Histoire de la littérature inuite du Nunavik. Québec: Presses de l’Université du Québec. ———. 2019b. A history of Inuit literature in Nunavik, by Nelly Duvicq. Imaginaire nord conference. UQAM. 04 October. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=wXx8mEdlcvA. Accessed 10 September 2023. Edwards, Natalie. 2020. Multilingual life writing by French and francophone women: Translingual selves. New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Elbourne, Elizabeth, Kimberley Ens Manning, and Zackary Kifell. 2023. The impact of law 21 on Québec students in law and education: executive summary of findings. [Executive Report, Web resource]. https://www.concordia.ca/content/ dam/concordia/now/docs/The-­Impact-­of-­Law-­21-­on-­Quebec-­Students-­in-­ Law-­and-­Education-­Executive-­Summary.pdf. Accessed 31 August 2023. Farhoud, Abla. 1998. Le Bonheur a la queue glissante. Montreal: Typo. ———. 2011. Le Sourire de la petite juive. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. ———. 2019. Le Dernier des snoreaux. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. Fontaine, Naomi. 2017. Manikanetish. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier. ———. 2019. Shuni. Ce qui tu dois savoir, Julie. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier. Forte, Maximilian. 2010. Introduction: Indigeneities and cosmopolitanisms. In Indigenous cosmopolitans: Transnational and transcultural indigeneity in the twenty-first century, ed. Maximilian Forte, 1–16. New York: Peter Lang.

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Freitag, Ulrike. 2005. Translokalität als ein Zugang zur Geschichte globaler Verflechtungen. H-Soz-u-Kult. 10 June. https://www.hsozkult.de/debate/ id/fddebate-­132127. Accessed 21 June 2023. Gale, Lorena. 1999. Angélique. Toronto: Playwrights Canada Press. ———. 2001. Je me souviens. Vancouver: Talonbooks. Goodale, Mark. 2006. Reclaiming modernity: Indigenous cosmopolitanism and the coming of a second revolution in Bolivia. American Ethnologist 33 (4): 634–649. Grosjean, François. 2016. What is Translanguaging? An interview with Ofelia García. Psychology Today. 02 March. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-­ bilingual/201603/what-­is-­translanguaging. Accessed 24 August 2023. Grutman, Rainier. 1997. Des langues qui résonnent: l’hétérolinguisme au XIXe siècle québécois. Montreal: Fides. Hannerz, Ulf. 1996. Transnational connections: Culture, people, places. London and New York: Routledge. Harel, Simon. 2005. Les Passages obligés de l’écriture migrante. Montreal: XYZ. Huron, Miranda. 2023. La difficile coordination fédérale-provinciale en matière de langues autochtones. In Une langue, des voix. Débats autour de la loi 96 au Québec, ed. Linda Cardinal, Bernard Gagnon, Virginie Hébert, and François Rocher, 81–85. Québec: Presses de l’Université Laval. Ibnouzahir, Asmaa. 2015. Chroniques d’une musulmane indignée. Montreal: Fides. Ireland, Susan, and Patrice Proulx. 2001. Immigrant narratives in contemporary France. Westport: Greenwood Press. ———. 2004. Textualizing the immigrant experience in contemporary Québec. Westport: Praeger. Janssen, Jessica. 2018. Le mouvement de renaissance littéraire autochtone au Québec: résistance, survivance, résurgence. In La renaissance des cultures autochtones: enjeux et défis de la reconnaissance, ed. Jean-François Côté and Claudine Cyr, 80–94. Québec: Presses Universitaires Laval. Jeannotte, Marie-Hélène, Jonathan Lamy, and Isabelle St-Amand, eds (Jean-Pierre Pelletier, trans. Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui, pref.). 2018. Nous sommes des histoires. Réflexions sur la littérature autochtone. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier. Kellman, Steven. 2000. The translingual imagination. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Kellman, Steven, and Natasha Lvovich, eds. 2021. The Routledge handbook of literary translingualism. London and New York: Routledge. Khordoc, Catherine. 2007. L’aspect transculturel de l’œuvre de Monique Bosco. In 1985–2005: Vingt années d’écriture migrante au Québec, ed. Marc Arino and Marie-Lyne Piccione, 19–40. Pessac: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux. ———. 2016. Traversing the borders of écriture migrante and transnational writing in Québec. In Dervila Cooke, ed. New Work on Immigration and Identity in Contemporary France, Québec, and Ireland. Thematic issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18 (4) https://doi.org/10.7771/ 1481-4374.2910.

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———. 2019. Worlded Literature in Quebec: Wajdi Mouawad’s Le Sang des promesses cycle. Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d’études canadiennes 53 (3): 495–513. King, Thomas. 1990. Godzilla vs. post-colonial. World Literature Written in English 30 (2): 10–16. Kovach, Margaret. 2015. Emerging from the margins: Indigenous methodologies. In Research as resistance. Revisiting critical, indigenous, and anti-oppressive approaches, ed. Leslie Brown and Susan Strega, 2nd ed., 43–64. Toronto: Canadian Scholars Press. Lamore, Jean. 1987. Transculturation: naissance d’un mot. Vice Versa 21: 18–19. Leclair, Stéphane, and Judith Plamondon. 2017. Les Québécois de la loi 101. Montreal: JAB Productions. Lemmens, Kateri. 2011. Écriture, migrance et l’horizon du monde. In La Migrance à l’oeuvre. Repérages esthétiques, éthiques et politiques, ed. Michael Brophy and Mary Gallagher, 211–222. Bern: Peter Lang. Leroux-Lévesque, Aude, and Sébastien Rist. 2019. A Place of Tide and Time / Temps et marées. Montreal: MC2 Communication Media. Letarte, Martine. 2017. La Loi 101 a transformé les communautés anglophones. Le Devoir. 06 May. https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/497889/40ans-de-la-charte-de-la-langue-francaise-la-loi-101-a-transforme-les-communautes-anglophones. Accessed 23 February 2023. Létourneau, Jocelyn. 2005. Postnationalisme? Rouvrir la question du Québec. Cités 3 (23): 15–30. Marchand, Laura. 2022. Quebec students see ‘no future’ for them due to religious symbols law, study suggests. CBC news. 16 March. https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/montreal/bill-­21-­study-­1.6385650. Accessed 31 August 2023. Mathis-Moser, Ursula, and Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner. 2014. Littérature migrante ou littérature de la migrance? A propos d’une terminologie controversée. Diogène 2-3 (246–7): 46–61. McAndrew, Marie. 2016. Competing visions and current debates in interculturalism in Québec. In Dervila Cooke, ed. New Work on Immigration and Identity in Contemporary France, Québec, and Ireland. Thematic issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18 (4) https://doi.org/10.7771/ 1481-4374.2920. Million, Dian. 2009. Felt theory: An indigenous feminist approach to affect and history. Wicazo Sa Review 24 (2): 53–76. Monture, Patricia. 2008. Women’s words: Power, identity and indigenous sovereignty. Canadian Woman Studies/ Les Cahiers de la femme 26 (3): 154–159. Nepveu, Pierre. 1988. L’ Écologie du réel. Mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal. ———. 1989. Qu’est-ce que la transculture? Paragraphes 2: 15–31. Ortiz, Fernando. 1940. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Havana: Jesús Montero.

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Ouchaou-Ozarowski, Saïda. 2021. In Full Voice / À Pleine Voix. Canada: National Film Board. Picard-Sioui, Louis-Karl. 2018. Préface. In Nous sommes des histoires. Réflexions sur la littérature autochtone, eds. Marie-Hélène Jeannotte, Jonathan Lamy, and Isabelle St-Amand (Jean-Pierre Pelletier, trans.). Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier, 5–8. Pruteanu, Simona. 2013. L’Écriture migrante en France et au Québec: une analyse comparative. Munich: Lincom Europa. ———. 2016. Cooking, language, and memory in Farhoud’s Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy’s Mãn. In Dervila Cooke, ed. New Work on Immigration and Identity in Contemporary France, Québec, and Ireland. Thematic Issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18 (4) https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2906. Publications du Québec. 2022. Projet de loi numéro 96 (2022, chapitre 14). Loi sur la langue officielle et commune du Québec, le français. https://www.publicationsduquebec.gouv.qc.ca/fileadmin/Fichiers_client/lois_et_reglements/ LoisAnnuelles/fr/2022/2022C14F.PDF. Accessed 09 September 2023. Reichardt, Dagmar. 2011. Sur la théorie d’une francophonie transculturelle: état des lieux et intérêt didactique. Relief 5 (2): 4–20. Reid, Gregory. 2005. Is there an Anglo-Québécois literature? Essays in Canadian Writing 84: 75–104. Robin, Régine. 1983. La Québécoite. Montreal: Québec-Amérique. ———. 1992. Sortir de l’ethnicité. In Métamorphoses d’une utopie, ed. Fulvio Caccia and Jean-Michel Lacroix, 25–41. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle. Rocher, François, et al. 2007. Le concept d’interculturalisme en contexte québécois: généalogie d’un néologisme. Rapport présenté à la Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles (CCPARDC). Ottawa: University of Ottawa and Université du Québec à Montréal. Schryer, Frans. 2010. The Alto Balsas Nahuas: Transnational Indigeneity and interactions in the world of arts and crafts, the politics of resistance, and the global labour market. In Indigenous cosmopolitans: Transnational and transcultural indigeneity in the twenty-first century, ed. Maximilian Forte, 97–126. New York: Peter Lang. Scott, Maria. 2020. Empathy and the strangeness of fiction: Readings in French realism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Simon, Sherry. 2003. Hybridity revisited: St Michael’s of Mile End. International Journal of Canadian Studies 27: 107–119. Slimbach, Richard. 2005. The transcultural journey. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 11 (1): 205–230. St-Amand, Isabelle. 2010. Discours critiques pour l’étude de la littérature autochtone dans l’espace francophone du Québec. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 35 (2): 30–52.

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Statistics Canada. 2022a. Immigrants make up the largest share of the population in over 150 years and continue to shape who we are as Canadians. https://www150. statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/221026/dq221026a-eng.htm. Released 26 October. Accessed 17 June 2023. ———. 2022b. Map. 1. The Atlantic provinces welcomed higher shares of recent immigrants in Canada than the previous censuses, while Quebec and the Prairies saw their shares decrease. https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/ 221026/mc-a001-eng.htm. Released 26 October. Accessed 17 June 2023. Sternberg, Meir. 1981. Polylingualism as reality and translation as mimesis. Poetics Today 2 (4): 221–239. Tassinari, Lamberto. 2006. Sens de la transculture. In Le Projet transculturel de Vice Versa, ed. Anna Paola Mossetto and Jean-François Plamondon, 17–30. Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon. Tedeschi, Miriam, Ekaterina Vorobeva, and Jussi Jauhiainen. 2022. Transnationalism: Current debates and new perspectives. GeoJournal 87: 603–619. Tomiak, Julie-Ann, and Donna Patrick. 2010. Transnational migration and indigeneity in Canada: A case study of urban Inuit. In Indigenous cosmopolitans: Transnational and transcultural indigeneity in the twenty-first century, ed. Maximilian Forte, 127–144. New York: Peter Lang. Tyquiengco, Marina. 2018. Indigenous cosmopolitanism. The Alaska Native Heritage Center. Lateral 7: 2. https://csalateral.org/articles/indigenous-­ cosmopolitanism-­alaska-­native-­heritage-­center-­tyquiengco/. Accessed 25 August 2023. Verboczy, Akos. 2016. Rhapsodie québécoise. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal. ———. 2023. La Maison de mon père. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal. Vernay, Jean-François, trans. Carolyne Lee. 2016. The seduction of fiction. A plea for putting emotions back into literary interpretation. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Vizenor, Gerald, ed. 2008. Survivance: Narratives of native presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality – The puzzling form of cultures today. In Spaces of culture: City, nation, world, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 194–213. London: Sage. Wilson, Sheena. 2012. Multiculturalisme et transculturalisme: ce que peut nous apprendre la revue ViceVersa (1983–1996). International Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue internationale d’études canadiennes 45–46: 261–275.

CHAPTER 2

Naomi Fontaine’s Indigenous Writing: Self, Community, and Society

Introduction Acclaimed Innu writer Naomi Fontaine was born in 1987  in the Innu reserve of Uashat adjoining the industrial town of Sept-Îles, in the Côte-­ Nord region of Québec. Her writing is both autobiographical and political, since her personal reflections are imbued with socio-political activism that bears witness to the struggles of the Innu people, as well as to their wisdom and strength. Her work is also about cultural crossing, given that Indigenous people must migrate back and forth between their traditional culture and the modern French-inflected North American culture of Québec in their daily experience, whether as modern Innus living on reserve, or in cities. Indeed, her writing often concerns nomadism of different types, whether in its content or aesthetic. In this chapter, the cultural tensions in Canada between Indigenous and non-Indigenous inhabitants are laid out, before the focus turns to Fontaine’s work more specifically. A guide to Indigenous Literary Nationalism first published on the CanLitguides website in 2013 focused on the “politics of respect”, extending the reach of Charles Taylor’s “politics of recognition”, and emphasising the importance of not judging other cultures by one’s own paradigms. In what follows, as a non-Indigenous scholar, I respectfully recognise my positionality and that there will be limitations to my academic approach and of my understanding of Fontaine’s deeply personal but also collectively focused work.1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Cooke, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45936-8_2

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The Innu nation are spread over what they call Nitassinan (meaning “our land” in Innu-aimun), which ranges over parts of North Eastern Québec and Labrador. “Indian” is a long-outdated term, and is now mainly used for legal or historic reasons, although some people in Canada still use it for self-designation in some circumstances. As the 1876 Indian Act is still in place in Canada, the term is used to describe legalities pertaining to registration as “Status Indian” (or “Indien inscrit” in French), referring to those on the Indian register, and to treaties, hunting rights, as well as to Indian reserves. Outside of these contexts, the currently accepted terms in Canada are “Indigenous” or “Aboriginal” in English, and “autochtone” or “amérindien” in French. The most recent politically accepted term for non-Indigenous Canadians has come to be “settler”, or in some contexts “settler-colonial”.2 As Karim Chagnon notes, “colonialisme d’implantation” is a useful term for this in French but there are other options also, including “colonialisme de peuplement”, “colonialisme d’établissement”, and the more militaristic “colonialisme d’occupation” (Chagnon 2019, 265). First Nations are a subset of Canada’s First Peoples, and are the most numerous of the three Indigenous groups in Canada, who together represent 4.9% of Canada’s population (Indigenous Services annual report 2020). The three Indigenous groups are First Nations (with more than fifty different nations across Canada), Métis, and the Arctic and sub-Arctic Inuit (Ibid 2020). Fontaine belongs to the Innu nation, and is one of the rising stars of Indigenous writing in Québec. Her 2011 work Kuessipan—a series of enigmatic, poetic vignettes about life in Uashat—catapulted her to fame in her early twenties. It has since been made into a successful film (2019), in a loose adaptation, also analysed in this chapter, directed by non-Indigenous filmmaker Myriam Verreault, with whom Fontaine co-­ wrote the screenplay. In 2017, Fontaine published her novel Manikanetish, (which became a 2023 play), followed in 2019 by a book of reflections on Innu experience and strength, Shuni, which was awarded the prix littéraire des collégiens in 2020. As an Innu writer, she belongs to one of the ten First Nations groups in Québec. Over the period 2011 to 2019, her work became increasingly political in tenor and more directly accessible in style. Most Indigenous people live their lives crossing between modern and traditional cultures. Fontaine’s personal experience is a strong example of this. She was born on reserve in Uashat but moved with her mother and siblings at the age of seven to Québec city, where she remained for all of her education during the next fifteen years. This is described as an exile in

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Manikanetish and in Shuni, although in Shuni it is both an exile and a liberation (“un affranchissement”, 102). Her father died as a young man in what seems to have been a drunk-driving accident (Kuessipan, 87; Shuni, 74), while her mother was pregnant with her. After completing her studies at the Université Laval she returned to Uashat to teach French, a process she documents in semi-autobiographical form in Manikanetish. She has called the reserve a “ghetto”, but it is a space of marginality and displacement to which she is drawn, nonetheless (Durand 2015). She is independent and outspoken by nature, refusing to be forced into stereotypical “Innu” behaviour or ceremonies, but is still resolutely Innu, as evidenced by her identification as a young Innu female in the title of the blog that she started in her early twenties: Innushkuess, fille Innu. The blog started in 2010, though as of 2023 there seem to have been no additions since June 2016. Upon returning to the reserve to teach French, she chose to live off-reserve, which for her is a valid way of being Innu. One of the strongest senses emanating from her work is of Fontaine as an independent spirit. For historical reasons, a considerable portion of academic writing on Indigenous creative production has been by non-Indigenous writers. In 2004, Maurizio Gatti anthologised a selection of First Nations writers in Québec. A decade earlier, Diane Boudreau’s 1993 history of First Nations literature in Québec included “oralité” in the title, foregrounding the fact that traditional passing down of cultural heritage through oral storytelling and debate should not be ignored in any comments on “literature” (Klaus 1995). However, Indigenous narrative and poetical analysis extends beyond oral forms. As Sam McKegney points out in a chapter in the edited volume Indigenous Poetics, it would be a grave mistake to ignore the “foundational critical insights” of Indigenous writers in the field of literature (2014, 46). He cites a long list of authors and thinkers from Canada: Jeannette Armstong, Maria Campbell, and Thomas King among them.3 Niigaan (or Niigaanwewidam) Sinclair, an Indigenous professor at the University of Manitoba, writes that “while Indigenous intellectualism is ancient, the academy is only now catching up to Indigenous theories of Indigenous literatures” (2015, 18). In Québec, a sociologically focused text on Indigenous history was published in 1989 by Georges E. Sioui: Pour une autohistoire amérindienne. Essai sur les fondements d’une morale sociale. In 2017, Fontaine co-edited an anthology of Indigenous writings in Québec with Olivier Dezutter and Jean-François Létourneau entitled Tracer un chemin, for which she also co-wrote the preface. In that volume,

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the editors point out that before any talk of reconciliation between peoples it is necessary to listen silently to the other, in this case through reading.4 Discrimination and Protest Discrimination against Indigenous peoples has been deeply ingrained in Canada since settler-colonial times. It continues today, as spotlighted by the avoidable death and racist treatment of Atikamekw woman Joyce Echaquan in a Québec hospital in 2020. In May 2021, hundreds of bodies of Indian children were discovered on the site of the former Indian residential school in British Columbia, at Kamloops. Further burial sites for Indigenous children who died at such schools have been found, for example at Williams Lake in British Columbia, and in Saskatchewan at Fort Pelly school and at Marieval school. Indian residential schools (in French, “pensionnats indiens”) have become a focus for discussion of centuries-­ long settler attempts to wipe out a culture, in what has become known as cultural genocide. This term is used in the Introduction to the Executive Summary of the 2015 report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up in Canada in 2008, following the example of South Africa after the dismantling of the apartheid system. Its report set out 94 calls to action to remedy some of the tragic fallout of the residential school system. Between the 1870s and 1970s (and as late as the 1990s for a few schools), an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children were placed in residential or day schools run by Catholic and Protestant Churches, on behalf of the Canadian government, across all of Canada. In July 2022, Pope Francis made a “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada, to apologise for the Catholic Church’s substantial role in this (Gillies and Winfield 2022). As part of his visit, he prayed on lands near the former Ermineskin residential school in Alberta. Francis’ apology on Canadian soil was made possible by the resolve and persistence of survivors (First Nations, Inuit, and Métis), who travelled to the Vatican prior to the visit to ask for this. The apology was welcomed by some, but seen by others as not going far enough. Francis failed to include sexual abuse (which was rampant), focusing instead on physical, verbal, psychological, and spiritual abuse. Furthermore, his speeches principally highlighted the evil of individual Church members, and did not adequately address the role of the Church as an institution that supported Canada’s assimilationist policy.

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In many cases, Indigenous children were kept apart from their families for ten months of the year (sometimes kidnapped to start with and taken very far away, returning only for the short summer). Many were forbidden any contact with their traditions, and beaten for speaking their language. Academic education was often minimal, and instances of sexual, emotional, and physical abuse were rife. Chanie Wenjack, a young adolescent Ojibwe boy from northern Ontario who died frozen to death in the snow in 1966 trying to make his way home by foot over hundreds of kilometres, has become one of the key commemorative figures in initiatives such as The Secret Path, set up by musician and activist Gord Downie, a nationwide movement of remembrance and reflection undertaken by Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, including in schools.5 Work to bring effects of the Indian schools to national consciousness had commenced among Indigenous survivors and their relatives as early as the 1980s. The year 1982 saw the publication of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which gave rise to considerable reflection on the rights of minority groups. However, the Indigenous rights movement took at least a generation (approximately twenty-five years after 1982) to become something that most Canadians are now aware of. In 1998, Canada made a Statement of Reconciliation to residential school survivors, and created the Aboriginal Healing Foundation. Survivors of day schools were not included in previous compensation but at the time of writing in 2023 they are also being urged to file claims. In the hope of encouraging reflection and commemoration, a National Day of Truth and Reconciliation for 30 September each year was inaugurated in 2021, marking the month that Indigenous children had to leave their families to return to school each year. Unofficially, starting from 2013, 30 September was already designated “Orange Shirt Day” (in French this is termed “la journée du chandail orange”), a well-marked day across Canada on which people wear orange tops to protest at the treatment of Indigenous children. Orange Shirt Day took as its inspiration the story of Phyllis Webstad, whose new orange shirt was taken away from her when she excitedly started her first day of Mission school aged six. The loss of her shirt symbolises not only the shirt itself but also the languages, customs, family ties, social glue, and overall cultural identity that were taken away via the Indian school system.6 It is unsurprising, therefore that when Canada celebrated 150 years of Confederation in 2017 and Québec had its own commemoration the same year for the 375th year since the founding of Montreal as Ville-Marie by European

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settlers on the lands known by the First Nations name of Tiohtià:ke many Indigenous movements and scholars protested.7 The Indian act of 1876 officialised the reserve system, seeking to confine First Nations people to small tracts of land, in order to free up their traditional hunting, fishing, and agricultural territories for settler-colonial economic interests. The Indian schools that were set up around this time sought to assimilate Indigenous children, and to break down family and community ties. In 1920, as part of the Act and to combat low attendance, Indian schools were made compulsory for “Treaty Indian” or “Status Indian” children between the ages of seven and sixteen. In 1969, Minister for Indian affairs Jean Chrétien proposed his White Paper to get rid of the reserve system in a further bid to assimilate First Nations. There was outcry among the First Nations, many of whom view the reserves as a way of keeping tradition alive, despite significant problems on reserves, although Fontaine has, to date, repeatedly indicated that she would welcome their abolition (Kuessipan, 47; Shuni, 19, 102). Despite the deplorable reasons behind their foundation, reserves have traditionally helped to keep Indigenous languages alive. In 2016, a much higher percentage of First Nations people with Registered Indian status who lived on reserve could speak an Indigenous language (44.9%), compared to 13.4% of those living off reserve (Statistics Canada 2017a). While the system of Indian schools was mainly wound down by the end of the 1970s, it has engendered intergenerational trauma among Indigenous people. Many of today’s young people have grandparents who experienced feelings of worthlessness and shame at school, and had their language and traditions forcibly taken from them. Due to the system of Indian schools, many of today’s grandparents knew family life in only a very fragmented way, and therefore lacked parenting models, leading to further family breakdown across generations. All of this has created lasting effects that filtered down to the parents of some of today’s young people, and even to those young people themselves. Approximately 40% of registered First Nations live on reserve, many in rural areas (Indigenous Services annual report 2020). Some, like Fontaine herself (Durand 2015), choose to live in adjoining towns, or in bigger cities. Those who leave do so often for work purposes, sometimes seeking freedom to become who they want to be, or anonymity (Kuessipan, 28). They sometimes seek to escape difficult circumstances on the reserve itself, where there can be elevated levels of unemployment, alcohol and drug dependence, and physical and sexual abuse. However, Fontaine’s

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Manikanetish is a work that shouts out hope, “qui crie l’espoir” (Deglise 2017), and this sense of hope and strength is even clearer in the 2019 work, Shuni. A Tradition of Vocal Innu Women Fontaine’s work follows on from the Indigenous activism and literary production in Canada in the 1960s and 1970s, partly in reaction to the aborted 1969 White Paper. In Québec, Bernard Assiniwi (of Cree and Algonquin heritage) came to prominence in the 1970s, as did Innu writer An Antane Kapesh, who published two political essays: the ironically titled Eukuan Nin Matshi-Manitu Innushkueu (Je suis une maudite sauvagesse, meaning “I am a damn savage”), and her political fable Tanite Nene Etutamim Nitassi? (Qu’as-tu fait de mon pays?), meaning “what have you done with my country?” These works were written in Innu-aimun, and translated into French by anthropologist José Cailhot, appearing in a bilingual edition where Innu-aimun featured as the first language. They were re-edited in 2019 and 2020 respectively, due to renewed interest in their subject matter. The fact that Fontaine wrote the preface to the 2019 edition of Je suis une maudite sauvagesse indicates not only the importance of Kapesh’s work in Fontaine’s writerly universe but also marks the young writer as a successor to Kapesh. Both can be seen as militant Innu women seeking to instil pride in the Innu nation through their writing, and to fight for Innu rights. Kapesh was an Innu writer and female leader of the band council of Matimekosh, near Schefferville. In her books, she argues among other things for return of the land to First Nations and for Innu-language schools. Christiane Chaulet Achour (2019) calls Kapesh’s work an implacable and well-documented indictment of those who took everything the Indigenous people had: land, language, territories, ways of life and customs, either erasing them or reducing them to what Chaulet Achour calls “folklore de pacotille” (cheap, commodified folklore). In her preface to Kapesh’s Je suis une maudite sauvagesse, Fontaine notes that in Québec, Indigenous issues in the 1970s and 1980s were often eclipsed by a focus on immigration-related tensions and possibilities, crystallising around la loi 101 (Bill 101), the famous linguistic law of 1977 discussed in Chap. 4 of the present monograph. It is deeply ironic that Fontaine was trained in classical and contemporary French-language literature from Québec and France, but only came to learn about Kapesh after writing Kuessipan. This

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shows how forces of social or political interest can cut First Nations people off from important landmarks in their cultural production or history, even if they are highly educated like Fontaine. Fontaine is part of a tradition of strong Innu women on a personal level too, starting with the example of her own mother. As depicted in Fontaine’s blog Innushkuess—fille Innu, her mother brought up her children alone, converted to Protestantism despite resistance by some relatives and peers, encountered racism, and gained an education in Québec city (see the blog section entitled “Neka”, meaning “mother”). She also cites her grandmothers, who are described in Shuni as equally formidable despite their lack of formal education, capable of rearing more than a dozen children and not afraid to stand up to giant males from the reserve who threaten their kin or their property. In terms of the female Innu writers with whom Fontaine forms a group, Daniel Chartier notes that it is Innu women and not Innu men who have taken over the literary field. Chartier points out that there have been successful Innu male singers since the late 1980s and early 1990s, but not many writers (Chartier 2017, 168 and 177). While Innu poet Rita Mestokosho has been publishing poetry since the mid-1990s, there has been a particularly strong wave of Innu women writers since about 2009, when the major poet and lyricist Joséphine Bacon (now famous) started publishing her poems (aged in her early sixties). The years 2011–2012 saw the publication of first works by Marie-Andrée Gill, a poet the same age as Naomi Fontaine, and by Naomi Fontaine herself in 2011. Poet and multidisciplinary creative practitioner Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, who is slightly younger than Naomi Fontaine, came to prominence as a poet in that time period also, and has been publishing steadily. Kanapé Fontaine’s recent output includes a first novel and a micro-album (both from 2021) and the important book of letters with Denis Ellis Béchard entitled Kuei, je te salue: conversation sur le racisme (also available in English translation).8 Language and Identity: Between Innu-aimun and French The question of language is omnipresent in Naomi Fontaine’s work. While Kapesh was far-sighted enough to argue for Innu-language schools in the mid-1970s, there are still no such schools in existence, although the Mi’kmaq in Nova Scotia have had good success with immersion programmes recently. Of the approximately 1500 inhabitants of Uashat, approximately two thirds claimed Innu-aimun as their mother tongue

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(still sometimes called by the settler-colonial term of Montagnais and also simply called Innu) in the 2016 census, yet this does not necessarily mean that they can read or write in the language (Statistics Canada 2017b). Traditionally in Québec and in the rest of Canada, Indigenous languages have not been given political space. When discussing the linguistic landscape, the focus is usually on the categories of Francophone, Anglophone, and Allophone, the latter particularly in Québec. Allophone is a contested term for someone whose main language spoken at home is not English or French, and is usually used for those of immigrant descent, and is discussed at length in Chap. 4. The vociferous debates around Allophones in Québec and whether they favour English or French, tend to keep Indigenous languages, or langues autochtones, from the visibility they deserve. In English-speaking Canada, the invisibility of Indigenous languages has recently been impactfully pointed out by artist Joi Arcand from Muskeg Lake Cree Nation, Saskatchewan, in her series of provocative and poignant signs in Cree (sometimes in huge neon), which she inserts into images of public space. One of these featured in an exhibition at the Wood Land school of SBC gallery in Montreal during the “Montreal 375” events of 2017 (Hampton 2018). In 2019, a Federal law entitled The Indigenous Languages was brought in to help protect and promote Indigenous languages. There are more than seventy Indigenous languages in Canada (Statistics Canada 2023), but a high proportion are spoken mainly as a second language, with relatively few fluent speakers. While there has been a rise in the number of learners of Indigenous languages as a second language, the number of people who say they can speak well enough to hold a conversation has dropped by 4.3% since 2016 (Statistics Canada 2023). For First Nations people in Québec, French is the dominant language. Fontaine can speak Innu well, but by her own admission she has an incomplete grasp of the language in its written form (Shuni, 38). However, she is taking lessons to learn to write it, and to improve her reading of it. Importantly, all Fontaine book titles so far have been in Innu-aimun, making the point that her Innu origins will inform what she will expound in French. A March 2020 TV5 monde interview with Fontaine showed her as hesitant to define herself as “Francophone”.9 She lamented that French should not have been her first language, and she also makes this point in Shuni (38). For reasons of language loss, the scattering of Innu terms that pepper her French texts have a forceful heterolingual presence. The Innu words draw attention to their difference, and sometimes to their

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incomprehensibility to people who do not speak this ancient language of what is now called Canada.10 While the words in Innu-aimun are not numerous, they are strategically placed. They often have accompanying translations to French, as when Kuessipan allocates a whole page to a list of words in Innu-aimun that have a resonance for the narrator, giving their translation after each word. However, they occasionally appear without translation. The latter approach puts the onus on the reader to research their meaning, and ideally to enter into translingual dialogue with a native speaker or a dictionary of Innu-aimun to find out their nuances. Otherwise, the reader remains outside of the Innu world. Despite the inclusivity of Fontaine’s texts, which often address non-Innu readers in a spirit of friendship, this may indeed be part of the point, stressing Innu difference and specificities. In the address to An Antane Kapesh in Eukuan Nin Matshi-Manitu Innushkueu (Je suis une maudite sauvagesse), when Fontaine closes her preface with the words “Tshinashkumitin Utshimashkueu”, she appears to share a moment of intimacy with her now-deceased fellow Innu writer and with those who can understand Innu (Kapesh 2019, 9). According to online dictionaries, the words mean “I give my thanks to you, noble lady”, but Fontaine puts the onus on her non-Innu readers to seek out this information. There are other times too where readers are challenged to enter the linguistic realm of Innu (or at least its fringes), either by guessing at what is meant, or looking up words. In the dedication in Manikanetish, the word “tshinashkumitinau” (meaning “I thank you”), comes after an expression of gratitude in French, and could be imagined to have the same meaning as the French words (it does), but the non-Innu reader would be excused for wondering whether it perhaps means something else entirely. Even Kuessipan needs native speaker translation in order to understand its principal meaning of “now it is your turn”. Were non-Innu readers only to rely on the French translation, “à toi” (to you), they might assume the expression was primarily a way of addressing the words of the text to another person, whereas it also means that Fontaine is encouraging other Innus to take up the baton of producing and transmitting their own narratives. Heterolingualism in these cases underlines some of the Innu specificities and shared codes that unite Innu speakers, making French seem more of a borrowed medium. Nonetheless, the narratorial persona in Manikanetish is very clear on the importance of proficiency in French for Innu people, across grammar, spelling, argumentation, creative and journalistic writing, including

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writing-­as-resistance. Given the political points that Fontaine makes about not victimising Indigenous people and celebrating their strength and tenacity, French allows her to reach the audience that she needs to convince, Innu and non-Innu alike. However, it is likely that were she able to write in Innu-aimun, that she would follow the example of Kapesh’s published work, where the writing in Innu-aimun very deliberately comes first, followed by the French translation.

The Kinetic, Visual Poetry of Kuessipan Kuessipan was Fontaine’s breakthrough into public attention. She published the text first on the website www.publie.net in 2010, then in 2011, with Mémoire d’encrier, a cutting-edge publisher set up by Haitian exile Rodney Saint-Éloi in 2003, who is also a creative writer. As an ending flourish to his generally highly enthusiastic analysis of the text in Le Devoir, writer Louis Hamelin wrote that Fontaine had, in 2011, not yet learned the ropes or threads of fiction: “les ficelles de la fiction” (2011). It might have been more generous to say that reading Kuessipan is challenging, jumping between perspectives, times, and spaces, and that it omits just enough detail to leave us wanting more. The writing is clearly aligned to poetry, with dense, rhythmic lines full of mystery and hidden meanings. The text seems deliberately enigmatic, provoking a sense of disorientation, particularly in non-Indigenous readers. Paradoxically however, the highly evocative descriptions give readers the feeling of being allowed to visit a place and its inhabitants, and that they are being given a privileged insight into some of the consciousnesses there, including that of the narrator, whose subjectivity often seems to merge with others in the work. Hamelin describes it as a series of “tableaux”. Chartier (2017) cites other critics who use visual metaphors to speak of “collage” or of having the feeling of looking through a photo album. A Strong Kinetic Field There is a strong kinetic field in the text, which facilitates movement towards “others” of several types. Within the textual universe, there is a journey of empathy and recognition back and forth between those in the Uashat community. This is accompanied by a movement towards the readerly other by the author and the various consciousness she projects, which are not full-blown “characters”. Kuessipan seems to be facilitating an

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understanding of Innu experience by the non-Innu reader, while always keeping a little bit back. In Shuni, the author’s opening remarks note that before attempting to help anyone one needs to get to know them first (“il faut bien commencer par les connaître”, 11), suggesting that her text will help to explain some of the Innu worldview and context. This is both a welcome and a warning not to be complacent in one’s approach, and to remember that Innus might do things a little differently, as shown in Kuessipan. Movement towards the other is also evident in the polysemic title of the work, and in its subtitle “à toi”, which can mean “over to you” or “your turn” but also “to you”. In its Innu meaning of “now it is your turn”, the word “kuessipan” will be understood by Innu speakers as a call to follow Fontaine’s lead in speaking or writing about their experiences. Likewise, the title exhorts all parties to consciously play their part in the unfolding of Innu history in Québec together. The subtitle in French is present on the title page alongside this Innu word. As noted, this word remains enigmatic and requires an Innu person to fill in details as to what it means in its fullest sense. As an address to readers, it also underlines the hybridity of the text. Taken in its literal French translation, it foregrounds the act of addressing others, underlining the sense that the text may be perceived as an address (or letter) to the Uashat inhabitants, as well as to non-­ Indigenous inhabitants of Québec. Innu and non-Innu interaction is highlighted in both the film and the novel. The film underlines the tensions between non-Innu and Innus in the Sept-Îles area, through a racist incident in a bar and through Shaniss’ inability to accept Mikuan’s white boyfriend, Francis. Francis is ultimately unwilling to remain part of Mikuan’s life, with all the complications it entails. These elements are less strong in the novel, but the novel too shows positive and negative interaction between Innus and non-Innus. In the novel, the settler-colonial aspects of Québécois society are initially introduced as responsible for destruction of Innu territory through clear-­ cutting of the forest. A settler-colonial dynamic also underpins the social welfare dependency system, and the rules of Québec society forbid campfires in the woods, which are central to Innu tradition. In the past, settler-­ colonials also promoted, accepted, or ignored the kidnapping of Innu children to bring them to residential school (48, 67). In the novel, the non-Innu lover mentioned near the end of the text has only negative comments about the reserve. However, a white girl “marries in”, participating in a traditional hand-tying ceremony, and a redheaded white woman sings

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with great empathy in the Innu language. The latter is no doubt a reference to singer Chloé Sainte-Marie and her work in the Innu language circa 2002, such as “E Pamutelan e Peikussian” from the album Je marche à toi. Such positive references show an openness to the other that is not one-­ sided. This gives a greater depth and range to the “à toi” of the title, implying a potential turn-taking in dialogue, and a welcoming of a wide audience. It is paradoxical that the huge interest in migrant writing or écriture migrante in Québec in the 1980s and 1990s may have displaced some potential interest in Indigenous writers, given that current Indigenous literary production shares so many thematic and formal aspects with migrant writing, while retaining its Indigeneity and autonomy. Chartier notes the shared focus on memory and identity, origins, trauma, experimentation with genre, an aesthetics of fragmentation and, frequently, an autodiegetic voice (2017, 171). In Kuessipan, fragmentation is taken to extremes, with some of the short texts occupying only a few sentences in length. Trauma (or at least painful memory) is clear from the first fragment, which the narrator concludes by flatly listing some of the problems on the reserve in the opening pages: including drug and alcohol misuse, incest, loneliness, suicide, bounced cheques, and rape. Identity is, however, not so much problematised on an individual level but rather “collectivised”. In an unstable autodiegetic voice, a “refracted” consciousness flows into the subjectivities of others, changes the pronouns of narration at will, and freely admits to inventing from the very first line: “j’ai inventé des vies” (Lives have been invented by me, 9). The Tu, Elle, Il, Je, all have multiple referents and can suddenly morph into one another. At one point, the “elle” of a tableau appears to take up the narration a few pages later as “je” (72, 75). At times, several consciousness come into focus in the same tableau or vignette, as with the eighth fragment (16). The reader may attempt to link the fragments together as one might re-thread dropped beads from an Indigenous earring. Narrative and poetic gaps and jolts present themselves from the start, with elliptical and non-linear time references such as those in fragments 3, 4, 7, and 8, about the “cousine” (who was to become Shaniss in the film adaptation), who then disappears from the narrative. The fragmentation is so pronounced that the film adaptation seemed to feel the need to invent a main character, Mikuan. Likewise, the structure of the narrative does not sit easily, despite the divisions into four ostensibly neat sections (“Nomade”, “Uashat”,

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“Nitshimit” and the last section, “Nukuss”, which focuses mainly on the idea of parent-to-child transmission). The thematic fog or “brouillard” that hangs over the reserve from the start is emblematic of the confusion felt by the reader, and indeed by the main narrator herself, as she pieces together her impressions of Uashat and beyond in her nomadic, wandering writing. The sections on motherhood in “Nukuss” seem to bleed back into “Nitshimit”, which is thematically focused on ancestry and the ancestral homeland. “Nomade” and “Uashat” share many similarities of theme that make the reader question the boundaries between them, as they highlight and problematise questions of liminality and boundaries (for the latter see Jeannette den Toonder, 2017). However, on closer inspection what appears to be lack of coherence often turns out to have its own logic, so that the sections on postnatal exhaustion and tears indeed “fit” in the section on ancestry, as part of the cycle or “circle” of life so dear to Fontaine, who uses the imagery of circularity and of groups of people in circles freely in her work. Types of Silence, Pathways, Fragmentation, Correspondence Principal themes in Kuessipan include the traumas of self and other, a return to origins, and the notion of healing. Healing often takes place through a physical or practical pathway of return to origins—for the old man who seeks out his cabin in the woods despite the need for several hours of travel, the young man who takes the train to the ancestral hunting ground of Nutshimit to escape the lure of alcohol and drugs, the not-­ so-­young man who finds redemption late in life through learning how to fish and hunt, or the forty-year-old woman who undertakes a gruelling ancestral portage journey and emerges spiritually refreshed. The main narrator herself finds a healing silence in nature. There is also a curative aspect to the linked work of memory and invention that connects her to her community and, through them, her ancestral past. Silence is a strong theme in the text, yet not all silences are healing there. There are more sinister silences too, like what is left unsaid about what appears to be domestic violence, seen in the narrator’s empathy with her cousin who quivers at the sound of a raised voice. The narrator notes that she would like to tell her cousin that she is aware of her situation, and to explain why she does not speak about it. Yet she also senses that it is important to convey these silences through writing, so that readers can feel the weight of what is unsaid (“Je voudrais lui dire que je sais. Pourquoi

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je me tais. Le silence. Je voudrais écrire le silence ”, 16). There is silence too in the stillness of the dead, who are often young men, lost too soon, in their coffins (13, 14, 50, 87). Or the silenced First Nations languages that were lost in so many of the schools, which explains the section devoted to a list of Innu words for family members, almost like a poem in prose, accompanied by a French translation, in the second fragment of the “Uashat” section (26).11 The wholescale breaking up of families that was orchestrated by the Canadian government and churches by means of the residential school system resonates with the striking fragmentation in Kuessipan. The novel was written during the initial work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and cannot fail to have been impacted by its far-reaching effects. Yet this context is by no means a direct focus of the text. Indian school is mentioned only twice, and then quite obliquely, firstly in relation to the Church’s role in the “enlèvement” (stealing) of Indigenous children who had never asked to be White (48), and secondly, in one of the shortest but most emotionally loaded fragments of the text, a terse five lines describing a mother who is unable to comprehend the loss of her son for ten months of the year, and who cannot express the pain at seeing him return to her as a stranger (67). Kuessipan’s narrative fragmentation may also reflect the shattering of the community through the many funerals to which the narrator seems to have been witness. Anna Paola Mossetto is right to call the text a series of micro-narratives, whose emotive density lies above all in what is left unsaid (2012, 50). One of the strongest thematic motifs of the text is that of roads and ways (“routes”) which also feature as “chemins” or ways throughout the text. In 2017, Fontaine highlighted the importance of this passage from Kuessipan by including it in the anthology Tracer un chemin (35–36). It is fitting that the first section of Kuessipan is entitled “Nomade” and that its last fragment ends on a discussion of routes (21–22). In the healing spaces of the text, there are meandering riverbeds to follow, and roads that lead to the vastness and tranquil silence of the ancestral forests in the Northern hunting grounds, away from this “minuscule” village called a reserve where it is impossible to get lost or to lose oneself in any restorative natural vastness. There are roads that are bumpy (“cahoteuses”), and there is also the road that makes us turn back on ourselves (“nous ramène à contre sens”, 21), as so often happens in this poetic, nomadic narrative. The opening line of the “routes” passage emphasises that roads are all different: “les routes ne se ressemblent pas” (21). This can be read as a

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metaphor for the right to difference, not only the uniqueness of all human lives, but the right to be Innu in one’s one way, even if like Fontaine, one does not live on reserve. The closing line in this passage emphasises the intrinsic nomadism of the main narrator, who here very clearly echoes the writer, the creator of the wandering text: “Nomade: j’aime concevoir cette manière de vivre comme naturelle” (22), which can be translated as follows: “I like to think of being a nomad as a natural way of living” (my translation). This highlights Fontaine’s right to take her own road, to build herself from the varied fragments of her experience, and to speak her own truth. In a 2016 discussion at the University of Concordia in Montreal, published two years later on the “Trahir” wordpress site, the abovementioned celebrated Innu poet Joséphine Bacon spoke of the stark differences between the language a nomadic Innu would use and the more prosaic Innu-aimum used on the reserve, confined to household matters such as broken fridges. By contrast, the Innu-aimun of wandering existence is a poetic language, with manifold subtly different terms for the activity of walking itself (Bacon 2018). The perhaps less overt theme of letter writing is also key to the understanding of the text. Kuessipan is not only a letter to Indigenous and non-­ Indigenous people, but a series of letters. In the eleventh fragment, the narrative disappears into a list of people to whom the “letters” of the text are addressed. This fragment juxtaposes the vaguer entity of a cruel world and the Innu people (“ce monde cruel” and “mon peuple”, 20), proclaiming a sense of belonging while also gathering the whole community into the dialogic space of this text. The main narrator’s baby is the first potential recipient, and the list ends, like the text itself, on a note of hope, with a reference to the children of the future. Among the many other addressees (family members and friends among them), there are the education officer on the Band council, and the prime minister of Québec. The social problems in the text may be assigned to the latter as something created by settler-colonial society, due to disregard for First Peoples that continues today. By this point in the text, readers will be bearing in mind the elliptical reference on earlier pages to deforestation through clear-cutting by settler-colonial society, for colonial-capitalist mining purposes that ignore the hunting and territorial rights of First Peoples (“coupes blanches dans le nord”, 12). Yet the Band council education officer (presumably Innu) is also being called to account, and being implicitly asked to take note of what needs to be improved for Innu young people in their schools and other educational opportunities.

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Female Strength and Male Malaise Both genders feature as agents of their own destiny, but the malaise of many of the young men in the text is evident, as noted by Chartier (2017, 177). While male elders and grandparents still manage to transmit ancestral knowledge of the woods (78, 93), some of the most heart-wrenching passages of the text concern the young men whose lives are wasted and almost destroyed by alcoholism or drug use. This is particularly clear in the fragment which opens with the evocation of a shadow, a mere reflection of a male human being: “Une ombre. Le reflet d’un humain” (28–31). A highlight in this person’s life occurred when the Band Council organised a memorable night of camping in nature for him and his young male friends. However, this was not enough to prevent his life continuing to be derailed through substance abuse, which started at age twelve. An unidentified youth lies dead in his coffin, lost far too early (49–51). Social welfare cheques are spent by the men on large packs of beer, while waiting girlfriends seem powerless to prevent their menfolk drinking the money away (27, 39). What hope there is for males at the mercy of alcohol or drug abuse is strongly associated with returning to the forest, to work or to hunt there, particularly when this is for an extended period (19, 95). Importantly, hope remains, even for males who are no longer young. We see this for example in the man who seems to be an instinctively magnificent hunter and fisherman, but who only came to this redemptive purpose in his forties (86). This is consistent with a First Nations lack of ageism (also seen in respect for elders) and a worldview of constant hope where chances come around again and again in the spinning circle of life. Here, as in so much of Fontaine’s work, narratorial anger is finely balanced with admiration and with hope. By contrast, the women, both old and young, seem to have more purpose in their lives. The mother character, la petite Lise, is small but strong, bringing up her large family alone after her husband’s death (87). While Fontaine places an early focus on the young pregnant girl (“la fille au ventre rond”, 11), who will die too young, will need to manage without her male partner’s help, and will never finish her studies, she also notes that all the young girls in Uashat want to have children, as soon as they can: “Elles veulent toutes enfanter” (83). Controversially, perhaps, but also realistically, given that humankind would disappear without new life, her narrator speaks of her pregnancy and forthcoming child-rearing as the essence of life (“l’essence”), from which Innu men often distance themselves. They

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forget its fundamental importance, she says (106). The breastfeeding narrator says that she does not have the “right” (“le droit”) to leave her task of nourishing life, though she is an independent nomad at heart. And while Fontaine describes maternal exhaustion, and hints at postnatal depression, she chooses to finish her text on the positive image of mother and son (the main narrator and her child) in contented togetherness on a summer’s day by the river. Non-Innu readers may perhaps view gender roles as overly traditional in Fontaine’s work, but we should not forget Fontaine’s own forging of a path for women as writers and inspirational speakers. She clearly admires the female figures in her community, who are highlighted for their hard work, determination, and achievements. Women are also shown to have a central place in society: they are first keeners at funerals, and first dancers at drumming ceremonies, perhaps in recognition of their important role in giving and nurturing life (43–49). Like Fontaine’s own female forebears, the narrator’s grandmother worked extremely hard to accomplish what she perceived as her role as a woman (“son rôle de femme”, 81) in the domestic sphere in mid-twentieth-century Innu society. It is hard to imagine this grandmother ever feeling close to giving up, by contrast with the modern-day woman in her forties who seeks to reconnect with tradition in a type of spiritual quest, and who initially finds it so difficult to hike the river path. Yet even this modern woman comes to recognise the importance of battling obstacles. Her struggle with herself and with her tiredness and the difficulty of walking the path leads her to see it as a challenge, a fight, and a quest, where surrender is no longer countenanced: “un défi, un combat, une quête, mais plus jamais une défaite” (73).

Kuessipan, the Movie: Cross-cultural Collaboration12 In the film adaptation by Verreault and Fontaine, gender roles are questioned to a greater extent. Out of the source text’s fragmentary perspectives, the film creates two contrasting females, who are close friends. The first is Shaniss, a traditional young mother who is initially hostile to interaction with non-Innus, suffers domestic abuse, but loves her partner, and is expecting a third child by the end of the film. The second is Mikuan, who falls in love with a white boy named Francis, and is far less traditional, and more independent-minded. Mikuan shares Fontaine’s own creative

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writing skills, and it is also not difficult to see shared personality traits between Mikuan and Fontaine. Mikuan, who is strongly built physically (by contrast with Fontaine in this instance), plays ice hockey like her brother, and rails against the double standard whereby her family is happy for him to leave the reserve when he wins a sports scholarship but is unwilling for her to leave to forge her own path in the city. She is a dab hand at DIY, and at managing a hunting gun. She gently takes the lead in the lovemaking with her white boyfriend. She is business-like and forthright in school discussions about Innu rights (“C’est notre territoire, on gère”: it’s our territory, we should be in control of it), and is unafraid to follow up on the “transaction” of the kiss with Francis. Again, this is a loose adaptation of Kuessipan, but one in which Fontaine collaborated, and which she admires.13 Perhaps the most poignant part of the film is the final section (1.49.00–151.25), which rewrites a key passage in the novel, the abovementioned section about the young pregnant woman: “la fille au ventre rond”. In the novel, this short passage comes early on and sets a certain melancholic tone, but the film extends the fragment and adds hope to it, focusing on female strength. The closing section of the film also emphasises women’s contribution through childbearing to the Innu nation, as a later passage in the novel also does (83). In the film, a voiceover by Mikuan accompanies scenes showing a more mature Shaniss, pregnant again, who is reading a book written by Mikuan, entitled Nutshimit, the title being drawn from the section of the Kuessipan text with that name. Although we do not see Mikuan’s written words, the voiceover seems to echo the Nutshimit book, which resonates in Shaniss’s mind as she reads. This scene highlights the importance of writing and reading, along with the education and promotion of solidarity they can bring about. It also underlines the role of strong females to inspire and to forge new paths—Shaniss and Mikuan alike, whether alone or together. While Mikuan, like Fontaine, has left the reserve to follow her own path, Shaniss has, for the moment, chosen the role of bearing children. There is no disdain here for the pregnant Shaniss. In fact, she is admired for her role in swelling the ranks of her people. By bearing children, she is contributing to the continued existence of the Innu nation, who have been the object of so many genocidal attempts (“qu’on a tant voulu décimer”), as expressed in the lines near the close of the film. This phrase is taken from the abovementioned passage in the “Nutshimit” section of Fontaine’s novel, describing the strong drive among Innu women to bear

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children. Children not only allow the Innu people to survive but represent human warmth and spiritual wealth (“une prospérité”, 83). The final lines of the film explicitly address viewers, expressing the wish that they can “connaître” (get to know) “la fille au ventre rond”, so that this Innu worldview can be better understood among non-Innu people. In a metatextual process, book and film merge in the final scenes, both between Fontaine’s filmic and textual versions of Kuessipan and within the film itself. At the end of the film Shaniss lifts her eyes from the book with its nature-inspired title to face the viewer with a certain confidence. This echoes the ending of the novel where the narrator imagines herself in moment of calm togetherness in a peaceful natural setting with her young son. The validity of each path or “chemin” and the hope contained in each route is thereby asserted. In each case, the ending is also associated with traditional Innu spirituality drawn from the land, whether this connection is held within memory in the case of urban-based Mikuan, or experienced at closer range by Shaniss. Implicitly referencing male violence against women, several lines are added here to the film’s blending of the original Kuessipan text. These lines speak of Shaniss as a girl (or woman) who has been physically abused by a man, or perhaps multiple men, and who will start to live once fear has left her, relieved finally to be able to be herself (“qui commencera à vivre quand la peur la quittera, soulagée d’être elle pour une fois”). This modifies the 2011 text’s more melancholic note that the “fille au ventre rond” will start to live too late and die too early (11). The film ends on the following impassioned lines, which are also not in the original Kuessipan text, but which evoke the forthright narratorial consciousness that text contains: “Le vois-tu, son regard qui brûle de l’intérieur? Des yeux d’Indienne, qui ont tout vu. Et qui s’étonnent de rire souvent” (Do you see the inner flame in her eyes? They’re the eyes of an Indian who has seen it all. And those eyes often surprise themselves by being able to laugh). Under Shaniss’ confident and self-affirming expression, viewers are being challenged to look closely to understand this woman’s burning gaze. Female oppression and resilience are highlighted simultaneously, with the emphasis on hope and women’s strength.

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Manikanetish and the Exceeding of Expectations Fontaine’s second published full-length semi-autobiographical text Manikanetish (2017) was considered for the prestigious prix des libraires du Québec that year. By contrast with Kuessipan, it does not provide a strong physical impression of the Uashat reserve as a place, apart from the intensely cold weather. Nonetheless, there are several highly evocative key sections devoted to the restorative power of nature for narrator Yammie (whose name is close to that of Naomi). For Yammie and her school class, nature trips are healing times, particularly on their trip to Nutshimit, the faraway ancestral winter hunting grounds. There is a very strong sense of Yammie’s feelings of wellbeing when immersed in nature and engaged in Innu traditional practices of hunting and living in the forest, whether in her relatives’ not-too-distant cabin at the weekends, or in the more extensive wilderness of Nutshimit. Yet the novel’s main emphasis is on personal development, both for Yammie and her students, ending on an abiding impression of the students’ accomplishments and abilities and of hope for the future. Two young male students, Marc and Rodrigue are shown as strong figures, turning their lives around, mainly through determination, but also with the help of their teacher. Young mothers emerge as particular figures of strength, as noted by Joëlle Papillon in her 2019 article on Naomi Fontaine’s “capable girls”. Key to the novel are the notions of caring for young people and drawing out their innate abilities, following the example of the original Manikanetish or, in her French name, Petite Marguerite, after whom the reserve’s school is named. Manikanetish was a woman with no children of her own but who gathered in stray youngsters, often those perceived as difficult, and gave them love, care and a sense of stability, just as Yammie seeks to do. While Manikanetish is about a school that was founded in the period of dismantling of the state-sponsored Indian schools, the novel is set much later, in what biographically informed readers may assume is approximately 2010, around the time that Fontaine herself returned from Québec city to teach at Uashat reserve. Fontaine’s novel shows the beneficial effects of a democratic relationship between students and teachers, and of mutual learning between them. A 2017 documentary True North by director Deirdre Mulrooney allows another fascinating insight into an educational establishment set up in the wake of the Indian school era. It documents the life of an Irish couple, the director’s parents Paud and Mary Mulrooney,

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who spent several years during the 1970s and 1980s teaching and managing a newly established local school in northern Ontario at the remote Indian reserve of Ogoki post (also called Marten Falls), which was the home of Chanie Wenjack, discussed above. Mulrooney’s parents were the progressive, respected, and well-liked principal and teacher at the Henry Coaster Memorial school. The Mulrooney children attended school with the locals, who were encouraged to have a democratic relationship with their teacher, whom they called by her first name. Importantly, the local children were allowed to be absent from school each autumn for several weeks to accompany their relatives into the forest in the millennial tradition of hunting Canada geese, leaving only the Mulrooney children in the classroom. The documentary shows principal Paud grinning with a string of freshly caught fish, having developed his skills through contact with the land and with the locals. Both True North and Manikanetish emphasise the need to retain contact with tradition as well as the crucial importance of human relations and the idea of learning from one another as a key part of the school experience on the reserves. Yammie learns far more than she expected from the students themselves. By contrast, the Indian schools functioned by dint of strict hierarchies and a missionary “white man’s burden” approach. While Kuessipan sets a décor, floats in and out of subjectivities, and fully “inhabits” the reserve, Manikanetish gives more attention to individual character development. It also has a clear storyline, perhaps in reaction to Hamelin’s critique of Kuessipan. Both works are divided into defined sections, but they are stylistically very different. Manikanetish has a continuous autodiegetic narration that allows the reader to feel an intimacy with the narrator as an individual. Readers may feel that they are being addressed in a conversation, or listening to a story develop. There is a lyrical lucidity to the crystal-clear rhythmical prose. As in Kuessipan, letters are important. As Manikanetish concludes, it foregrounds letters as a narrative mode where the addressee is both personal (a certain individual) and collective (the inhabitants of the reserve, and readers in Québec more generally). Karim Chagnon (2017) and Alice Charbonneau-Bernier (2018) both note that Fontaine’s work is part of an Indigenous tradition that allies personal and collective lived experience with the political sphere.

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Fighters, Not Victims Even more than with Kuessipan, the people living on reserve are shown as fighters and achievers rather than as victims. The title of Sonja Finck’s 2021 German version of Manikanetish translates as “The small school of great hope”: Die Kleine Schule der großen Hoffnung. However, Fontaine does not shy away from the more difficult realities, including the prevalence of suicide. Yammie notes that two of her cousins took their own lives, and schoolgirl Marithée’s suicide is a key element in the novel, along with the suicide attempt of her best friend Maya (81–82). Ultimately, however, the focus is on solidarity and strength and on working together to pull through, accepting the challenges that occur in life. The section titles are telling in this respect: “L’Inconnu”, “La vie est un combat”, and “Les choses que je ne peux changer” (The Unknown, Life is a battle, and The things I cannot change). The title of the final section, “Les choses que je ne peux changer”, indicates not a passive surrender, but a realistic attitude of choosing one’s battles. Although the narrator herself has mixed feelings about being able to manage alone with her recent pregnancy, the young school-going mothers are held up as examples of strength and fortitude, as most of them cope admirably with the multiple demands of motherhood, minding younger siblings, housekeeping, and completing their studies, sometimes with the help of their own mothers or mothers-in-law. While Marithée’s despair is not forgotten, Manikanetish can therefore be read as a cry of resistance against the negative stereotypes of alcohol and drug addiction, welfare dependency and apathy in depictions of First Nations people in Canada. In emphasising tenacity, Manikanetish includes a preoccupation with challenges such as suicide, Rodrigue’s anger against the world, student Olivier’s familial problems, absent or ineffectual fathers (not only the narrator’s dead father, probably lost to drunk-driving, but also Olivier’s father and Mikuan’s husband), the illness of Marc’s mother in a faraway hospital and her subsequent death, the depression of Maya and Marithée, and the extra challenges faced by girls who have mothering roles. Yet the main emphasis is on the sticking power of the vast majority of the young people, who overcome their anxieties and the loss by suicide of one of their peers to finish their education, take charge of their lives, and rear their children. In somewhat surreal fashion, they even put on a successful production of Le Cid, the seventeenth-century play set in medieval Spain and written in Alexandrine verse by French classical writer Pierre Corneille. The epigraph

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by An Antane Kapesh, the female Innu leader who fought for the rights of her people, tells the reader that anyone who seeks to accomplish anything will encounter difficulties but that person must never give up despite the challenges (“toute personne qui songe à accomplir quelque chose recontrera des difficultés mais en dépit de cela elle ne devra jamais se décourager”, 7). The novel never descends into a miserabilist viewpoint, focusing on achievement and personal blossoming, like the blooming of a marguerite daisy. Manikanetish is a Bildungsroman, but one that involves much more than narratorial personal development, since many of the students develop too, often exceeding academic and other expectations (101; 132–134). Education and Eloquence as Tools for Empowerment The novel also places great emphasis on the importance of self-confidence and fluency in speaking, writing, and argumentation, all of which Yammie encourages in her students. Her interest in increasing their eloquence seems political, in order that Innu culture may resist suppression, and that it may bloom and increase. Manikanetish asserts the right to be Innu and have a university education, as in the case of Yammie, and those of her students like Mikuan who aspire to third-level qualifications. Important societal context needs to be remembered here, specifically the amendment to the Indian Act in the 1880s stating that any “Indian” who was awarded a university degree would be automatically “enfranchised”, in other words would gain the right to vote in Federal elections but would have to lose Indian status.14 Enfranchisement was not abolished until 1985 with Bill C-31. While Fontaine does not comment on whether any given Innu person is a Status Indian or not (and does not seem interested in the question, seeming to feel that Innu-ness is as personal as it is collectively shared) it is fortunate that her characters do not have to face such challenges to their identities if they go on to further education. Befitting a novel where the title is the name of a school but also of a substitute parent who cares for young people, education is held up as a vital pursuit. One of Yammie’s deepest regrets is the loss of her brilliant student Mélina, who is asked by the principal to leave school due to too many absences. Mélina’s writing skills and impassioned approach to her subject matter suggest that she could go on to defend Innu rights eloquently as a journalist or writer. Yammie’s encouraging letter to her at the

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end of the novel suggests that she has not yet given up hope that Mélina will fulfil her potential. The academic success of Marc and the theatrical prowess of Rodrigue, both students who were initially perceived as difficult, are a huge source of pride to Yammie. Her letter to Mikuan shows her teacherly satisfaction in Mikuan’s determination to finish her schooling and go on to further study, despite having years of academic delay and an infant to take care of. Yammie also addresses a letter of admiration to Myriam, who like Mikuan is a young mother, praising her fortitude in choosing life over despair, and continuing her lead role in the play after losing her sister to suicide. She writes to her supportively to let her know that if she works hard, there is no reason why she could not be a television actor. Yammie wants her students to succeed, primarily for themselves but also for the advancement of the Innu people more generally, and to counter stereotypes. Part of the political imperative of Fontaine’s work is to provide a role model of success and empowerment through writing. Her many interventions available on the Internet show her excellence and confidence orally too. In Manikanetish, Yammie takes her apparently mundane linguistic and textual analysis work with her students very seriously as a teacher of French, encouraging them to improve in written and oral language, syntactically, structurally, and in argumentation. This is in order that they may increase their ability to present a point of view, extract an argument, and speak eloquently. Unexpected as it may be in an Innu context, the classical play by Corneille they put on is good training for oral eloquence. Writing has also become crucial in the transmission of cultural knowledge, as when Yammie asks Jean-Guy, their old Innu host in Nutshimit if she can write his story down. Innu Pride and Tradition Sylvie Bérard has pointed out that the title of Manikanetish showcases hybridity from the start, as it is the name of a flower, a person, and a school (2019, 23–24). Yammie herself is deeply hybrid, having spent most of her formative years in Québec city, then feeling the pull of return to her roots, and she is set to leave the reserve again after a year of teaching there. Her students are also hybrid, and have experienced cultural loss, particularly in terms of language, as most of the children speak only French when arriving at primary school, with some speaking both Innu and French. A very few speak only in Innu-aimun as small children. However, the students

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seem to experience their mix of Western and Indigenous cultures without much conflict. They wear NYC tee-shirts and denim jeans along with traditional earrings bought at a Pow Wow. At the Christmas bingo party, they mainly eat non-traditional food and play non-traditional games. Yet there is always just enough Innu culture present to remind them of where they come from: a precious plate of reindeer meat (caribou) is provided at the party, where traditional “artisanat” (handcrafts) also appear. By contrast, Yammie initially feels some insecurity about how Innu she may or may not be. After living in Québec city between the ages of seven and twenty-two she has a white girl’s accent (“mon accent de Blanche”, 14). She also does not know many of her numerous cousins on the reserve, and indeed chooses to live off reserve. Yet what ultimately proves more important is her personal growth through her contact with the students, as she learns to connect with them on a human level and to admire their strength, and their keen eye for injustice. Her visit with the students to the ancestral hunting grounds of Nutshimit is also a strong reminder of her Innu-ness. Several of the schoolchildren make multiple visits each year with their families to Nutshimit, to reconnect with life in the hunting grounds, which their grandparents know intimately. These students are skilled in shooting partridge, and teach Yammie how to do so, just as her uncle’s family show her how to set traps on their visits to their cabin in the forest (31; 106). Restorative visits to the natural environment where their families are rooted nurture a sense of Innu identity. In Manikanetish, cultural belonging also manifests itself strongly through the importance given to respect of traditional land usage rights. Some of the students remain very connected with the land, as is evident early on in Mélina’s essay, where she laments the clear-cutting of the forest by non-Indigenous industrialists (27–28). The contribution of student Patrick to the class debate on democracy in the “Evaluation” section, measures inequality in terms of the lack of recognition of his father’s rights to hunt on traditional lands. The latter have been expropriated by Hydro Québec, the hydroelectric company that played an important role in Québec’s economic rise in the 1960s, and is still one of the major industrial players.

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Reconnecting with How to Be an Innu: Interpersonal Relations and the Peace of Nutshimit Alongside the question of empowerment, human relations and self-­ knowledge are ultimately what matter in Manikanetish. The novel places much store on tonic personal pronouns, which are emphasised from the start, sometimes in highlighted font or at the end of important sentences or sections. The section directly following the prologue is entitled “L’inconnu” (the stranger, or the Unknown), and its first word is “Eux” (they/them). This emphasises the narrator’s sense of being outside of a group, with much to learn, and a certain distance between self and other. However, her brief account of her worries about how to interact with her Innu students ends with an emphatic “C’était avant moi” (That was before I became me), with the implication that her students have helped her to become who she now is (14). In relation to Innu selfhood and identity, Nutshimit allows both Yammie and her students to come (or come back) to the strongest sense of their Innu-ness. In Nutshimit, they enter into another space (“un autre espace”, 104), leaving any problems, complexities, and tensions from the reserve behind. They gaze at vast star-filled skies, and share stories with each other around a fire in the traditional tent or shaputuan. The links with tradition are accentuated by the presence of their Innu host, an older man named Jean-Guy, who spends much of his life as he can in the forest, when not jobbing for the white man’s wage. When Yammie describes Jean-Guy and his wife, she ends her account with the words that she and her students were far away from the reserve, yet so close to their authentic selves (“si près de soi”, 106). For Yammie as a first-time visitor to the ancestral hunting grounds, the experience is both life-changing and imbued with a sense of the sacred. As a child in Québec city, the only brown-skinned child in a sea of white faces, she recounts how she felt uncomfortable with her Innu identity and sought to minimise it. She was relieved if she was assumed to be Latina and supremely embarrassed if she was ever asked to talk about “her” culture. Even as a young girl, she thought of other Innus as “Eux” (they/ them) but with a sense of longing nonetheless: ce “eux qui aurait dû être ce nous”: “this ‘they’ that should have been a ‘we’” (25–26). It is appropriate that it is in the place of ancestral tradition, far away from contact with the non-Indigenous world, that she comes closest to a sense of her Innu self.

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Yammie opens the novel with the words “Revenir est la fatalité” (9), which can be translated as “Coming back [to one’s roots] is meant to be”. On deciding to teach in the reserve, she instinctively chooses “moi” (me) over “lui” (him) in the chapter where she leaves her white boyfriend Nicolas behind in the city (“c’était moi que je choisissais”, 17). Even at this point, she seems to have a deep-seated understanding that she needed to be surrounded with Innu-ness, whether in the form of her Innu community or in the natural world. There are several key bonding milestones in Yammie’s relationship with her students. Even without the experience in Nutshimit, the forging of relationships in school allows her to feel even more Innu, as she learns about Innu values of emotional solidarity and human connection. In Shuni, Fontaine addresses her white friend Julie (the eponymous Shuni), noting in a reflection on national characteristics that where she comes from the most important thing is human relationships: “chez moi, Shuni, ce qui prime, ce sont les relations” (2019, 105). Manikanetish makes the same point through fiction. Through contact with the students, Yammie gradually overcomes her need to keep a distance between herself and them. She had at first felt uncomfortable at letting her guard down, due to their proximity in age and what she has learned about class management in her Université Laval education. When Marc’s mother dies, she is still hampered by her need for distance. However, she instinctively realises that she wishes to be able to comfort him, and envies the students who can give him emotional support. This is an important psychological realisation but it is not until the Christmas bingo party that barriers start to be broken down through shared games and enjoyable silliness. By the chapters “Lorsque la nuit tombe” (when night falls) and “Cercle” (circle), the students and Yammie are close enough to be able to attempt to comfort one another on Marithée’s shocking death. While at the start of the novel, Yammie somewhat self-importantly states that she felt she was going to teach her students about the world, or give them a world of knowledge (“je leur apprendrais le monde”, 13), she ultimately learns as much from them as they do from her, particularly in their support of Myriam after her sister’s suicide. It is perhaps in the importance of down-to-earth human exchange that the most “Innu” aspect of the novel lies. While so much linguistic and cultural richness has been lost, much has been retained among Indigenous people in terms of solidarity and human connection. These are the qualities that Fontaine shows her narrator learning, following the example of the on-reserve community.

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Charbonneau-Bernier reads Manikanetish through the lens of personal decolonisation or “décolonisation personnelle” (2018: 17, 20, 116), drawing on a concept explored by Indigenous writer Waaseyaa’sin Christine Sy in her 2014 essay “Through the Sugar bush”. Personal decolonisation means many things for Sy, including reappropriation of the home place through writing. For Yammie, personal decolonisation is not only personal but interpersonal, as it involves a move towards decreased individualism and less emotional distance from others. In sharing her emotion at student Marithée’s death with the other students, Yammie moves towards immersing herself more fully in the ups and downs of shared human experience. Yet perhaps because of her Protestant upbringing she does not deny the importance of her individual subjectivity, nor of her right to be different, arguably a concept that is given less emphasis in Indigenous tradition. It is perhaps because she wishes to retain a sense of her own distinctiveness that she chooses to live off reserve, and to leave Uashat at the end of the novel: remaining “of the reserve” but not fully in it. Yammie’s sense of being Innu is as Innu as the identities of those on the reserve (which are culturally mixed in their own ways) but in this novel she is still finding her sense of that identity. Fontaine, by contrast, has found her own place through her political and cultural reflections in her teaching, both as a schoolteacher and more broadly in her lectures and talks for Radio Canada, and for Indigenous and other groups. Through this knowledge transfer and through her writing, she creates a space for other Indigenous people to emulate her success and to inspire new Indigenous thinkers to step forward. Le Cid: Beyond Stereotype In terms of the choice of Corneille’s Le Cid as a school play for Innu teenagers to act in, it might initially seem absurd to imagine young Innus acting in such an old play, which is set in Spain in a medieval court. It is particularly striking that it is written in Alexandrine verse, given that many of these students already had problems writing correctly in French. Yet Yammie poses the challenge, for the students and for herself, and the task is accomplished brilliantly. It is as though Naomi Fontaine is gently tapping sceptical readers on the knuckles, by going beyond stereotypes, and showing openness to other worlds. The students are already culturally mixed as their world is deeply imbued with Euro-Canadian practices and they are used to crossing between cultures. There is also a sense in which

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the play is universal, and as Mikuan points out, the theme of crossed lovers is familiar to them (albeit through the European reference of Romeo and Juliet). There is nonetheless a poignant quality in the fact that the students take pleasure in wearing their beautiful semi-medieval costumes, which have some resonance with the beautiful ceremonial costumes of the Innu. Equally, the use of a doubly foreign language (French, in Alexandrine verse) strengthens the sense of loss of culture and ancestral language. Importantly, Yammie explains that her choice of text was limited by the plays she was exposed to, by studying them at university (64). These include plays by Molière and Shakespeare, as well as contemporary or more recent classics from France, such as Ionesco’s Rhinocéros, or modern classics from the turn of the millennium in Québec such as La Face Cachée de la lune by Robert Lepage, and Rêves by Wajdi Mouawad (a “migrant” writer, originally from Lebanon), as well as the 1980 play C’était avant la guerre à l’Anse-à-Gilles by Marie Laberge. This last play features a strong female character, like the women of Manikanetish. Rhinocéros speaks of identity and collaboration with a colonising and occupying force, with clear resonances with the Innu situation. Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which Yammie also mentions, is about the difficulty of avenging a father and the main character’s thoughts of suicide because of the inability to do so. Robert Lepage’s La Face Cachée de la lune evokes old wounds in an incessant coming and going of personal reminiscences and historical memories, which resonates with the historical wounds suffered by the Innu. Mouawad’s Rêves also talks about emotional wounds and suicide, among other elements. This choice of intertextual affiliations, which are given in a dense list on one page, is not innocent, but rather highly resonant, despite their elliptical and matter-of-fact presentation. Importantly, the list also underlines the lack of availability of plays by Innus, or even about Innus, which the students would have preferred (72). A student with literary gifts like Mélina would be well-placed to create such a play. Her gift for the written word is emphasised in the final pages of the text, where Yammie writes to her, exhorting her to keep up writing. This suggests hope to see a play about Innus by Innus, as is now the case, with Fontaine’s March 2023 adaptation of Manikanetish for the Duceppe theatre in Montreal. The content of the play Le Cid and its historical background also resonate with the situation of the First Nations in Canada. Le Cid, based on the real character of El Cid (Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, born circa 1043, in Castille), was a warrior and a war hero. This resonates with the ancestral mythology of the Innu, and of the First Nations more generally. In the

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play, the character of El Cid goes to defeat the Moors, who are trying to invade Spain and colonise it. This again creates echoes with the situation of the Innu in Canada, although this time evoking their oppression rather than their warrior qualities. To complicate the matter, the historical figure of Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar fought for both Christian and Arab armies, and his name derives from the Arabic Al-Sid (“lord”), which then became the Spanish El Cid, and in Corneille’s version Le Cid. This web of resonances highlights the transcultural quality of the play and of the character of Le Cid. The playwright, Innu actors, and historical warriors have all crossed between cultures in different ways.15 A major theme in Le Cid that is highly relevant to the situation of the Innu is the question of how one can love someone who has killed one’s father. How can the Innu love those who killed their “fathers”, their own ancestors, in other words the settler-colonial Whites (or more accurately those people’s ancestors)? Chimène loves Rodrigue (Le Cid) but she finds it difficult to forget the fact that Rodrigue killed her father. It will take her a year of mourning to succeed in forgetting her principles of revenge. Fontaine no doubt carefully reflected on the name for her disruptive character Rodrigue, who ultimately redeems himself through respectful behaviour and hard work, going on to perform the role of Don Sanche in the play. Yammie finds she can “forgive” him, just as Chimène will probably forgive her lover Rodrigue (El Cid). While it is important to note that Rodrigue is primarily important as an Innu character, who highlights the importance of striving towards self-fulfilment, it may not be too far-fetched to see another resonance here, if he is viewed less in terms of his Innu-ness and more in terms of the work he needs to do to improve. Like the disruptive teenager Rodrigue, settler-colonial society needs to learn to listen, to pay attention, and to work with others to transcend some of the wounds of the past. There is a need for hard work by the descendants of settler-­ colonials, and those who allow the status quo of inequality to continue, to prove themselves worthy of respect and forgiveness by Indigenous peoples. In the case of Yammie’s Rodrigue, the redemption that ensues is his personal fulfilment in his splendid performance in the play. If settler-­ colonial society can work with the Innu and other Indigenous people in an atmosphere of respect, an even greater redemption might be seen. Corneille’s play was controversially open-ended, leading to the famous Querelle du Cid. It leaves an element of uncertainty as to whether Chimène will in fact be able to forgive Rodrigue, and to marry him after her year of mourning has passed. While blood seems thicker than any new alliance for

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Chimène in this play, she may well learn to forgive. Fontaine’s choice of play may also have been a nod to the importance she accords to her own Innu father and blood-kinship. Yet is vital to note that Yammie does in fact forgive Rodrigue, once she is assured of his determination to do better. If the analogy is followed of the reparation work needed by settler-colonial society, this may indicate a certain optimism by Fontaine about future relations between Innu and non-Innus, as long as the latter are respectful, listen, and pay attention.

Shuni: Letters to Oneself and to Others Shuni (2019) is a set of politically focused essays with a personal slant, which combines ethnographical observation with autobiographical reflection. It is Fontaine’s most militant work to date. It is divided into ten parts, nine of which have an epigraph from an Indigenous writer (one Indigenous male, the rest Indigenous female), concluding with a section where the epigraph is from the only other man, Québecois nationalist singer Félix Leclerc. This last epigraph repeats the injunction to fight (“se battre”, 145). A combative spirit enjoins Innu readers to see their cultural survival less as “résilience” (Fontaine views resilience as too passive a term) and more as resistance (“résistance”, 83).16 It is a book of many facets, simultaneously deeply personal and fundamentally collective. It is about transmission of a sense of Innu-ness, and of the will to fight to be respected for that culture. It is about correction of stereotypes, targeting those who mean well and wish to help, like Fontaine’s Baptist missionary and social worker friend Julie, the Shuni of the title, whom she knew as a child on the reserve, as well as those who are more dismissive and prejudiced. Expanding on the epistolary elements in the previous works, as well as on the concept of written communication, Shuni can also be understood as a series of letters. Ten of the “letters” in Shuni are addressed to the author’s son, Marcorel, nicknamed Petit Ours (Little Bear), with several others overtly directed to Julie / Shuni. It is also, above all, a long letter to the Innu people, full of admiration and encouragement, fostering pride in Innu identity and culture. Symbolically, the authorial persona feels cut off from her father, whom she never knew, as he died while her mother was pregnant with her. A letter from the father features as an object of longing, as it was addressed to his mother, and not to the author herself (43). The letter was a request for the father’s mother to call him, as he had something important to say to her. It is unclear whether he ever had the

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chance to say what was on his mind, as he passed away within a few months of writing the letter. Importantly, his death meant a break in connection between parent and child that Fontaine is eager to correct through her transmission of Innu identity to her own son. The absence of a letter from father to daughter may also be interpreted on a collective level, chiming with the need for transmission of culture. It is not too much of a leap to link the absent letter with the family letters kept from Indigenous children at residential school, one of the deliberate acts of colonial violence that caused deep fissures in Indigenous family relations and the breakdown of culture. Letters at residential school are mentioned in Ogoki, Call of the Wild, a haunting 2008 radio documentary by Irish director and writer Deirdre Mulrooney, who as mentioned above spent time as a young child at the remote Indian reserve at Ogoki post in Northern Ontario in the 1970s and 1980s. Mulrooney’s radio documentary captures the voice of Pearl Achneepineskum, aunt of the tragically lost Chanie mentioned above, speaking of her own experience in residential school. While Pearl would receive letters from her parents in syllabics (the form in which Indigenous languages were first written down in Canada), she could not read them, as knowledge of her language in any form was strongly discouraged. The letters, which included correspondence informing her of the deaths of her sister and brother, would be taken away shortly after receipt, but Pearl would try to keep them as long as she could. She did this, heartbreakingly, because they smelled of home.17 Fontaine aims to correct the fracture of cultural transmission through her writing, both on a collective and personal level. It is noteworthy that the text is dedicated to her grandparents, who represent familial lineage as well as a certain Innu worldview and skillset that need to be remembered and honoured. Like all her work to date, Shuni is also a letter to herself, where writing stirs up longing in her to know more about her Innu family and community (73–74). Writing About Multiple Homes (and Who Is Being Written To) Rachel Baker, in a McGill University Masters thesis on Kuessipan, notes the importance of “writing home” for many Indigenous writers, such as Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, Neal McLeod, and Fontaine in Kuessipan. Baker describes “writing home” as a restorative writing focused on Indigenous peoples (2017: “une écriture réparatrice tournée vers leurs peuples”, 7). Citing work by McLeod (2001) she notes that by contrast to

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works by postcolonial authors in the 1980s and 1990s, Indigenous works are less commonly rooted in the cities that were the seat of their oppression, often focusing on reconnection with communities in a home place that had been left behind. In other words, Indigenous writing has often been a case of The Empire Writes Back by Writing Home.18 I construe the concept of “writing home” as both writing to those still in the home place, as well as writing about home more generally. Writing home addresses a wide audience, including others from home, and indeed the self, as Indigenous writers often also “write home” for their own personal development. Their audience also includes those who do not know the home that is being written about, like Fontaine’s non-Innu readers, who gain a glimpse into Innu culture and experience through her writing. Letters imply a correspondent, and Julien Defraeye’s review of the text calls it the start of a dialogue: “l’amorce d’un dialogue” (2019, 170). Journalist Natalia Wysocka describes it as an “invitation”. This fits well with Fontaine’s own description of the text to Wysocka, where she calls the text a guide, or an advisory document, for those who wish to open themselves to her culture (2019). Getting to know—“connaître”—the Innus is imperative as a starting point (11, 22). “Connaître” means getting to know the group as well as the individuals that make up that group, and realising that each First Nation has its own context and identity. Fontaine is enraged every time she is approached as an object of curiosity to answer questions about “Autochtones”, as though she were able to speak on behalf of all Indigenous peoples. In her view, the term simplistically amalgamates distinct peoples, who are called Indigenous so that they do not have to be given their proper names (“un amalgame de peuples distincts, que l’on appelle Autochtones pour mieux ne pas les nommer”, 33). This book is both a love letter to the Innu people and a step towards facilitating knowledge of them as a specific group. In Shuni, home has its strongest existence in the heart. While Kuessipan focused on a sense of place, and Manikanetish concentrated more on individuals inhabiting that place, Shuni goes beyond place to inscribe Innu-­ ness wherever an Innu person feels at home and wherever that person celebrates his or her Innu culture. In Innu-aimun, the term used to denote the reserve is “innu-assi” (land of Innus). Fontaine hopes that the day will come that there will be no reserve but still a strong sense of “innu-assi”, and that all Innus will come together from where ever they are to dance the ceremonial or celebratory makushan, in freedom (102). The Innu

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language does not possess a word for freedom, so intrinsic is the concept to their way of life in its traditional nomadic form. The closest Fontaine can get to translating the word from French is “apikunakanu”, which means “la fin d’un enfermement” (the end of an imprisonment, 19). Importantly, a sign erected by the Innus at the boundary of the reserve shows that the relationship between white people and Innus is no longer one way. The Innus have used their voice to write their own message, just as Fontaine is doing in this text. The text’s opening meditations include a reflection on the Innus having marked the reserve as their community, noting that alongside the stark, government-imposed sign reading “Uashat, Limite réserve” (Uashat, reserve boundary) the Innu have placed a bilingual sign reading “Les Innus vous souhaitent la bienvenue dans la communauté de Uashat. Tshiminu-takushinauute Uashat mautania innit” (17), which can be translated as “The Innus welcome you to the Uashat community”. Key here is the word “community”, to which Fontaine returns later in the text. She opposes it to “reserve”, stating that community is the foundation of the Innu people (“la communauté, c’est notre fondation”), and that she has been longing for her community, and missing it, all of her life (101–102). Therefore, while she rails against the reserve system, she celebrates the notions of community, people, and nation (85). The gently loaded title of the work, an Innuisation of a French name, countermands colonial Frenchifying or Anglicising strategies, since Julie becomes the deliberately different Shuni, who is nonetheless still the same person. Fontaine’s own surname is a case in point of deformation or attribution of names by French-speaking colonisers. “Innuisation” is not done with resentment, more as a gentle sort of “adoption” or even “reconciliation”, the term with which Fontaine ends a meditation on language (39). By using the politically charged term “reconciliation” along with the concept of “Innuisation”, Fontaine emphasises Innu agency in a societal context of ongoing work of repairing and reconstructing settler-Indigenous relationships. Julie, a social worker who represents those who seeks to help Innu society (but who is also somewhat problematically a missionary, and therefore associated with the wish to impart a given value system), is exhorted by Fontaine to ask Innu people what kind of help they might like. Fontaine refuses to speak on behalf of anyone else in this respect, noting that Julie will need to work with her Innu interlocutors and to listen to them (71).

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Self-affirmation and Hope Self-affirmation is at the heart of this text. Within any community, all are individuals, as Fontaine emphatically notes in a long mediation on difference within Innu-ness, giving a counter example for every stereotype (of drunkenness, teenage motherhood, violence, and more: 63–64). This chimes with the host of distinctive “routes” reflecting the many different life paths for Innus described in Kuessipan. She notes that she herself is not completely immune to interiorised colonial reflexes, for example when she calls her small son a “petit indien”. When he reminds her that he is Innu, not Indian, she reflects in shock that when she was born, as recently as 1987, the French term “Montagnais” was still in use. Fontaine creates a sense of Innus as individuals but also of a proud, stalwart, people, with a distinct worldview. They view life not as a linear sprint, but a constantly renewed circle. From an Innu perspective, life is carried out at one’s own pace, with regularly reappearing chances for success, whether in education, sobriety, self-determination, or any other matter. By contrast with the industrial world, where timers and watches measure temporality in seconds, the word for clock in Innu-aimun translates as “counter of moons”, stressing the cycle of life as well as the waxing and waning of natural phenomena (139). There is no sense that it is too late to achieve anything, as shown in the example of the man in his forties who has multiple challenges in his life but persists in learning about Innu literature (81–83), or the person who was illiterate at fifty but overcame that challenge to complete a secondary education (139–40). Indeed, it is the latter person who is most applauded among all students, just as Jordan, the recovering alcoholic is buoyed up with community support each time he attempts to go clean. The circle of life that constantly recommences is also apparent in the transmission of family bonds. Near death, Fontaine’s grandfather passes on the baton of keeping a connection with his hunting territory in the natural environment of Nutshimit to the author, aged twelve. Fontaine ends this section by stating that she knows life is a circle (“Je sais que la vie est un cercle”, 28). Variations on this phrase recur in the text and it returns verbatim in the very last line, where son Marcorel congratulates his mother on being nominated for a prize. The young boy notes that his offering of praise is almost fatherly, almost as though his maternal grandfather Marc Fontaine, whom he resembles physically, were speaking through him (151). There are other circles too, such as the concentric circles of

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generations within the community, with children at their heart (117–118). All the above circles are positively connotated. In Manikanetish we saw Innu group discussions taking place, democratically and inclusively, in circular formations. However, we should not forget the sinister incidence in Shuni of feelings of inferiority or exclusion coming full circle, when Marcorel tells his mother he wants to be white, just as she had felt as a child (55–57). Nonetheless, in Fontaine’s texts to date, children overwhelmingly embody hope for the future and the possibility of cultural transmission (the author learns about the forest from her grandfather, and she in turn teaches her son to fish, for example). On a very basic level, children assert the vibrancy of life. This is particularly important in the face of suicide, which her community cannot comprehend, and which Fontaine emphatically denounces (77–79), as she also does in her blog. By contrast, natural or accidental death is accepted as part of the circle of life. Children are also conduits for warm affection between parent and grandparent and child, and Fontaine shows the strength of her own bond with her son. While non-Innu commentators often see teenage motherhood as an obstacle, Fontaine devotes a section to discussing motherhood and maternity in terms of giving life (“donner la vie”) and as a simple and natural thing (“une chose très simple”, 115). As with Kuessipan and Manikanetish, Shuni ends on the image of a child, and of togetherness between mother and son. Leadership, Female-to-Female Support, and Healing A key element of the text is its focus on female figures as models of strength and capability. From the starting year of her blog, Fontaine foregrounds her female relatives, particularly the grandmother she honours so deeply, and her mother and aunt, in the entry “Pour elles” (2010). As mentioned, her 2014 blog entry titled “Neka” (mother) is a long paean to her mother, that precedes the sustained emphasis on female determination and accomplishment echoed in Shuni. Section 7 of Shuni is devoted entirely to celebrating Innu women, old and young. While one of Fontaine’s grandmothers was a member of Band Council, all eleven Innu communities are currently led by men, by contrast with some other First Nations in Québec. Fontaine notes on the first page of Shuni that Innu communities are by nature conservative. However, she strongly stresses that women are

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nonetheless at the centre of households, families, and the community (“elles sont au centre d’un foyer, d’une famille, d’une communauté”, 111). The grandmothers, particularly “Ourse noire” (Black bear), seem larger than life, as does Fontaine’s mother, as a single mother of a large family. Fontaine herself is an outspoken and magnetic figure. In a brief essay entitled “Puamun, le rêve”, she wrote of herself somewhat tongue-in-cheek as a “difficult” woman, not inclined to compromise: “une femme difficile, peu encline aux compromis” (2015, 171). In Shuni, she writes that in the past, Innu women ensured the survival of the community by hunting small game in case their menfolk could catch nothing in the woods (112). Their force of character remains legendary. In Fontaine’s grandfather, Anikashanit, to whom Shuni is dedicated along with grandmother Alice, is described as a visionary, due to his commitment to his girls’ education and his insistence that they should not marry, in order to remain independent. Yet, following their own hearts and heads, they did all marry, and still managed to retain their independence (121–122). Despite all of this, Fontaine specifically states that she is not a feminist, as she feels that it is not necessary in her cultural context (112). This is a common reaction among women like Fontaine who have been brought up by strong women or in a matriarchal female environment. Nonetheless, whichever term one chooses, the women in Canada campaigning in the movement entitled “Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls” would no doubt describe themselves as standing up for women’s rights.19 Mentioning this campaign twice (35–36; 109–110), Fontaine hates that she is forced to carry the weight of her Indigeneity in terms of her womanhood. She is keenly aware of the burden of stereotypes around Indigenous women as objects of violence at the hands of their menfolk. She is deeply embarrassed when she gets a black eye through falling on some ice, feeling the weight of the assumption that she is a battered woman every time she goes out with the mark. In such instances, her individuality is undermined by perceptions surrounding a group, both for Indigenous women collectively and Indigenous people more generally. Female-to-female help and positive interaction is evident throughout Shuni. Fontaine’s mother is encouraged by her own mother to follow her calling and leave for Québec city, and one of Fontaine’s grandmothers (perhaps the same woman) frequently reminds Fontaine how proud her father would be of her achievements (44). Early on, the authorial persona expresses the wish that she and Julie could sit together and chat by the river in the Innu tradition, where female togetherness is crucial (13).

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Fontaine makes a point of inscribing herself in First Nations female writerly tradition, acknowledging inspiration from these writers for the vast majority of her epigraphs. Four of them are Innu: An Antane Kapesh (mentioned twice), Joséphine Bacon, Marie Andrée Gill, and Natasha Kanapé Fontaine.20 An old woman highlights one of the key points of the text: the healing gifts of Naomi Fontaine. According to Innu tradition, a child who is born without ever having seen his or her father is blessed with the gift of healing. While Fontaine initially doubts what the old woman says, she comes to realise that through her writing she can act as a healer by helping to right some of the wrongs done to the Innu people (127–129). Identity, Innu-ness, and a Shared Space of Exchange Writing allows Fontaine not only to express her anger, but also her openness to others, and to counter stereotypes. Fontaine wryly reminds an interlocutor that she is Innu despite not having travelled to the Festival America near Paris by canoe, ironically referencing the exotic image of Indigenous people to which some of the audience might limit themselves (59–61). While never complacent about problems on reserve, including those caused by Band Council and reserve residents (106), her writing also teaches us not to judge others by our own paradigms. Importantly, she is also a spokesperson for other Innus, as is evident in the rapturous reception she received at the Institut Tshakapesh, where women lined up to congratulate her and exhort her to continue talking of the wrongs done to their people and how to correct them (128). As in Manikanetish, she is keenly aware of the power of the well-written word, and of the importance of writing and speaking about one’s experience more generally. Noting with sadness a cousin in Shuni whose child dies and who is torn apart by the anguish of not being able to speak about it, she herself has the healing facility of expressing personal and collective pain in writing. In her 2020 TV5 monde interview, Fontaine notes that she does not necessarily feel Québécoise and that she will put her Innu identity first. This was not always the case, as Fontaine confirmed in a May 2021 conversation at the sixteenth biennial Women in French UK-Ireland online conference (themed as Femmes dérangeantes, femmes dérangées/Disturbed and Disruptive Women). There she told the audience that she stopped saying she was Québécoise upon being constantly asked as a young woman abroad “but where are you really from?” It is poignant that her wish to see herself as Québécoise was hampered by others’ refusal to accept it. As with

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Guerrina, the daughter of Italian immigrants, in Anita Aloiso’s Les Enfants de la loi 101 (see Chap. 4 of this volume), Fontaine states that she identified strongly as a young woman with the fight for self-­determination of the Québécois. She cites her early enthusiastic reading of classic writers dear to Québécois nationalists such as Nelligan, Anne Hébert, and the writer and singer Félix Leclerc. Leclerc provides the incitement to fight in the last epigraph of Shuni, just as Innu writer Kapesh had exhorted in Manikanetish. In the same way that Québec seeks (at the very least) cultural and societal independence, Fontaine asserts that self-determination should be possible for Indigenous peoples too. Speaking towards the end of Shuni on behalf of all First Nations in Québec, Fontaine is careful to note that self-determination must cover everything, from economic and territorial autonomy to responsibility for social problems, and that Indigenous people must move away from dependence on the State. Yet the section ends on a softer note, reflecting the aspiration that Québécois, “néo-Québécois” (the term often used for new immigrants) and First Nations might build a common land together (141–143). Whether Québécoise or even Canadian—and it should be noted that many First Nations people refuse these labels, as they contest colonial delineation of identities—Fontaine is resolutely Innu, in her own way, and on her own terms, but she is open to a shared space of exchange with the other inhabitants of the land.

Notes 1. I am a feminist Irishwoman writing in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, from a culture that has known oppression and colonisation and suffered huge language loss, but that, crucially, forms part of the dominant English-speaking industrial world. 2. The use of the term “settler-colonial” sometimes poses problems, for example if used to describe recent immigrants to Canada, particularly those from postcolonial societies, as noted by Métis writer and legal scholar Chelsea Vowel in Indigenous Writes (2017). 3. The book in which Sam McKegney’s chapter on writer-reader reciprocity features is edited by Neal McLeod from Saskatchewan, a scholar of Cree and Swedish heritage. 4. Fontaine’s reflective piece on motherhood from 2012, “Nukuss”, meaning “son”, was republished in this 2017 anthology.

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5. For the Legacy Schools programme, see the Gord Downie and Chanie Wenjack Fund. https://downiewenjack.ca/news-­publications/secret-­path-­ live/ Site accessed 23 February 2023. 6. Phyllis Webstad’s story and the history of Orange Shirt Day is available at https://orangeshirtday.org/portfolio-items/phyllis-webstad/. Site accessed 31 December 2023. 7. The name Tiohtià:ke has many different spellings as it is a transliteration into the Latin alphabet. As part of the now-common statements of territorial recognition (see for example McGill University’s website), Tiohtià:ke is recognised as being under the stewardship of the Kanien’kéha Nation. https://www.mcgill.ca/indigenous/land-­and-­peoples/learn-­about-­land-­ and-­peoples-­tiohtiakemontreal# Site accessed 15 June 2023. 8. Issue number 10 (Spring 2015) of Littoral on L’écriture innue showcases artists and writers from the region, including Naomi Fontaine. Littoral is a literary review published by GRENOC (groupe de recherches sur la littérature nord-côtière) devoted to the Côte-Nord region. 9. Fontaine’s desire to avoid reductive labels about identity and to choose how she belongs echoes that of Aloisio, and also Maryam Madjidi, whose work is discussed in the companion volume on cultural crossing in France. 10. On heterolingualism as understood by Grutman and Delabastita see Chap. 1 of this volume. 11. Doug Cuthand, an Indigenous columnist writing in 2022 in The Saskatoon Star Phoenix, notes that across Canada there is the start of a slight comeback in Indigenous languages, despite the attempted cultural annihilation at residential schools, and despite the impact of television, which is often not available in the Indigenous languages. Cuthand notes that Indigenous children in the eight years and under bracket are learning more of their heritage languages, as Indigenous language teachers are increasingly being allocated to schools. It is worth noting that although he writes from the province of Saskatchswan, he alludes to Québec at several points in his article. He points out that in Québec, trilingualism is common, arguing that rather than being an extra cognitive burden, multilingualism would be an enrichment for Indigenous people, just as it was in the past (his grandfather spoke Cree and Blackfoot and some English, and many people who lived in northwestern Saskatchewan spoke both Cree and Dene). He also takes the example of Québec to argue for defence of Indigenous languages: “In Quebec, they realize that the protection of their language and culture is necessary to protect their distinct national character. The same applies to Indian country”. He also notes that despite attempts to silence the languages, the children who returned to the reserves, whether on leaving school at sixteen or during the short weeks of summer, tried to pick up their language again: “Speaking the language was an act of defiance and our people practised it” (Cuthand 2022).

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12. At the  time of  writing in  2023, Kuessipan is available on  Vimeo at  the  following link: https://vimeo.com/535030974 Site accessed 15 September 2023. 13. For thoughts by Verreault and Fontaine on the film and their productive and enriching cooperation see the Kuessipan website in the interview at https://www.kuessipan.com/presse for which no interviewer name is given. Site accessed 24 February 2023. 14. Being “enfranchised” also curtailed one’s rights to owning property under certain “title”. 15. As noted in the Britannica.com entry on “El Cid” (Russell 1998), Díaz de Vivar “loyally served al-Muʿtamin and his successor, al-Mustaʿı ̄n II, for nearly a decade. As a result of his experience he gained that understanding of the complexities of Hispano-Arabic politics and of Islamic law and custom that would later help him conquer and hold Valencia”. 16. Again, Fontaine’s reluctance to wallow in victimhood concurs with what Gerald Vizenor and his co-contributors discuss under the umbrella term of “survivance” in First Nations (Vizenor 2008). 17. Deirdre Mulrooney may be contacted at http://www.deirdremulrooney. com/ for enquiries regarding access to the documentary film True North, and her radio documentary Ogoki: Call of the Wild. Canadian syllabics were devised in the early 1800s to write Cree and the Inuit language of Inuktitut by James Evans, a missionary in what is now Manitoba. Evans was inspired by the Cherokee syllabary developed by the highly influential Indigenous linguist Sequoyah, born in what is now Tennessee in the United States. 18. For the origin of the term “The Empire Writes Back” in postcolonial literature, see the famous book of that title by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin (1989). 19. Jihan Gearon, an Indigenous ecologist and feminist from the Southwestern United States, notes that the terms “matriarch” or “matriarch-­in-­training” are often more easily accepted in the workshops on Indigenous feminism that she runs. See her 2021 piece entitled “Indigenous Feminism is our culture”. 20. It is noteworthy that the writers Fontaine uses for her epigraphs to Shuni come from both Francophone and Anglophone Canada, as well as from the United States. This places Innu experience in a wider context of pan-­ American Indigeneity. This is surely the influence of the 2018 edited anthology of translations to French of Indigenous writing in English (Nous sommes des histoires, Jeannotte et  al. 2018), which allowed Indigenous thought to be shared across the language divide. For many First Nations in Québec, especially if they come from rural areas or relatively homogeneously French-­speaking towns, the language barrier of not having a high level of English has tended to isolate them from their English-speaking counterparts elsewhere. This anthology is a very welcome development.

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References Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 1989. The empire writes back: Theory and practice in post-colonial literatures. London: Routledge. Bacon, Joséphine. 2018. L’innu-aimun, une langue en marche. Trahir. 24 July. https://trahir.wordpress.com/2018/07/24/bacon-­innu-­aimun/. Accessed 10 September 2023. Baker, Rachel. 2017. Le désir d’être soi: fragmentation et identités dans Kuessipan de Naomi Fontaine, suivi du texte de créátion Sois qui peux, Masters dissertation. Montreal: McGill University. Bérard, Sylvie. 2019. L’école des enseignantes dans Ces Enfants de ma vie de Gabrielle Roy et Manikanetish de Naomi Fontaine. Voix et Images 45 (1): 81–95. Boudreau, Diane. 1993. Histoire de la littérature amérindienne au Québec: oralité et écriture. Montreal: Éditions de l’Hexagone. CanLitGuides Editorial. 2013. Indigenous literary nationalism. CanLit Guides. https://canlitguides.ca/canlit-guides-editorial-team/indigenous-literary-history-1960s-1990/indigenous-literary-nationalism. 05 November [revised 15 November 2016]. Accessed 23 February 2023. Chagnon, Karim. 2017. L’infiniment grande Petite Marguerite. Spirale. 19 December. http://www.spiralemagazine.com/article-­dune-­publication/ linfiniment-­grande-­petite-­marguerite. Accessed 23 February 2023. ———. 2019. Colonialisme, universalisme occidental et traduction. Traduction et politique(s) 32 (1): 259–278. Charbonneau-Bernier, Alice. 2018. L’écriture subjective des enjeux contemporains dans les romans des auteures autochtones Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau et Naomi Fontaine, Masters dissertation. Ottawa: University of Ottawa. Chartier, Daniel. 2017. La réception critique des littératures autochtones: Kuessipan de Naomi Fontaine. In À la carte. Le roman québécois (2010-2015), ed. Gilles Dupuis and Klaus-Dieter Ertler, 167–184. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Chaulet Achour, Christiane. 2019. Présences indiennes dans la littérature du Canada, 2: Naomi Fontaine. Diacritik. 28 November. https://diacritik. com/2019/11/28/presences-­i ndiennes-­d ans-­l a-­l itterature-­d u-­c anada-­2 -­ naomi-­fontaine/. Accessed 23 February 2023. Cuthand, Doug. 2022. Indigenous languages are making a comeback. The Sasktatoon Star Phoenix. 19 August. https://thestarphoenix.com/opinion/ columnists/doug-­cuthand-­indigenous-­languages-­are-­making-­a-­comeback. Accessed 15 June 2023. Defraeye, Julie. 2019. Fontaine, Naomi. Shuni. Voix plurielles 16 (2): 185. Deglise, Fabien. 2017. La voix de Naomi Fontaine contre l’indifférence. Le Devoir. 23 September. https://www.ledevoir.com/lire/508608/la-­voix-­de-­naomi-­ fontaine-­contre-­l-­indifference. Accessed 15 June 2023.

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Den Toonder, Jeannette. 2017. Narrative dynamics of liminality in Naomi Fontaine’s Kuessipan (2011). In In-between: Liminal spaces in Canadian literature and cultures, ed. Stefan Brandt, 133–146. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang. Dezutter, Olivier, Naomi Fontaine, and Jean-François Létourneau, eds. 2017. Tracer un chemin. Meshkanatsheu. Wendake (Québec): Éditions Hannenorak. Durand, Monique. 2015. À moi la colère, à toi la lumière. Le Devoir. 20 June. https://www.ledevoir.com/societe/443333/journee-­n ationale-­d es-­ autochtones-­a-­moi-­la-­colere-­a-­toi-­la-­lumiere. Accessed 15 June 2023. Fontaine, Naomi. 2010. Innushkuess  - Fille Innu. http://innutime.blogspot. com/. Accessed 23 February 2023. ———. 2011. Kuessipan. À toi. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier. ———. 2012. Nukuss. In Les Bruits du monde, ed. Laure Morali and Rodney Saint-Éloi, 45–48. Mémoire d’encrier: Montreal. ———. 2015. Puamun, le rêve. Littoral 10 [Special issue on Innu writing]:171. ———. 2017. Manikanetish. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier. ———. 2019. Shuni. Ce qui tu dois savoir, Julie. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier. ———. 2020. Littérature: rencontre avec l’auteure Naomi Fontaine. TV5 Monde. 13 March. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXJ94oHZLbY. Accessed 23 February 2023. Fontaine, Natasha Kanapé, and Deni Ellis Béchard. 2021. Kuei, je te salue, conversation sur le racisme. Montreal: Les Éditions Écosociété. Gatti, Maurizio. 2004. Littérature amérindienne du Québec. Écrits de langue française. Montreal: Hurtubise. Gearon, Jihan. 2021. Indigenous feminism is our culture. Stanford Social Innovation Review. 11 February. https://ssir.org/articles/entry/indigenous_ feminism_is_our_culture. Accessed 23 February 2023. Gillies, Rob, and Nicole Winfield. 2022. Pope’s apology to Indigenous peoples for abuse at residential schools insufficient, Canada says. Public Service Broadcasting. 28 July. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/popes-­apology-­ to-­indigenous-­peoples-­for-­abuse-­at-­r esidential-­schools-­insufficient-­canada-­ says. Accessed 23 February 2023. Hampton, Chris. 2018. Reflections on language: Joi T. Arcand in Sobey art award 2018. National Gallery of Canada Magazine. 14 September. https://www. gallery.ca/magazine/artists/sobey-­art-­award/reflections-­on-­language-­joi-­t-­ arcand-­in-­sobey-­art-­award-­2018. Accessed 23 February 2023. Indigenous Services. 2020. Annual report to Parliament. 03 November. https:// www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1602010609492/1602010631711. Accessed 10 September 2023. Jeannotte, Marie-Hélène, Jonathan Lamy, and Isabelle St-Amand, eds (Jean-Pierre Pelletier, trans. Louis-Karl Picard-Sioui, pref.). 2018. Nous sommes des histoires. Réflexions sur la littérature autochtone. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier.

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Kapesh, An Antane, trans. José Mailhot. 2019. Eukuan Nin Matshi-Manitu Innushkueu. Je suis une maudite sauvagesse. Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier. ———, trans. José Mailhot. 2020. Tanite Nene Etutamim Nitassi? Qu’as-tu fait de mon pays? Montreal: Mémoire d’encrier. Klaus, Peter. 1995. Diane Boudreau, Histoire de la littérature amérindienne au Québec: oralité et écriture. Études littéraires 28 (2): 121–127. McKegney, Sam. 2014. Writer-reader reciprocity and the pursuit of alliance through Indigenous poetry. In Indigenous poetics, ed. Neal McLeod, 43–60. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. McLeod, Neal. 2001. Coming Home through Stories. In (Ad)dressing our words: Aboriginal perspectives on aboriginal literature, ed. Armand Garnet Ruffo, 17–36. Penticton: Theytus Books. Mossetto, Anna Paola. 2012. Nicole Brossard, Naomi Fontaine. L’Univers et la réserve en assonance. Francofonia 62: 45–57. Mulrooney, Deirdre. 2008. Ogoki: Call of the wild. Ireland: Broadcasting Commission of Ireland. ———. 2017. True North. Ireland: Out There Productions. Papillon, Joëlle. 2019. La solidité des filles chez Naomi Fontaine. Tangence 119: 41–58. Russell, Peter. 1998. El Cid. Britannica.com. 20 August. https://www.britannica. com/biography/El-­Cid-­Castilian-­military-­leader. Accessed 15 September 2023. Sinclair, Niigaanwewidam. 2015. Indigenous literary nationalism: A theory for all. English Studies in Canada 41 (4): 18. Sioui, Georges E. 1989. Pour une autohistoire amérindienne. Essai sur les fondements d’une morale sociale. Québec: Les presses de l’université Laval. Statistics Canada. 2017a. The Aboriginal languages of First Nations people, Métis and Inuit. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/assa/98-200-x/2016022/98-200-x2016022-eng.cfm. Released 25 October. Accessed 23 February 2023. ———. 2017b. Uashat, IRI [Census subdivision], Quebec and Baie-Comeau [Census agglomeration], Quebec (table). Census Profile. 2016 Census. Statistics Canada Catalogue no. 98-316-X2016001. https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/censusrecensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/index.cfm?Lang=E. Released 29 November. Accessed 23 February 2023. ———. 2023. Indigenous languages across Canada. https://www12.statcan.gc. ca/census-recensement/2021/as-sa/98-200-X/2021012/98-200X2021012-eng.cfm. Released 29 March. Accessed 10 September 2023.

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Sy, Waaseyaa’sin Christine. 2014. Through Iskigamizigan (the sugar bush): A poetics of decolonization. In Indigenous poetics in Canada, ed. Neal McLeod, 183–202. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Vizenor, Gerald, ed. 2008. Survivance: Narratives of native presence. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Vowel, Chelsea. 2017. Indigenous writes: A guide to Indigenous, Métis and Inuit issues in Canada. Newburyport: Portage and Main Press.

CHAPTER 3

Abla Farhoud: Montreal Migrations and the Ghost of Lebanon

Introduction Abla Farhoud (1945–2021) was a Lebanese-born playwright and novelist who lived and worked in Montreal for more than sixty-five of her seventy-­ six years, from 1950 to 1965 and then again from 1973 until her death. She started her professional life as an actress, before moving to a writing career. Writing plays at first in the 1980s, she turned to novels from the late 1990s onwards, with the celebrated Le Bonheur a la queue glissante (1998), a biofictional novel loosely based on her mother’s experiences in Québec and Lebanon. She was part of the discussions around transculture in 1980s and 1990s Québec, which emphasised the transformative potential of culturally mixed and mentally migratory encounters within literature, and of reciprocally beneficial contact between different cultural groups on a societal level, as part of the defining period of écriture migrante.1 As noted in Chap. 1, the category of écriture migrante has often been questioned, to counteract any perceived assumption that writers who have migrated from another country must write about migration, and that if they do so, that they must either celebrate or lament it. Farhoud does write about migration, but does not always do so, and it is not always the main focus of her work. Her multi-faceted work provides many angles of approach. Farhoud is acclaimed among scholars of Québec writing in French, particularly for her plays and some of the early novels, but some of her © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Cooke, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45936-8_3

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work has not had the attention it deserves, particularly the post-2011 novels discussed in this analysis. She is also less well-known in wider Québec society than she should be, as a pioneer of feminist and taboobreaking writing, including in relation to mental illness and old age. Although she has received a slew of prestigious prizes for her work, many of these have been France-based, such as the prix Arletty for Les Filles du 5-10-15c and the prix France-Québec for Le Bonheur a la queue glissante. Her first plays were published in France and Belgium. These were Quand j’étais grande, first produced in 1983 (Farhoud 1994), and Les Filles du 5-10-15c, first produced in 1986 (Farhoud 1998a). Nor is she as wellknown as she should be in English-speaking Canada or the rest of the English-speaking world.2 To date, the only Farhoud novel with a fulllength English translation is Le Sourire de la petite juive, from 2011, which was translated in Québec as Hutchison Street (Farhoud, trans. Judith Woodsworth 2018). This is an important novel for Farhoud’s transcultural approach. After spending her first six years in Lebanon, which haunts her work with the memory of running barefoot over its red earth as a child, Farhoud had fourteen formative years in Montreal, where she attended Catholic school relatively unproblematically as a Lebanese Christian. At age twenty, Farhoud returned to Beirut with her parents and siblings, and spent four predominantly unhappy years there before leaving for Paris, where she led an independent life working and studying theatre for another four years. She returned to Québec in her late twenties in 1973 to pursue a life with the Chicoutimi-born musician Vincent Dionne, from whom she later separated. Farhoud had two children with him, Alecka Farhoud-Dionne and Mathieu Farhoud-Dionne, who both became musicians.3 Farhoud’s writing often reflects on how individuals deal differently with psychological shocks or traumas, including those caused by loss of people and places. In her work, the mental movement between self and other inherent in writing and reading is shown to allow a regeneration of the skin of the self, and some healing. So too does transcultural encounter on a directly societal level. On a personal level, regeneration of the self was enhanced by her activity as an actor in childhood and early womanhood. Farhoud’s work in the 1980s and 1990s focused both on geographical migration and other more universal matters. Her very first play, Quand j’étais grande from 1983 but published 11 years later (Farhoud 1994) was about the oppression of women, both in Lebanon and more generally. Likewise, Quand le vautour danse (Farhoud 1997b) was about mental

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illness, and the Lebanese-inspired background was not overt. The language in which she writes is Québec-inflected, sometimes strongly so, as with Les Rues de l’alligator and Maudite Machine, both written around the turn of the millennium and published a few years later, with publication dates of 2003 and 2005 respectively. She expressed the wish early on not to be pigeonholed into the literature of exile or migration, after she reached relative fame in the literary world with her 1998 novel (Farhoud 2000; Carrière and Khordoc 2006). From the turn of the millennium, it became ever clearer that her work deals with many types of mobility, not only geographical displacement but a constant movement between fiction and autobiography, or from female to male psyches when she inhabits male consciousnesses, or other mental “migrations”. Mental distress and mental illness often appear as disruptive forms of such mental migration in Farhoud’s texts. The figure of a mentally disturbed yet deeply clever brother features a half-dozen times in the works, most prominently early on in the widely acclaimed Le Fou d’Omar (2005a). Splendide Solitude, Farhoud’s second novel, which has had relatively little critical attention, also deals with mental suffering, portraying a woman experiencing depression and an existential crisis in a menopausal “empty nest” after separation from a beloved partner.4 Her work can also be humorous, as in her poignant and sometimes darkly comical 2019 novel Le Dernier des snoreaux, which presents a mentally ill brother called Ibrahim Abou-Snobara who tells his story in old age, from a psychiatric institution. Here, the focus is strongly on the universal aspects of his mental distress. However, cross-cultural factors informing the problematic nature of Abou-Snobara’s identity are also clear, as he was born in Québec of immigrant parents and was saddled with the comically Québécois name of Snoreau, since no-one could pronounce his real name, or bothered to try. In what follows, it is salutary to remember that my use of the term “transculturality” often departs from the more euphoric usage emphasised by some members of the transculture movement of the 1980s and 1990s in Québec. I do not mean to suggest that transformative cross-cultural interaction is always immediately constructive or life-affirming (see also the discussion of Wolfgang Welsch and transculturality, in Chap. 1). Although the term is frequently positively employed in the coming analysis, it is often meant neutrally, in a broad sense of cultural mixing or questioning. Farhoud’s most overtly autobiographical novel, Toutes celles que

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j’étais (2015) emphasises the multiplicity of the transcultural experience and the construction of selfhood, including by others. Ultimately, this analysis of transculturality in Farhoud’s œuvre describes how a high level of instability of identity led Farhoud to be the strongly humanist author she became. In my analysis of Le Sourire de la petite juive, which has not received enough attention to date, I argue that of all Farhoud’s work it is the most highly emblematic of transcultural encounter, despite the potential and tentative manner in which this occurs. It is also a crucial example of this in Québec literature more generally. As with all of Farhoud’s œuvre, this novel deals with questions of freedom and self-­ determination, but its deepest focus is on transcultural potentiality, and the role played by literature (reading and writing) in creating a sense of connective transformation. Having lived through uprootings from two homelands, Farhoud experienced transculturality in a migration-related form perhaps the most fully of all the cultural creators in this volume. Her work depicts wounds relating to her exiles from both Lebanon and Québec, and the scars that remain. While she recounts the childhood departure from Lebanon in the form of an adventure in Toutes celles que j’étais, the rest of that narrative shows how the loss of home fed into a feeling of instability throughout her life. She also experienced multiple dislocations within her second homeland of Québec, through a long sequence of house moves and being taken out of school to work in the family shop. The father moved his family to many different addresses in Montreal and thence to Lebanon during their life as a family unit, meaning that Farhoud experienced multiple periods of radical change. However, this instability and precariousness were ultimately highly productive and enriching for both Farhoud and the many readers that she influenced with her portrayals of encounters with other cultures, and migrations of a more mental nature. Many of Farhoud’s narratives are subtly haunted by Arabic, the language in which her parents communicated to her, and which she partially lost after the age of six. I discuss its symbolic and heterolingual presence in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante and in Toutes celles que j’étais, where it surfaces in small but crucial ways. Not only does this small bubbling up of the language of origin highlight her sense of having been cut off from this language of her childhood in Lebanon, which was also spoken in basic household form by her parents in the family home in Montreal, but it signals her wish to reconnect with it in some way, while also underscoring

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her conflicted relationship with it as a reminder of patriarchal structures and systems in her culture of origin. As per the discussion in Chap. 1, Rainier Grutman’s concept of “héterolinguisme” (heterolingualism) in literature describes the writerly practice of highlighting snippets of a foreign language in a text, usually to emphasise something about the speaker’s relationship to it. This occurs early in Farhoud’s work, with her breakthrough autobiographical play from 1986, Les Filles du 5-10-15c, which focuses on transculturality in Québec as experienced by two young Lebanese-born teenage sisters. Acclaimed at the time of its production, it is still relevant to modern-day situations of traditionalist and patriarchal culture that clash with more libertarian Western mores. As with Toutes celles que j’étais and Le Bonheur a la queue glissante, traces of Arabic in the 1986 play and in Jeux de patience comment on the uprooting from her language of origin that permeates Farhoud’s writing. Arabic is symbolically present in fragmentary form in other works by Farhoud too, underlining its cultural and personal importance for Farhoud, and sometimes a sense of language loss. Lebanon as a Conflicted Presence Although Farhoud lived in Montreal nearly all her life, Lebanon haunts her work. Her years in Lebanon from 1965–1969, where her nostalgic father wished the family to live, were among the most traumatic of her life. She depicts these years in fictionalised form in Au Grand Soleil cachez vos filles (2017). Prior to leaving for the “home” country, she had suffered as a Lebanese-born girl in Québec from the constraints that her parents imposed on her freedom when they obliged her to give up school in her early teens to work in the family haberdashery shop. Yet she felt even more deeply marginal and restricted by the values of the patriarchal society of 1960s Lebanon, as a Québec-formed independent-minded woman. Farhoud’s family had a long history of emigration to Québec, since before the time of her grandmother, depicted as sitté Jana in Toutes celles que j’étais. The initial attraction to Québec for this family may have been partly because of Lebanon’s historically Francophone links, although her father felt inadequate in his use of the language, despite his solidarity with Québec nationalism. Lebanon’s relatively brief French colonial past arose from historical connections going back to Crusader times between France and the Maronites, who are the biggest Lebanese Christian group. French is still widely used in Lebanon, and in Au Grand soleil cachez vos filles,

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authorial alter ego Ikram gains an acting job in French while living in Lebanon in the 1960s. The country was carved out of Greater Syria after World War One (Perry and Creidi 2020), and became a French protectorate in 1926 after a long period of Ottoman rule, gaining independence from France in 1943.5 Lebanon is a division-ridden society, that still has deep gulfs, not only between the sexes but between rich and poor, and wide rifts between its many religions. Although it is home to approximately twenty religious sects, from Shi’ite and Sunni Muslim to Druze, and the dozen or more Christian sects including Orthodox Christian, to which Farhoud’s family belonged, there are strict divides between them. In Au Grand soleil cachez vos filles, this is shown in the example of teenage Mona, a Christian whose love for her Shi’ite suitor is forbidden (Farhoud 2017, 88–89). Farhoud did not live in Lebanon during the fifteen-year-long Lebanese Civil war (1975–1990), which was fought in the name of religion (mainly Muslim sects versus Christian sects and vice versa). However, she felt deeply for her Lebanese compatriots and relatives who experienced that bloody and damaging armed conflict. The effects of the Lebanese civil war on Farhoud are clear in Jeux de patience, first produced in 1995 (Farhoud 1997a), which features the ghost of a young Lebanese girl who was killed in the war, and ends with a mountain of dead bodies falling onto the stage, gesturing to the collective trauma it engendered.6 Jeux de patience is deliberately universal, and is an early example of what Catherine Khordoc in a 2019 article termed “worlded” literature, since it brings in other armed conflicts across the globe and includes them from the start in its stage directions. Other famous Lebanese writers in Québec include Rawi Hage, who writes in English though he also knows French, and Wajdi Mouawad (see Moss 2001 and Khordoc 2019), around whose Sang des promesses cycle Khordoc builds her theoretical framework of “worlding”. As noted in Chap. 1, for Khordoc, “worlded literature” is writing that is open to wide-ranging global concerns, exploring “interconnections between different cultures or regions of the world” (Khordoc 2019, 496–498). By this definition, Farhoud’s writing has been “worlded” since its inception, for example with her early play Quand j’étais grande, which explores the oppression of women in a universal way, despite its main focus on patriarchal dominance in Lebanon. Le Sourire de la petite juive is also “worlded” in Khordoc’s sense, since a multiplicity of characters from many different backgrounds and with connections across the globe

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intermingle in the multicultural Montreal street that all of them now call home. Farhoud returned to Lebanon for a visit in 1992 after the war ended, bringing her young son with her, and her radio play Apatride was written as a result of that visit.7 She did not subsequently visit Lebanon (conversation with the author, June 2019). Her interview at the Cégep Eduoard Montpetit in Longueuil, Québec (Delisle and Tézine 2018) showed that her relationship with the country remained conflicted all her life, although writing Au Grand soleil cachez vos filles brought her some reconciliation with her roots through imaginative reconnection. Autofiction, Fiction, and a Sense of Adoption in Montreal Autofiction is one useful lens through which to approach Farhoud’s work. She can be said to have produced an autofictional corpus, in other words a work that problematises autobiographical identity through various literary techniques. It can be useful to distinguish between autofictional purpose and effect. In Farhoud’s case, the autofictional purpose is to highlight the multiplicity of identity that arises from high levels of transcultural experience. The autofictional effect of her literary works stems from the repetition of various autobiographical tropes. There is, for example, an array of exiled or bereft people, whether children, women, or men, who experience solitude, anger, and trauma, sometimes bearing the same names in different Farhoud texts. Toutes celles que j’étais features a character called Aablè and is a standalone autofiction. This enhances the autofictional effect of the other texts by retrospective action. That text also subtly echoes the very first Farhoud text, Quand j’étais grande, by including a similar title as one of its chapter headings, implicitly calling on the reader to activate the autofictional linkage. In Au Grand soleil cachez vos filles, a similar activation of connections by the reader is called for, when the title of Le Bonheur a la queue glissante is evoked in the comment that happiness has a smooth tail that is hard to grip on to: “le bonheur a la queue lisse, difficile à attraper et à garder” (Farhoud 2017, 77). All of this suggests that Farhoud was carrying out an autofictional dialogue with her readers, especially towards the end of her writing life. All her texts bear a hallmark emotivity, allied with a restless quest for answers about psychological motivation, or about challenges that require constant retelling in autofictional ways.

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Fiction as a liberating and creative practice was of vital importance to Farhoud, whether in the imaginative aspects of her more overtly autobiographical work or through her invention of characters in other texts. While many of her works are closely focused on her familial or personal experiences (as with her later writing and some of the earlier work), others are more overtly based on invention and imaginative connections with created characters. The works with the most invention arguably include the abovementioned play Les Rues de l’alligator and its companion Maudite Machine (2003, 2005b), Le Sourire de la petite juive (2011), parts of Le Fou d’Omar (2005a) and Le Dernier des snoreaux (2019), as well as Quand j’étais grande and Jeux de patience (1994, 1997a). Imaginative creation in the republic of letters gave Farhoud the most freedom to self-invent. This is evident in Le Sourire de la petite juive through her creation of a metatextual writerly alter ego named Francoise, from the historically established Francophone population, and through Farhoud and Françoise’s imaginative identification with the young Hasidic girl of the novel’s title, who herself benefits from imaginative identifications with people from other culture, through reading novels in French. Although—or perhaps because—she was an emblematic figure of écriture migrante, Farhoud also embodied key aspects of Québecness, in its propensity for change and its culturally mixed core, although she never felt fully Québécoise. Some of Farhoud’s texts move the mirror close to Québec society, with varying degrees of emphasis on encounters between different cultures, but transcultural encounters or experiences remain a guiding force. Le Fou d’Omar, for example, gives space to an open-minded Francophone who was born in Québec, Lucien Laflamme, who has sincere conversations with his Iranian neighbours and reads the Coran and Arabic poetry in French translation, with respect and admiration. Les Rues de l’alligator and its sequel Maudite Machine are deeply rooted in Québec in both content and register but are still infused with references to migration.8 In those plays, a recurring character to whom all of Maudite Machine is devoted, and who turns out to have a Ukrainian grandmother, bears the very French-Canadian sounding surname of Bélanger. Maudite Machine is relevant to Farhoud’s autobiographical experience despite its fictional quality, albeit metaphorically, as it is about the trauma of loss and displacement caused to a child in the adoption process, as well as the child’s anger towards her mother, and a complicated mother-­ daughter interaction. This has clear resonances for Farhoud, whose adopted society is Québec and who was taken from her “mother country”

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in early childhood and went on to have a fraught relationship with Lebanon. Like Sonia Bélanger’s daughter in that play, who is angry with Sonia for having rejected her (as she sees it), Farhoud felt both love and hatred towards Lebanon later in life. Its patriarchal society allowed her no space to belong there, since she was unwilling to conform to its terms. She felt disdained and spurned when Lebanese society could not accept her for the liberal young woman she was. Montreal itself (as adoptive, but also adopted, mother) and in particular her physical residence in the multicultural environment of Hutchison street was home for Farhoud. Despite incarnating much of Québec’s pluralist quality, she felt more of a Montrealer than a Québécoise, like Chawki in Le Sourire de la petite juive, and like another famous migrant writer, Régine Robin, whose 1983 novel La Québécoite described her inability to feel Québécoise. However, literature and writing were also home for Farhoud, in a very real sense. She belonged to her literary creations as much as they belonged to her or came to form part of her. She also found home and belonging in transcultural creativity itself. Nonetheless, the sense of home that filters through her works is shifting and constantly migrating. The following analysis of transcultural experience and encounter within Farhoud’s work will start with a short section on Le Bonheur a la queue glissante, before looking closely at the fictionally ethnographic exploration of cultural diversity in Montreal in Le Sourire de la petite juive. As one of Farhoud’s very Québec-focused texts—with a local focus on a single street, but also a translocal and connective emphasis—Le Sourire de la petite juive also explores the very personal challenge of navigating cultural constraints as a person from a minority culture, particularly through the persona of the Hasidic Jewish girl, Hinda Rochel Hertog. The discussion will then turn to the more directly autobiographical narrative Toutes celles que j’étais.

Le Bonheur a la queue glissante: Language, Displacement, Resilience, and Pain Farhoud’s first novel is a biofictional narrative that portrays some of her mother’s experiences through the fictionalised character of Dounia, through whose point of view the novel unfolds. The narrative focuses at length on cultural displacement as well as on oppression of women and on

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co-dependency in love. Dounia, a Lebanese-born mother, now an elderly grandmother, had to move between Lebanon and Québec throughout her life, whenever her husband Salim wished. Her life was shaped by migration, with little ability to self-determine in this world or to make her voice heard. Yet Le Bonheur a la queue glissante manages to rectify some of this lack, by filtering Dounia’s point of view through her writer daughter Myriam, and inserting Dounia’s favourite proverbs from Lebanese culture in various strategic ways. It is important to note the relationships between parents and children in this text, and the presence of the need to remember, record, and work through the lived experience of migration. The house in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante is a translocal space, connected to Lebanon by the Arabic language spoken by the mother and the father’s abiding nostalgia for his homeland, but resolutely part of Montreal through its physical location and through the Québec-inflected French spoken there by the children. The text highlights the author’s relationship with Arabic, but in a different manner to her plays or the other novels, since it pointedly sets Arabic separately from the body of the text in half a dozen pages of Dounia’s sayings and proverbs. These are rendered in the colloquial Lebanese form that would have been used by Farhoud’s own mother.9 The phrases are woven through the text in their French translation, but their greatest impact comes at the very end where they appear as a list in both the original Arabic and French translation, forming a fragmentary annex of enigmatic traces. Even more strongly than the snippets of Arabic in Farhoud’s other works, these proverbs form a block of heterolingual presence, assembled in Arabic script as well as en masse in French. Coming at this strategic point after the main body of the narrative, they assert Dounia’s worldview as well as her divided existence. On one level, the Arabic script emphasises Dounia’s foreignness within Québec. On another, Farhoud’s provision of a French translation for each of Dounia’s proverbs solidifies the reader’s sense of this Lebanese mother’s outlook on life as well as her claim to belonging in Québec despite her lack of mastery of the French language. The value of working through memories and past experiences is apparent for Dounia, but also from the point of view of her daughter Myriam, who is a writer like Farhoud. Myriam acts as ghost writer for her mother, taking it upon herself to record and portray her mother’s oral testimony about her life. Furthermore, through Myriam, and through her siblings and their offspring, the novel comments on youthful experiences of

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cultural mixing, although the main focus is on seventy-year-old Dounia. While the novel has much to say of universal importance, including about ageing, and about house-bound women who are parents and grandparents, it is a noteworthy account of immigration from the point of view of mothers who remain in the home largely cut off from the culture of the host society, and who are in that sense exiled from their children and grandchildren who have migrated linguistically and culturally away from them. Myriam transmits Dounia’s thoughts by encouraging her mother to tell her life story, which Myriam then writes down in French (29, 117). Through this, Dounia gains the chance to express herself after a lifetime of being silenced by patriarchal society (although paradoxically she has adapted much better to life in exile than her melancholy and nostalgic husband Salim), and after having been linguistically cut off from her now-­ French-­speaking children, who have lost most of their Arabic. She speaks very little French, and a large part of how she communicates her love for them and her grandchildren is through cooking Lebanese food.10 Dounia not only gets the chance to tell her story (through Myriam), but she grows in self-awareness through the storytelling process. The storytelling process permits this fictional daughter and mother to connect. It also allows Farhoud to relate to her real mother in fiction by inhabiting the consciousness she imagines for her, thereby negating the cultural and linguistic gaps that grew between them. The Lebanese Arabic sayings are a key element of the text on an autobiographical level. They highlight Farhoud’s influence by them while she was growing up, and her deep connection with her mother despite the barriers between them, which included having felt cut off from her mother tongue when French took over. Through the narrative consciousness she creates for Dounia, Myriam briefly expresses her own feelings of being cut off from her mother as they grew apart due to the child’s acquisition of a new language and education (24–25). There has been a flurry of interest in Le Bonheur à la queue glissante since approximately 2015, particularly to do with the older-aged female immigrant. This interest in the experience of older immigrants is a welcome development, yet some of the commentary has been overly celebratory. It is true that Dounia, the main character of the novel has had a laudable success in navigating her years as a stay-at-home immigrant mother, despite her many challenges. Although she cannot speak the language of the home country (and this has caused great harm to her), she

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retains a positive outlook throughout most of her life, shows deep love to her descendants, and provides a grounded home for the family. Dounia’s resilience is certain, but this does not diminish the challenges she faced, particularly towards the end of her life. It should not be forgotten that her children follow the Western practice of finding a nursing home for her when she becomes immobile, despite having vociferously declared at the start of the novel that they would not do so. In Toutes celles que j’étais, Farhoud recounts that her great-grandmother Sitté Héloué and other relations were housed by her real mother in her home, and that her great-grandmother was able to live out her life in the bosom of her extended family, with Farhoud and her siblings (Farhoud 2015, 128). By contrast, Dounia is left largely alone to face death, her children coming to visit her in the nursing home for fifteen minutes at a time, as though they were doing her a favour, as Dounia puts it (Farhoud 1998b, 157). In the final pages, we see Dounia no longer sure of who she is, living out her final days away from the family home that used to be her dominion. She describes herself in the third person as a woman who is a wreck (“Elle est assise”; “la femme-épave”), for whom only a railed-in bed remains, far from any of the homes that she has built for herself and her family (157–8). She contrasts her situation with that of her aunt in Argentina who died in her own bed, surrounded by her offspring and grandchildren, after a party they had organised for her 106th birthday. The Western cultural influences on her children have in this case contributed substantially to Dounia’s loneliness and relative abandonment. Language comes to the fore very strongly towards the end of the text. Dounia ends her narrative wistfully, imagining a scenario in a mix of tenses that suggests a near-death hallucination, or a fantasy of her heart’s desire that wishes for everything she had not had in her life in terms of communication with her children and husband.11 She starts by imagining herself surrounded by all her children and grandchildren, each speaking in a foreign language, which she can understand. The tense here is in the past: “parlait”, “comprenais” (“spoke” and “understood”), as though to erase any past linguistic obstacles to communication that have arisen due to transcultural circumstances. In the same passage, Dounia also imagines that after waiting all her life (which feels to her like a hundred years), she is finally asked by her sometimes-­violent husband to share a romantic tête à tête with him in a nearby café (and, in a very Western manner, a cappuccino). She fantasises that she would link arms with him and walk with him in the public space

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of the street, talking as equal to equal for the first time and receiving his compliments and gratitude for her contribution to his wellbeing and to their family. This is another expression of the desire for better communication, and a wish for respect, and it ends on a putative conditional tense: “il ferait beau” (the weather would be fine). This highlights the lack of reality of the imagined togetherness with Salim that Dounia has just set before us, and by implication therefore her loneliness. It is worth noting that this fantasy might not have arisen without the observations that arose from Dounia’s life in Québec where she witnessed equality and respect occurring between less patriarchally constrained men and women. Since Dounia is largely confined to the home and comprehends French poorly, what we see of her life mainly highlights language barriers and displacement. Her exposure to two cultures brings few concrete benefits for her as a traditional Arab woman, as she is fundamentally hampered by her lack of schooling and inability to converse in French (31–32). Myriam, the writer daughter, and a strong alter ego for Farhoud, who instigates the oral outpouring of these memoirs by prompting Dounia to tell her story to her, has had a much more empowering experience of cultural mixing. Her upbringing in Québec permitted female education and access to equality, and she was at liberty to express herself in writing. Myriam utilises her education and writing skills to write mainly about her mother, in order to give her the strong presence that her mother could not access on a societal level. Yet it is Dounia’s human presence that is foregrounded, not Myriam’s. As noted, the text does not end on Dounia’s impossible fantasy but is followed by echoes of Dounia’s voice in seven pages of the Lebanese Arabic proverbs that she liked to weave into her vocalised epigrammatic interactions with her family. As there is no narrative in these pages, Dounia’s subjectivity no longer needs to be filtered by Myriam’s rendering of her thoughts. Although the proverbs are an expression of a shared culture in Lebanon (and therefore suggest a collectivity and a homeland), they also reassert Dounia’s individual personhood. Since the sayings are her legacy, her ghost hovers around the poetic and sometimes paradoxical traditional epigrams, highlighting her personality and her distinctive way of communicating. Retrospectively, this section also allows Dounia a certain independence, as the sayings are given directly after she states that her husband did not like proverbs, with the implication being that his wishes were disregarded on this occasion (160). It can be considered a homage to Farhoud’s own

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mother, as a woman who made her mark through the love she expressed through cooking and the proverbs she passed down, despite having lived her life mainly in the home. It is also an expression of the importance of Lebanese Arabic in Farhoud’s relationship with her past, which will be explored in more detail in the discussion of Toutes celles que j’étais.

Le Sourire de la petite juive: Montreality, Transculturality, and the Portrait of a Street Transcultural encounter is a key element of Le Sourire de la petite juive (2011), including for the eponymous young person, Hinda Rochel Hertog, a young Hasidic Jewish girl, who in her daily life is locked away from cross-cultural mixing, but who finds possibilities for personal growth in the transcultural space of literature. This is facilitated by her neighbour, the writer Françoise, who leaves a book from Francophone culture for Hinda Rochel to find. The book is the famous 1945 text Bonheur d’occasion, by the writer Gabrielle Roy, which concerns a poor waitress in the working-class district of Saint-Henri, who longs to escape from her life of drudgery, as Hinda Rochel herself does. Françoise herself finds personal growth through carrying out research about Hasidic Jews and in the smiles that she shares with Hinda Rochel, as well as by identifying with her through her creative writing. In many senses, Françoise creates Hinda Rochel’s character (with author Farhoud as matriarch of this metatextual family), while still respectfully allowing her to remain impenetrable and a sense of autonomy.12 Montreal’s Jewish population is diverse (formerly the most populous in Canada but now second to Toronto). It arose from various waves of migration, from the eighteenth century onwards. Cultural creators known worldwide from the Jewish communities in Montreal include Leonard Cohen, Naomi Klein, the actor William Shatner of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk fame, and the iconic Montreal writer Mordecai Richler. There is also a Francophone Jewish presence, including from North Africa (Brabant 2017). Montreal’s ethnically mixed cuisine has been marked by Jewish culture in the famous Montreal smoked meat and bagels. Hasidism in Montreal was the subject of an important recent volume (Anctil and Robinson ed. 2019). The Hasidic presence in Montreal is made up of many separate communities (Boutros 2019, citing Pierre Anctil) and stems from migration after the Holocaust of World War Two. This is an important subtext of Farhoud’s novel, through the character of the

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traumatised grandmother Batseva, who is a striking reminder of the persecution of minorities worldwide, specifically in Batseva’s case the unspeakable attempt to annihilate the Jews during the Holocaust. Hasidic Jews pay attention to dressing in the manner of Polish Jews from the eighteenth century, not only as a way of showing their intention to preserve the devout spiritual climate of that time, but also to demarcate themselves visibly as different from modern secular practices. However, since the start of the second decade of the millennium, there have been attempts by the Hasidic community on Farhoud’s very patch of Hutchison street in Outremont to facilitate some understanding of its way of life, including a Facebook group called “Friends of Hutchison street /Les amis de la rue Hutchison” (Boutros 2019). Their first monthly get-together was in 2013.13 Given the novel’s publication date of 2011, it is possible that Farhoud’s writing contributed in some way to this rapprochement. It is noteworthy, that coming originally from an Arabic-speaking culture, Farhoud should choose to identify so empathetically and closely with the young Hasidic girl she invents, and it is also significant that she uses the persona of a writer from the historically established Francophone majority to strengthen that bond. It is a reflection on how marked Farhoud continued to be even in later years by the aspirations of transculture from the 1980s, where writers and thinkers sought to transcend and transform identities, initially through literature, but with aspirations to render society in general more open and inclusive. This was encapsulated by the resounding call to action by French-Jewish immigrant writer Régine Robin to focus on more than just ethnicity, in the aim of avoiding essentialisation: “sortir de l’ethnicité” (Robin 1992).14 A Dynamic Intervening Space The English title of Hutchison street has the great merit of highlighting the street’s symbolic importance in the novel. Farhoud herself was a long-­ term resident there. The street borders on the Mile End neighbourhood, which as Ignace Olazabal puts it, “synthesizes and symbolizes better than any other the city’s plural and hybrid social reality” (2006, 7). Similarly, for cultural critic and translator Sherry Simon, “if a neighbourhood can be said to have a sensibility, then Mile End’s has to do with polyglot interaction, passage and exchange” (2003, 118). Hutchison street also borders on Outremont, an area that is historically more Francophone than Mile End, but one that is also culturally mixed. The twelve-year-old girl of the

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title lives on Hutchison street in the contemporary era, but in many respects she is caught in the eighteenth or nineteenth century (the time of the birth of Hasidism), or even biblical times. The novel is divided into Mile End and Outremont sections, with a short chapter near the mid-­ point of the novel entitled “Interstice” providing the hinge between them. Woodsworth translates this as “Interlude” (2018, 143), which is appropriate, as the chapter provides a break from the consciousnesses of the characters to provide a brief history of the street. However, the word “interstice” would also be appropriate in English, as it can mean a small intervening space, in both French and English, although the word is much more commonly used in French. This is a useful way of considering the street, as Hutchison street “intervenes” in Montreal in the sense that it extends between two entities that can constantly be viewed from different starting points. The discussion below highlights the transcultural “Montreality” of the novel, emphasising positive interminglings and the richness of surprising encounters.15 In the “Interstice” chapter, the street is personified as a (female) character (to add to the other approximately twenty-five named characters in the novel who are allocated tableau-like chapters). In Judith Woodworth’s translation, the street is described as follows: “feet spread apart, caught between two stools, like the many immigrants who live in the neighbourhood” (Woodworth translation, 143–144).16 In the original French, this is “les pieds écartillés, le cul entre deux chaises comme beaucoup d’immigrants – qui sont d’ailleurs nombreux à y demeurer” (121). This “Interstice” chapter is a crucial one, given its emphasis on the street’s doubleness, and its ability to change and surprise. Farhoud describes the street’s self-transforming nature as follows: “De Sherbrooke à la gare Jean-­ Talon, métro Parc, Hutchison apparaît et disparaît plusieurs fois, presque jamais en ligne droite, comme le sont généralement les rues de Montréal. Capricieuse comme pas une, elle change de direction, devient sens unique à plusieurs reprises, vers le nord ou vers le sud, et redevient à double voie sans s’annoncer à partir de Fairmount jusqu’à Van Horne” (122) (From Sherbrooke Street to the Jean-Talon train station, which used to double as the Parc metro station, Hutchison appears and disappears several times. It never runs in a straight line the way streets often do in Montreal. Unusually erratic, the street changes direction several times, becoming one-way north or one-way south, and unexpectedly two-way from Fairmount to Van Horne, JW translation, 144). The street’s qualities are attributable to the energy effused by the strongly culturally mixed quality of the area, and

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the fluidity and shaking up of identity that comes with migration, along with the intermingling to which immigration exposes the majority culture. As Sherry Simon notes in the preface of her celebrated work Translating Montreal, Montreal moved in the last quarter of the twentieth century from a mainly French-English divide to enhanced pluriculturalism and an often-fluxional state of in-betweenness: “The once divided city has become a laboratory where new categories of identity are coming into being” (Simon 2006, xv). In the “Interstice” chapter, Hutchison street is described as “écartillée”, which has “divided” as one of its meanings, and this term certainly underlines the gulf that exists between the Hasidim and the non-Hasidim. However, “les pieds écartillés” in Québec parlance means “with feet stretched out” (or “with feet apart”), so it can have a neutral or even positive meaning in this context. In terms of the novel as a whole, Hutchison street is primarily redolent of mixing and of encounters, whether these be ephemeral or longer lasting like the text itself. Antonella Rossetti, an older lady and keen gardener originally from Italy is a joyous character in the novel, who quite literally makes her street bloom. In an autofictional moment by Farhoud, Antonella’s urban vines, like those of the other Italian families in the neighbourhood, are said to have made the Lebanese residents jealous (79–81). Nature provides a link to the southern Italian village of Antonella’s childhood, where she ran about barefoot as a child, like so many versions of Farhoud herself as a child in Lebanon across the works. This sunny Italian neighbour uses urban gardening to embed herself in growth, consolation, and hope. Antonella seems anchored in Hutchison street, just as her tomatoes root themselves in the local soil. She has the talent of seeing the bright side of everything: “tout prendre du bon côté” (82). The street is a place of vibrancy for Antonella, just as it is for Benoît Fortin, who is one of the first characters to be discussed. Although Fortin loves the solitary life, and feels best when working alone on his computer, even he likes to spend sun-filled days with the girls that he occasionally encounters in the neighbourhood cafés. The city of Montreal is what saves him from himself, and Hutchison street is key to his salvation. The main character, writer Françoise Camirand, also likes to live alone in her apartment, but her imagination and soul are nourished by the colourful goings on in the street. By contrast, Ron Kowalski, is associated with the wilds of the forest. He described as “sans patrie” (without homeland, or not belonging anywhere, 162). It is only in the forest, and therefore very pointedly not in the street, that he feels some sense of calm and of being

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in the right place. Yet he is one of the most sombre and tormented characters in the novel. While Ron’s personality means that he cannot find peace in the streets of Montreal and can only breathe easily in the forest, Antonella has been able to adapt to a particular type of urban nature. Like Antonella Rossetti, Jean-Hugues Briançon is an immigrant, this time from France, who throws himself into Montreal life and becomes proficient in Québécismes, like so many of the other characters. As noted by Anne de Vaucher Gravili, the use of Québec expressions by characters, whether from a migrant background or not, often seeks to emphasise that immigrants can be as rooted in Québec as any dyed-in-the-wool inhabitants (de Vaucher Gravili 2013). Linguistic vibrancy of other types is also evident. Several of the characters are trilingual or multilingual, speaking their heritage languages and/or other languages, as well as English, on top of French. The English language at times appears within a French sentence, if it is the best choice to express a given reality concisely. Despite this, linguistic ability is not portrayed as a pre-requisite for happiness. Sombre Ron is multilingual, but he feels homeless. His sunny counterpart Antonella Rossetti is less proficient linguistically, which might at first give her more of an aura of migrancy, but she in fact feels rooted where she lives, in strong contrast to Ron. In Antonella’s case, linguistic proficiency is less important than her sense of belonging and of blooming where she has been planted. There are several instances apart from the connection between Françoise and Hinda Rochel where characters allow themselves to be open to learning about, and indeed from, other cultures. Willa Coleridge, a pious, dance-loving Black lady who is a recurring character in two of the text’s chapters, is pan-spiritual and curious about others’ religions. Hershey Rozenfeld from the Hasidic community deliberately welcomes non-­ Hasidim along with Hasidim in his bakery-café. He chats with the gentiles and drinks beer with them, and even has an Arab business partner. That Arab colleague is from Lebanon, in an autofictional nod to Farhoud, as “partner” in the creation process. On a religious level, the text is deliberately respectful of all religions and cultures, and also of atheism. Hutchison street is described in the Interstice chapter as belonging to Yaweh, God, Allah and to those who have no religion, or prefer a secular approach (entre Yaveh, Dieu, Allah… et aucun des trois!, 123). On a broader cultural level, Madeleine Desrochers experiences a widening of horizons when her carer Nzimbo, a young girl from Togo, provides companionship

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to her. Together they have a powerful experience when they see Nzimbo’s village of origin appear on a computer screen via the Internet. The character of Tunisian-born Chawki who came to Montreal from France as a young man is particularly interesting, especially in autofictional terms for Farhoud. He and his French wife Isabelle have differing parental attitudes to their culturally mixed offspring in Québec. Isabelle would like Chawki to teach the children Arabic, wants them to have Arabic names, and is keen to take them to Tunisia on holidays, while Chawki initially keeps his children at a distance from his mother tongue. Perhaps in a reference to Farhoud’s own conflicted relationship with her Arabic-speaking heritage from Lebanon, he is initially too traumatised by a clan feud in Tunisia to be interested in the transmission of any emotional connection to his country of origin to his children.17 Yet, after the September 2001 attacks, he is so disgusted about being treated like a terrorist that he defiantly starts to teach the children Arabic, and Isabelle picks it up through listening to them. It is a challenge, but they have fun with the sounds, and the reconnection with the language causes Chawki to feel less melancholic. Like Dounia in Farhoud’s first novel, and like Farhoud herself, Chawki is a creative and accomplished cook of dishes from his native land. The tastes of home are the only thing he seeks to keep alive (“la seule chose qu’il gardait vivante”, 131), until he finally comes to view linguistic heritage as important. Chawki is described as not very “québécois” (131), and this hints at a similar feeling in Farhoud herself. Yet he belongs to Hutchison street, and arguably comes to a greater sense of belonging to his culture of origin too, by exploring his heritage. Transcultural Encounter Within the Pages of a Book: Smiles and Potential Connections An important expression in English in the novel is “by the book” (83), voiced by the title character Hinda Rochel Hertog. Eleven of the novel’s chapters are devoted to her, including the first chapter after the prologue. She is given a first-person voice and her perspective is set apart by italics. Hinda Rochel’s life is dictated by the written word through the Talmud and the Torah but her salvation lies in the ability to imagine beyond her constricted situation through reading French novels. She speaks English with her friends and Yiddish at home, and embraces the French language in reading and writing as a form of escape. She has a double first name, like the Anne-Maries and Sophie-Catherines in Farhoud’s other works, which

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is one of this dual-culture writer’s ways of highlighting to readers that a character may share some of her own situation or traits. Readers aware of Farhoud’s early autobiographical play Les Filles du 5-10-15c will understand how Hinda Rochel’s strictly gendered experience, feelings of imprisonment, and lack of self-determination echo the experiences of Kaokab and Amira in the 1986 play. Like Kaokab in Les Filles du 5-10-15c, Hinda Rochel immerses herself in novels and in reflections on her existence as much as she can to escape the monotony of her experience. Kaokab speaks into a tape recorder, echoing Farhoud’s attachment to vocalisation through her acting, whereas Hinda Rochel writes her diary (in French) as a space where she can be alone to work out her own thoughts. As with Aablè in Toutes celles que j’étais, French and a love of the beauty of words is presented as the child’s salvation, in a world governed by family, although unlike Aablè, Hinda Rochel is not an immigrant but was born and bred in Montreal. Those who come to Le Sourire de la petite juive after encountering Aablè in the strongly autobiographical Toutes celles que j’étais will have an even stronger sense of how Hinda Rochel reflects the author herself. Aablè’s Lebanese family is much more accommodating that that of Hinda Rochel in terms of encounter with the majority population, yet even in that narrative, as in all Farhoud’s texts, there is a pervasive feeling that one’s life is governed by a familial group. The only daughter in a family of sons, Hinda Rochel is the mother’s second pair of hands. As a typical Hasidic woman, the mother devotes her time to the painstaking preparation of kosher food, to lengthy cleaning activities, to looking after her family, and to the surveillance of what is deemed “impure”. The only time and space available to Hinda Rochel for self-determination is in the toilets of the house, where she can start becoming her own person by writing in her diary or seizing a few moments to read in French. Her religion, intensified by the gender constraints within it, means that she is not used to speaking for herself. Obedience, interdictions, and a fear of contamination prevail in the community she has been born into. Fortunately, the novels of French-Canadian writer Gabrielle Roy, originally from Manitoba, allow Hinda Rochel a window on a world outside her home, where she can identify with fictional characters and learn from them. She learns French in school from a supportive teacher, Madame Genest, and works hard to perfect her grasp of it so that she can read these novels, and also so that she can write in her diary without her parents understanding her. She longs to be able to escape into fictional worlds in

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literature, and ultimately to become a writer (127). The other main character, Françoise Camirand, encourages her, and offers her access to her store of books. Transformative encounters with members of the majority population therefore provide a lifeline for Hinda Rochel, as they later do for Aablè in Toutes celles que j’étais. However, due to great restrictions on Hinda Rochel’s life, the transformation remains at a nascent level. Françoise Camirand, Hinda Rochel’s unlikely twin, is the established writer who is writing the book we are reading. She is in some ways an even stronger alter ego for Farhoud than Hinda Rochel. Françoise is the most likely narrator of the prologue (although she is not named there, and its narrator could alternatively be the authorial persona of Farhoud herself). From the second chapter onwards, many of the chapters are devoted to the representation of Françoise’s consciousness in the third person, slightly more than those allocated to Hinda Rochel. The narrative always reverts to her perspective after a character or several characters have been portrayed, and the novel ends on her voice. By contrast with Hinda Rochel, Françoise, now in her mid-fifties (younger than Farhoud at the time of writing), had the freedom at the age of sixteen to escape her bourgeois family and stifling Montreal suburb. This was the same suburb of Saint-­ Vincent-­de-Paul, where the Aablè of Toutes Celles que j’etais and the real Abla spent most of her adolescence “imprisoned” as a salesperson in the family shop. Françoise spent time in Paris, like Farhoud, who herself resembled Gabrielle Roy in her trajectory of youthful acting, and studying theatre in Europe before returning to Montreal (in Roy’s case from London and in Farhoud’s case from Paris). Like Farhoud and Roy, Françoise returned to Québec to become a writer. She imagines the lives of her neighbours, and constantly reflects on the process of writing, noting when she is about to start on a new character and commenting on the joy of getting to the essence of another. She has lived in the same apartment on Hutchison street for thirty-nine years, and has seen the ethnic makeup of the street change to a predominantly Hasidic demographic. Early in the narrative, Françoise dreams that Hinda Rochel comes to her home, walking over to Françoise’s computer with a smile, and starting to type. Françoise reflects on how much they resembled each other in that dream. The novel often seems to be more about Françoise than about Hinda Rochel, expressing Françoise’s need to connect with other human beings through the medium of fiction, inspired by the neighbours in her street.

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Willa Coleridge has chosen smiling as a “way of life” (“elle avait choisi le sourire come mode de vie”, 28). Willa smiles at everyone she meets, despite being a deserted wife, and notwithstanding the racism and exclusion she is said to sometimes endure. She admires the dancing of the Hasidic Jews who are her neighbours, and is curious about their place of worship. As a highly spiritual person, she wishes to learn from them about their relationship with God. However, she is given a poor welcome when she sneaks in to the synagogue to take part in their Friday-night ceremony. She is thwarted by the inability of the women there to connect with anyone who is not part of their group. They are locked into the patriarchal rules that dictate their lives and keep them pure of non-Hasidic influence. Willa receives only two chapters of focus, but symmetrically occupies the fourth and fourth-last chapters. She is important for the connective instinct she embodies. A smile that Hinda Rochel bestows upon Françoise closes the text and gives the text its title. However, there is also a missing smile, when she does not dare to smile at Willa, due to feelings of being under religious surveillance. This is a comment by Farhoud on the limited nature of transcultural encounter currently open to Hinda Rochel. However, there remains some hope that, eventually, the novels of Gabrielle Roy, and the mental immersion in the French language and different worldview they entail, will give Hinda Rochel the courage to question some of the aspects of the life that has been imposed on her, and potentially to become more self-affirming and self-determining. The fact that Françoise gifts Hinda Rochel writings by Roy is deeply symbolic. Like many of the characters in the novel, who have either immigrated or left the suburbs of Montreal for the city centre, Roy moved from an initial place of origin. She came from Winnipeg and identified very strongly with migrants of all varieties. Hinda Rochel is not a migrant (although the Hasidim have a migrant background), but she is on the periphery, like many of Roy’s characters. Given the weight of restrictions upon Hinda Rochel, the hope for self-­affirmation and self-determination remains small, but what is crucial is that it exists, and that literature can start the process of enabling it. Despite the lack of transcultural openness in the synagogue, the novel is about making connections, often in an intergenerational manner or cross-cultural manner. These two aspects are combined in the nascent bond of friendship between Françoise and Hinda Rochel. This growing connection promises to last into the future, since Françoise lets Hinda Rochel know that she is always welcome to drop by to browse her

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bookshelves and to borrow her books. Hinda Rochel’s smile of potential connectivity is reflected in many of the other characters’ smiles and laughter (there are more than a dozen references to laughing and smiling in the text). Most commonly, these smiles emphasise the transformative powers of small moments of human connection. Smiles create many such instances in this novel, often in a surprising manner, such as those between the morbidly timid Jeannot Paterson and the normally angry Ron, or between the street lady Mme Groulx and the elderly Thérèse Huot who lives on her own. Yet while Willa Coleridge is the embodiment of smiling encounter, even she cannot pierce the closed group of the Hasidim. Only literature manages to do so, when the encounter with Gabrielle Roy’s fiction allows Hinda Rochel to go beyond the self and the self-group. In the main, smiling and laughing are used by characters to attempt to rise above their personal difficulties in this text and to maintain a positive perspective on life. The example of Antonella Rossetti has already been mentioned. There are some troubling or false smiles too, however: a man smiles as he sets a dog on Hasidic children, and a singer-songwriter undergoing a crisis of confidence cringes at his own smiling mask when attempting to appear natural to the media. Journalist Albert Dupras smirks bitterly when others react in shock to his vitriolic criticism of their artistic work, and later finds a vengeful actor smiling menacingly at him (60, 88, 171, 176), but Dupras also has a more connective, child-like smile, that few have seen (173). Although he may seem vitriolic, his behaviour can be explained by his bullied childhood and lack of positive encounter with others. His beautiful smile as a child was ignored when his peers focused on his ugliness, and has now become bitter and twisted. However, even Dupras is perhaps not beyond redemption, as a timidly sincere smile occasionally still emerges (173). The vibrant Madeleine Desrochers (“Madeleine, la rieuse”, 96) is an apparently minor character who is nonetheless vital to the meaning of the narrative, as she has had a difficult life but laughs a lot. In this she resembles Farhoud herself, who in her personal life often chose humour with a hearty chuckle as a way of connecting easily with others.18 A considerable portion of the encounters in the novel happen through music. Like Sylvain, the eighty-nine-year-old Marie Lajoie finds transcendence when she finds a young musician to sing the song that she has composed, and wants to leave as a legacy to the world. (True to her aesthetics of inclusivity, Farhoud can never be accused of ageism.) No doubt influenced by Farhoud’s years with her ex-husband Vincent Dionne and her

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two musician children, there is a striking emphasis on song and music running through Farhoud’s œuvre. For example, live music is a lynchpin of Splendide Solitude, and the girls in Les Filles du 5-10-15c love dancing to music on the radio. In Le Sourire de la petite juive, snippets of song pepper the narrative. The songs here are mainly by established musicians in Québec and from France, though at other times they seem to have been composed by Farhoud, as in the Marie Lajoie chapter. Farhoud has written songs with her musician daughter Alecka, as described in a newspaper article from around the time of the publication of the novel, which she did as a way of surmounting writer’s block (Siag 2011). Her musician son Chafiik is mentioned by autofictional association in the text, when journalist Albert Dupras is described as having a vocabulary that is wide-ranging enough to equal Loco Locass (“aussi riche pour accoter Loco Locass”, 172). The twinning of literature and music seems to be a natural fit. Readers are part of the channels of communication and of activation of the text, since they are given the task of activating and actualising the author’s words, including in the songs she composes, though they are free to follow their own imagined melody, whether in the song on the page, or in the narratives she creates. Mental Migrancies, Emotional Distress, and Transitional Life Stages Difficulties remain manifold in this novel, however, and cannot be entirely displaced by a buoyant attitude, despite the sense of nascent optimism at the end of the novel (itself countered to an extent by Willa’s experiences of exclusion from the synagogue). The challenges encountered by the characters and the ways in which some of them overcome their problems make much of the novel’s interest, but some struggles are particularly tenacious, such as the persistent mental illness of Jacinthe Beaulieu, alias Cynthia. There is a focus on mental health issues such as self-esteem problems and depression (as with Sylvain Tremblay, Tamara, Alain Pasquier, and Jeannot Paterson), and other mental illness such as Jacinthe-alias-­ Cynthia’s schizophrenia, Ron Kowalski’s eruptive anger problems, and Chawki’s mood-swings between melancholia and positivity. A particularly crucial point to note is that while some of the older characters such as Marie Lajoie and Antonella Rossetti take life in their stride, the darker example of Batseva the elderly Hasidic matriarch is a deliberate

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counterpoint. Batseva is haunted by survivor guilt in vivid nightmares, due to the devastating loss of her brothers and sisters in the Holocaust, which is described in her chapter as the unspeakable (“l’indicible”, 116). As noted, the largest wave of Hasidic Jews to come to Hutchison street was in the 1940s as a result of the Holocaust, which was notoriously an attempt to annihilate Jewish reality and culture that forced many Jews into migration in a particularly violent way. This sombre element of the novel cannot be ignored. Nor can the difficulties that Hinda Rochel is likely to face if she does question the closed protectiveness of the group into which she was born. Yet while the social constraints are extremely weighty in her case, she does have some hope of becoming a writer, and the mental freedom of reading. Despite the title’s emphasis on youth, there is also much attention to age and ageing. Farhoud was in her mid-sixties writing the novel. Many of her female characters are in their mid-fifties, one of the common turning points for both males and females, and also the age of menopause (although this is not spelled out) and male mid-life crises. Sylvain the “has-been” singer-songwriter is this age, and is constantly on the verge of tears until he finds someone to sing his songs. Ultimately a hopeful figure, his character reinforces the motif of transformative encounter in the novel. Through his connection with someone to sing his songs, he is also part of the novel’s dynamics of channelling oneself through others, just as Françoise Camirand, Gabrielle Roy, and Farhoud herself do through their creation of characters. Creative Solitudes, the Writing Process, and Autofictional Winks Despite the novel’s emphasis on connection between humans, Farhoud also suggests that time spent alone in writing and reflection can be extremely productive. Hinda Rochel savours the moments when she can be alone to write (in her diary at first, but with aspirations that this will turn into creative writing in the future). She is spiritually in exile from her group, and literature gives her a new home or homeland, a “patrie”. Without it, she would run the risk of being one of the “sans patrie” (those without a homeland), personified by Ron Kowalski. By contrast with Ron and also with Jacinthe and others who are marked by profound and unshakeable mental distress, Hinda Rochel gains a stronger sense of self through reading fiction and by producing her own reflective writing.19

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While Hinda Rochel has dreams of being a writer, it is unclear whether she will manage to escape any of the constrictions surrounding womanhood in her culture. At the very least, however, it seems evident that reading and writing will remain immensely enriching parts of her life. Roy’s character Florentine has become someone with whom she can connect. Equally, writing will allow Hinda Rochel to question her the constraints on her existence, and to reflect on the society that exists around and beyond her. Through transcultural encounter with Madame Genest and Françoise, and the possibilities opened by a different language, Farhoud seems to be suggesting that Hinda Rochel may gain the tools to brave cultural taboos and smile at others in other circumstances. As such, the young Hasidic Jewish girl crystallises the sense of world-expanding possibility that can come through connections with others, in this case a transcultural one with a neighbour from the majority Francophone population, with literature, and a foreign language. Françoise too has an inner drive to write. When her character Madeleine muses on the expressive power of a single image (“une seule image”, 101), in this case a visual image on a computer screen, Françoise clearly means to indicate that the mental images of literature are equally powerful. There are many reflections in the novel on the power of fiction, including writing-­ as-­ healing, and its truth or “vérité” (136). The restorative and even redemptive qualities of fiction are highlighted not only through Hinda Rochel but through Martine Saint-Amant, whose distress upon separation from her husband is assuaged by her enormous consumption of detective novels. Overtly autobiographical narratives are somewhat denigrated in the text, but readers aware of Farhoud’s life and preoccupations will nonetheless understand the autofictional resonance of Le Sourire de la petite juive within the œuvre, where autobiographical elements are filtered through female and male perspectives alike. Farhoud’s alter ego Françoise dismisses direct autobiography as unnecessary, although her editor and life-partner is constantly begging her to write one (136). At this point, Farhoud had not yet written the openly autobiographical text of Toutes celles que j’étais. In a metatextual process, Farhoud has the writerly character Françoise make the weighty and mischievous comment through the character of Madeleine Desrochers that she expresses herself entirely through her work (“elle s’exprimait entièrement à travers son œuvre”, 95). Here, the “she” of the sentence can refer to Madeleine, Françoise, and Farhoud herself.

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Male characters have been a strong interest for Farhoud since her radio play Apatride, which features a male and a female with different approaches to homeland, and soon after that in Quand le vautour danse, first produced in 1997, which hinges on a mentally distressed male. De Vaucher Gravili (2007) notes that the choice of the male voice in Le Fou d’Omar is a “migration” for Farhoud, but if this is case, it is one that she often favours. In Le Sourire de la petite juive, male-filtered vectors for Farhoud’s life include Benoît who loves working on his computer in solitude, and the French-born Jean-Hughes who chose to live in Québec, as Farhoud did on her return from Paris. Other male vectors for autofictional elements include Srully who loves to read and learn, and Sylvain’s sense of being a has-been (coinciding with a period of mental block for the writer immediately prior to the writing of the book and perhaps during it), and his artistic collaboration with someone to sing his songs, as Farhoud collaborated with her daughter. As noted, Chawki’s melancholy, his complicated relationship with Arabic, and his creative Arabic cooking also echo the author and her life-context. In a June 2019 conversation with me, Farhoud declared that she loved to cook Lebanese food, and particularly to come up with new dishes or combinations. Yet it is just as plausible that Farhoud may have put aspects of herself into her female Black character, Willa, who celebrates all the Québec traditions, French-speaking and English-speaking alike. Like Willa, it is likely that for Farhoud, her real place of belonging was Montreal, in all its diversity: “son pays, c’est Montréal” (32). At the end of the Madeleine Desrochers chapter, Farhoud seems to address the reader from her authorial perspective, wondering “between you and me” if it is really necessary to “tell all”: “entre vous et moi, est-ce vraiment nécessaire de tout dire?” (101). The next section of this study of Farhoud’s work looks at how she “tells all” (or much of her story) in Toutes celles que j’étais. In that text, acting allows a child caught between two cultures to become herself, just as the autofictional actresses who are allocated a chapter of Le Sourire de la petite juive radiate happiness when they meet others who love to act. Entering a world of resonant words and emotions through acting allows the actresses in Le Sourire de la petite juive to be fully themselves (“pleinement soi-même”, 92) and this is the case also for the Aablè of Toutes celles que j’étais.

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Toutes celles que j’étais: The Multiplicity of the Ever-reconfigured Self Toutes celles que j’étais relates the facts of Farhoud’s first twenty years the most closely of all her written production, although the writer has mischievously noted that some anecdotes are invented (St-Jacques 2015). In six sections of unequal length, it covers the departure from Lebanon aged six to be reunited with a father she has not seen for two years, and ends with the prospect of return to the country of origin. In the final pages, the narrator, barely out of her teens at the age of twenty, prepares to travel back to a place where the notion of home no longer seems to fit well. The confident freedom-loving child of the first sections runs barefoot from house to house on the red earth of Farhoud’s home village of Aïn-Hirshy in South East Lebanon, and vibrantly declaims a poem of adieu from a perch high in a tree. Fourteen years later she has become an anguished young person, who no longer knows who or where she is supposed to be. That young woman dreads a second exile to the land of her birth, yet longs to see her mother and those members of her family who are now living in Lebanon, where they have been waiting for her and her brother and father to return from Montreal. Separation, loss, and in-betweenness (in this case of a debilitating type) mark her young life. Toutes celles que j’étais deals with outsider status, multiple uprootings, and separation from family members and from things the narrator loves to do. The family moves house ten times in fourteen years, if one includes their arrival to Québec and their departure (57). However, the text also shows the excitement of the narrator’s discovery of the host country and of learning through reading and the love of words. It places a special spotlight on the thrill and deep sense of self-fulfilment that she gets from performing in school plays and Saturday radio programmes, and later from time to time as a paid television actress. The narrator must deal with some racism in terms of her appearance or background, as there is frequent mention of her slanted eyes or “yeux bridés”, and occasional attempts at exclusion, as in the “Mesquinerie” chapter, which translates as “mean-­ mindedness”. She sometimes faces ignorance from others: no-one knows where Lebanon is, not even a mayor she meets as a pre-teen. However, this life narrative also tells of many beneficial encounters with people in the host country, mainly with established Québécois, some of whom are her drama teachers, but also with immigrants like the narrator herself. Yet

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despite this, and despite her excellent French and knowledge of Francophone culture, the narrator nearly always feels like a foreigner. Repositionings and Displacements Although she is academically excellent and loves learning, the narrator often feels “déplacée” at school, a word that means “out of place” while also suggesting the idea of displacement. This sense of displacement extends to her life more generally, unless she is acting a role or practising for the dramatic productions that are her lifeline (58, 81). On some occasions, however, she feels accepted, for example when she is in the company of her best friend Carmen, whose bohemian family are also somehow marginal, or during the summer when she becomes the female child-mayor of the neighbourhood in Sainte-Rose, after impressing the local children by her decision to run for election and with her convincing campaign speech, aged eleven or twelve. Sainte-Rose was the place where she was happiest. She allocates almost one third of the text to her experiences there, although she loses her friendship with Carmen when she is taken out of school to work in the family shop at age fourteen. She is grateful when, in the “prison” of the family shop she is helped to practise her lines for her acting roles by the father’s employee Madame Chaussé, who shares her emotion and love for the beautifully written word. Madame Chaussé not only helped the family with their business but more importantly she loved them (“Madame Chaussé qui nous a aidés et surtout aimés”: 66). A brief moment of recognition of Aablè’s talents comes in the shop when she enjoys an affectionate hug with a customer who congratulates her on her wonderful rendition of a Québécois girl in a television series. Earlier on, she feels inspired to become an actress by the ever-smiling Sœur Marguerite at school. Yet she cannot fail to stand out as different, especially as there are only a few immigrant families in the series of French-speaking neighbourhoods that her father chose for his family out of respect for his adopted country. Most other Lebanese families depicted in the text chose English as the language with which they engage with Québec society and even sometimes with each other in the 1950s and 1960s Montreal that is presented here. The other Lebanese and Syrians are numerous but they generally live far away in non-Francophone neighbourhoods. There is just one family, that of Rachidi and Olga, who like the Farhoud family have chosen to live in a Francophone neighbourhood, yet Aablè feels different to them too.

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Crucially, they are settled in Québec, whereas the urge to return governs the Farhoud family’s life through the person of their nomadic and nostalgic father. Unlike the narrator, Rachidi and Olga do not experience any of the internal turmoil (or “tremblement intérieur”, 258) that bothers her so greatly after half of her family decide to leave for Lebanon. Aablè is not only different from the other Lebanese but sometimes set apart from her classmates also. Although she is an Orthodox Christian child, and one who would have grown up calling God “Allah” as both Christian and Muslim Lebanese do, the Catholic school gives her a place. Yet while Sœur Marguerite is a powerfully positive force in her life, she is made to feel different by some of the nuns, whose actions are not always based on welcome (accueil). One of them declares that she is not even Catholic (“elle est même pas catholique” [sic], 134), when she accomplishes the astounding achievement of winning the Catechism prize for the whole of Québec, as Farhoud herself did. Into her large and complex Lebanese family, are drawn extended family members who each have different and sometimes surprising relationships with Québec. The father’s cousin Fadlallah is a door-to-door salesman, or kashash, embodying the nomadic impulse that governs the family, but also showing the possibility of acceptance by the rural Québécois, who seem eager to hear about life in Lebanon, and who often invite him in for chats and cake (the local mincemeat tart called “tarte à la farlouche”, 132). The paternal uncle Georges arrived like Aablè in Québec the age of six, but he seems more integrated and settled, at least in what we see of him in this text. Like Aablè, he speaks impeccable French, but his accent is highly local, redolent of the isolated and far-flung Côte-Nord area of Havre Saint-­ Pierre where he was brought up with his sister and with his mother Jana. While Aablè has an Arab name, Georges’ name has become Frenchified, from the Lebanese Jérios. Georges/Jérios resembles Aablè’s father physically to a great degree but the two of them are otherwise very different, in terms of their relationship with Québec and their command of French. The father speaks very good French (better than his English, as Aablè notes), but he chooses to speak mainly English outside the family. This is despite his choice to transplant his family to a French-speaking environment out of solidarity with the Québec desire for independence, and out of friendship and respect, because of his gratitude for their welcome of many generations of his family (119–120). He turns out to have an inferiority complex about his command of French. The narrator even suggests that French is perceived as a less welcoming language than English (more

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demanding: “pointilleux” and “exigeant”, 63) and that foreigners are sometimes made to feel awkward in their attempts to speak it. The Havre Saint-Pierre area where Georges lived is surrounded by Indigenous territories, though this fact is not discussed in Toutes celles que j’étais. Jana herself, who brought Georges there, is given a full chapter of the text. She is described as a strong, independent woman, but one who was always described in terms of the males in her family, whether by reference to her father’s name (as Madame Farhoud by the Québécois) or to that of her eldest son, as is the Arab tradition. Farhoud here pointedly calls her by her forename to give her the individuality she deserves, emphasising it twice in the title chapter: “Jana, sitté Jana” (Jana, granny Jana). Jana ran a series of shops with great success and made the surprising and never-­ quite-­explained decision to bring two of her children up in Havre SaintPierre. She also has multiple properties and shops in Montreal, which her son Chafic goes on to run, and which provide accommodation for his family as he moves them from one Montreal residence to the next. Farhoud put the finishing touches to her final novel, Havre Saint-Pierre pour toujours, a few days before she died in December 2021 and it is due to be published in 2023 or soon thereafter. It will no doubt further explore the complexities of this fascinating and divided family, whose lives were governed by displacement and multiple migrations. The family’s relationship with Québec goes back to 1885 as noted in the chapter on Jana. Each generation of the father’s family has made the maddening decision to leave one of the family “at home” in their village in Lebanon, so that they are constantly pulled back to the country of origin. Jana herself was left in Lebanon by her mother who had gone to Québec, and she in turn left her son, Aablè’s father Chafic, to grow up in Lebanon without her. Both Jana and Chafic met their mothers as strangers for the first time as adults. This is explored in detail in the chapter entitled “L’émigration les éloigne, la télé les rassemble” (Emigration pushes them apart but they are all united around the tv). In the chapter on Jana, Farhoud notes the highly unsettled nature of her family, and wonders why the Lebanese people she knows always seem to want to leave the place that they are in (“Mais qu’est-ce qu’ils ont donc, ces Libanais, à toujours vouloir partir!”, 85). On the same page, Aablè wonders why on earth these Lebanese people always left a child behind in Lebanon, and asserts that it would be (or would have been) better to choose a homeland, once and for all (“Qu’est-ce qu’ils ont donc, ces Libanais, à toujours laisser un enfant là-bas? Rester ou s’en aller, un jour, il faudra choisir!”).

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While the pull of the home country is strongest on the father, Aablè also feels that her early childhood was amputated from her. The first chapters of the text showing her as a small child in Lebanon do not focus on any apprehension, but rather highlight the child’s excitement at seeing bayé (papa) after an absence of two years. This reflects how the child herself may have dealt with the impending departure by focusing on the idea of adventure. However, these pages also impart several abiding memories of the original homeland. Wimbush considers that Farhoud is “unlikely to have many firm recollections of the time she spent in her native village” (2021, 200). However, the first pages depict several very vivid sensory memories, even if they are not numerous. Each orchard in the Lebanese village has a name, and the little girl can pick as much fruit as she likes. Neighbouring women feed the child fresh warm bread and she can slake her thirst from the water in the gourds or “gargoulettes” outside every door. Furthermore, despite the brevity of the pages devoted to her time in Lebanon, the fact that her homeland has stayed with her emotionally is made very clear in her description of one of her first school plays in Montreal. The narrator remarks that to steady her nerves when starring in the production of Madame reçoit, she thinks of her home landscape when she closes her eyes. She can see the mountain in front of the orchard in her village, with its beauty, serenity, and immensity, and has the feeling that nothing bad can happen (“Je ferme les yeux et je vois la montagne en face du verger de mon village, la beauté, la sérenité, l’immensité. Rien ne peut arriver de mauvais, je le sens”, 74). Lebanon hovers somewhere behind her eyes, like a retinal image. Aablè and Aabla: Heterolingualism, Autofiction, and a Complicated Relationship with Arabic While Arabic is not as visibly present in this text as for example in Les Filles du 5-10-15c or Jeux de patience, or indeed in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante (albeit through absence and annexation in the 1998 novel), Farhoud’s choice of name for her narrating alter ego in Toutes celles que j’étais as Aablè neatly emphasises the importance of Arabic as a deeply personal linguistic heritage. While even Abla is a Latin-alphabet transliteration of an Arabic name that looks very different in Arabic writing, it can be transcribed in different ways, for example as Aabla. Indeed, she notes that her father named her for the beauty of the Middle Eastern ancient heroine of the Aabla and Aantar epic tale, which he would recount to her

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as a child (149). Yet what is most intriguing about the spelling of the narrator’s name as Aablè (and not Aabla or Abla) is that it reproduces the sound of the local pronunciation of the writer’s name in Lebanese Arabic. This emphasises her Levantine and specifically Lebanese roots, and underscores the writer’s attachment to the sonority of her name in Lebanese Arabic.20 The transliteration of her name reflects the sound of the parents’ voices and those of other family members, particularly Jana, calling her in that name (88). Its doubled vowel also highlights the existence of a written double—or rather many doubles—in her overall textual production, just as in Toutes celles que j’étais we see numerous variants of herself on a continuum. This double vowel also underlines the process of translation that must happen when attempting to render a linguistic reality, and indeed any lived reality, into a writing system, whether different to one’s normal writing system or not. The fact that Aablè is a deviation from Abla, but still the same name, highlights the autofictional status of this text. While, taken as a whole, Farhoud’s work can be considered an autofictional corpus, the 2015 text can be called a standalone autofiction. When applied to a specific text, the term “autofictional” means a narrative that is strongly autobiographical but that also emphasises the impossibility of ever easily summing up or simplifying what the self is (Cooke 2005). Autofictions often highlight the act of storytelling to show how it continually reconstructs the self. This criterion is met here also, complexified by Farhoud’s strong experience of encounter with different cultures in the development of her selfhood. Aablè is both Abla in many forms (“toutes celles que j’étais”: all the females figures that I was) and at the same time never quite her. The self is continually slipping into something else, as a performer or actor might take on a new role, just as Farhoud herself did as an actress for many years and again through her writing. People with exotic names are often asked what their names mean in the language of their home country. As Abla is an Arabic name and Arabic has so many linguistic subgroupings, dictionaries of names should be approached with caution. An online search from November 2022 shows dictionaries giving the meaning of Abla as a girls’ name that signifies “well rounded” or sometimes “full figured” or “perfectly formed”, occasionally giving Swahili roots as “wild rose”. However, a 2019 Radio Canada interview included a clip from a 1986 interview in which Farhoud told listeners that her forename meant “beautiful eyes” (Bouchard and Pleau 2019). The Aabla of the Aabla and Aantar epic no doubt had beautiful eyes, as

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this folktale heroine is described by the father in Toutes celles que j’étais as the height of perfection. In any case, it is important that the name of Abla or Aabla is not merely her own name but one from a story (in this case an epic tale) that her father told her in moments of closeness and affection. This highlights the formative importance of stories and storytelling from multiple cultures in her writerly consciousness. As befits a text in the tradition of migrant writing, storytelling in Toute celles que j’étais is not fully linear. Antonia Wimbush highlights its temporal shifts and the fact that it tends to follow the vagaries of memory, despite broadly following a chronological timeline (Wimbush 2021). An important example of this is the fifth chapter, “Le Temps arrêté” (Suspended or arrested time). It breaks the linear chronology early on, showing the adult narrator on what could be either her first return to Lebanon fourteen years after her first departure as a child, or her visit to Lebanon in 1992 a few years after the civil war had ended (twenty-three years after leaving Lebanon in 1969). In either case, a long period of separation from Lebanon has occurred, and the narrative may in fact conflate both returns. The autobiographical or emotional truth of the events described are more significant than the facts of specific dates in this instance. The pain of having lost Arabic is evident during this fifth chapter. The narrator says she has forgotten a key incident where she climbed into a tree as a six-year-old to recite a poem to the villagers to say goodbye when she was leaving for Montreal. A wave of intense emotion returns to her when she hears her interlocutor saying the words of the poem, presumably in Arabic. She is suddenly transported in time to the period of departure that had got stuck (“arrêté”) inside her. Her grasp of the Arabic language is now too poor to be able to tell the villagers that she felt obliged to forget some aspects of her early life in Lebanon for reasons of psychological survival, and that as a child she repressed her memories despite herself (“malgré soi”, 25). Child blends into adult emotionally here, and also structurally in terms of the juxtaposition of the chapters. Later, she notes that her deep despair at being taken out of school in her early teens might be explained in part as a delayed reaction to her first exile (166). Language is a site of displacement (from Arabic) as well of self-­recreation (through French) in this novel. The reason why Aablè can only speak broken Arabic to the villagers in Lebanon is because her single-minded focus on the French language in Québec meant that her Arabic never progressed beyond basic household contexts, and she became cut off from her parents’ conversations in Arabic. She and her sister attended language classes

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in Arabic on almost the same basis as English-language classes, as though it were a foreign language. Her language loss or linguistic inadequacy in Arabic is evident when the Syrian Orthodox priest Père Zarbatany comes to dinner at their house in Montreal. She is ill-equipped to deal with this translingual situation, and requires a French translation of his commentaries in Arabic on the Oriental philosophers (186). While Arabic has become foreign to her in many ways, it still haunts the text. Two chapter titles foreground the Arabic language, and references to it are scattered through numerous other chapters in the text, as heterolingual elements. They often pop up in unexpected places, for example in the chapter she devotes to her best friend Carmen. They seem out of place in that chapter and are set apart from the narrative of their friendship, yet their intrusion reflects the abiding duality of Aablè’s cultural environment. Heterolingualism is also used to highlight expressions in Arabic that indicate the patriarchal nature of Lebanese society. This is most evident in the chapter entitled “Quand tu seras grande” (When you grow up), which follows the depiction of the child running freely barefoot from house to house in her natal Lebanese village, untrammelled by any existential doubts. Echoing the title and content of Farhoud’s first play, Quand j’étais grande, which bore witness to oppression of women in Lebanon, seven-­ year-­old Aablè is innocently dancing while singing a song in Arabic, and is warned by her father that, as a woman, she will no longer be able to dance with such abandon.21 The words “charmouta” (prostitute) and “aayb” (shame) come back to the adult narrator in that chapter. This marks Arabic early on as a language where women are disenfranchised and sexually stigmatised. Similarly, in her “Quatorze ans” (fourteen years old) chapter, the narrator muses that for many years she thought there was no word for vagina in Arabic, until she read erotic Arabic tales in French translation (169). In the “Artéfacts” chapter, the narrator recounts how she found diaries from her girlhood, noting that there is not a single word of Arabic in those diary pages. It is as though when consigning her thoughts to paper the teenager had deliberately chosen to exclude Arabic, and to focus on the freedom of self-expression that she associated with her acting roles in the French language. A patriarchal attitude is also associated with Arabic through the father’s imposition of monolingualism in that language on his wife. While the father speaks some French and English as well as his language of origin, the mother, Zahra, is largely confined to Arabic and has only very broken French. In the chapter on the children’s school reports (“M’ma et le

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bulletin de fin d’année”), it emerges that Zahra was not allowed to learn French by her husband, as he wished the children to learn Arabic from her (98). Chafic does not reckon with the weight of the French-speaking external environment, where Arabic is given no place, so that it seems destined to become a lost language for his children in any case. The result is the worst of both worlds: Zahra cannot integrate linguistically and culturally, and she and her children lose their ability to communicate deeply through a common language. While it is laudable that Chafic wished his offspring to retain a linguistic connection with their cultural roots, he has no regard in this instance for his wife’s personal happiness or autonomy. His decision views her solely in terms of what she can hand down to her children linguistically. Aablè describes her mother as an imprisoned princess (121). In-betweenness, Acting, and Multiplicity Multiplicity of identity is a key motif in the text, and in Farhoud’s work more generally. Like Aablè, many other female characters in Farhoud’s writing have names that are double in some way, like the young girl Anne-­ Marie in Les Filles du 5-10-15c who is a literary double for the Libano-­ Québécois girls in that text, and who serves to emphasise their stolen youth by contrast with her own freedom. Sometimes these names are drawn from encounters in Farhoud’s life. Toutes celles que j’étais notes that Anne-Marie was the name of Farhoud’s first character for television, when she played the non-immigrant daughter of actors Béatrice Picard and Paul Hébert in a television series (231). Retrospectively, the young Anne-Marie of Les Filles du 5-10-15c, takes on an autobiographical tinge despite being a girl from the majority population, as just one aspect of the multiple identities that Farhoud was able to access through acting. The name Anne-Marie is important in a significant moment in the 2015 narrative that allows Farhoud to express her love of acting and at the same time a brief feeling of being accepted as a Québécoise. In the chapter entitled “Le lendemain d’un jour heureux” (the day after a day of happiness), which is set one day after her first appearance on the series, a customer from the majority Francophone population comes into the shop and casually remarks to her how much the new little girl in the television series resembled Béatrice Picard, her on-screen mother. He does not initially realise that she is the girl on the television, since she has fallen back into the drab identity that she assumes in her shopkeeping role. The man

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is open-minded and warm, and upon realising his mistake he delightedly hugs her and gives her a kiss, amid a plethora of Québécismes that highlight his localness. The chapter ends on a note of longing but also of identification, and Aablè notes that she felt like his granddaughter whom he had not seen since at least last Christmas (“Je me sens comme sa petite-­ fille, qu’il n’a pas vue depuis au moins Noël dernier, et lui mon grand-­ papa”, 239). Here, Aablè momentarily falls into the role of the man’s grandchild, provoking reflection in the reader that this young girl is in fact very anchored in Québec. She spoke and acted so well and naturally in French that nothing in her stage persona indicated that she was born in Lebanon. Yet for Aablè, the relationship with Québec is still problematic, as she is still imprisoned in the shop, and only rarely able to escape into the identities of her choice. She is only Anne-Marie when she is free to act that role. This customer does not expect the girl serving him to feature on his television screen, but perhaps he also does not expect a Lebanese-born child to be able to play this kind of role, or to be given it at all. Farhoud notes that there were no roles for immigrants as immigrants in the Québec of the 1960s, and the closest she ever got was to play First Nations girls (“des Indiennes”, 227), due to her exotic appearance with her plaited dark hair and slightly slanted black eyes. In the previous chapter, Farhoud claims that one of the reasons that there were so few immigrants who acted in French was that some were denied access to French-speaking Catholic schools by Catholic school boards, with all the potential racism that this denial implies (227). (The historical situation is more complicated than this, since some Catholic parents preferred their children to study in English, and Catholic schools were set up for them in that language, and programmes in their mother tongue were also made available.22) Whatever the case, many immigrants did not speak French well enough to be able to act in French-speaking roles. Farhoud notes that her experience as a fifteen-year-old in 1960 came seventeen years before la loi 101 (Bill 101), the 1977 law that requires immigrants and Francophone inhabitants to attend school in French if they are attending the state school system. Chapter 4 of this volume discusses the huge change brought about by la loi 101, focusing on works by Anita Aloisio and Akos Verboczy. For the eight years until she was taken away from school at the age of fourteen, Farhoud created her Québec self, by throwing herself into the French language and through her acting roles in school theatre, drama class, and her Saturday radio appearances. Yet her existence remained

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defined by in-betweenness. Eschewing any one meaning of her name, Farhoud reasserts herself as a citizen of the world by displacing the meaning of the name Abla to the éwé language of Togo, where it supposedly means “Tuesday”. These reflections occur at the end of the chapter about a life-changing phone call (entitled “L’appel qui change une vie”), where she has just described how she telephoned the auditions department of Radio-Canada at the age of fifteen, in desperation to be able to act again after a year spent away from acting in her family’s haberdashery shop. She comments that Tuesday, her namesake day, is a day that is situated between the others, somewhere in-between but neither at the beginning of the week, at the end, nor fully in the middle. She identifies with its existential search for a place to call its own (“à faire sienne”, 213). Here she underlines the identity crisis of her adolescent self, imprisoned as an unwilling salesperson in a Lebanese family shop and largely isolated from the Québec society she wanted to be part of. Importantly, however, she has come to accept and indeed embrace that sense of décalage or in-betweenness as an adult. True to her careful attention to language, Aablè reflects on the word “aise” in relation to acting. She remarks that it has an etymological link with the idea of an empty space beside somebody. This is corroborated by the web glossary of the France-based Centre national de recherches textuelles et linguistiques. She remarks that she was a hundred thousand times more at ease (“cent mille fois plus à l’aise”) in her acting roles than in her shopkeeping role (231). Through her acting, she fills an empty space beside someone (herself), and that empty space is proteiform. For this avid student, the empty space may at times feel like the lost happiness of school-­ attendance, or it may seem like the space of the lost homeland. On other occasions, the empty space that needs to be filled might have been dug out by her ebbing self-confidence, or perhaps even a house-move that causes a feeling of something that is missing. However, acting allows her to step into the different empty space of the role, and to be fully herself, and at ease, momentarily, by inhabiting a space to be filled. In an interview with Le Devoir newspaper at the time of publication of the book, Farhoud spoke of her sense of permanent traumatism because of her various exiles, but stressed the initial departure above all: “Quand tu pars une fois, c’est fini. Tu te retrouves à jamais en décalage avec toi-­ même, avec ton identité, fragmenté, à la recherche de quelque chose qui n’existe plus, et ce, jusqu’à ce que tu finisses par ramasser tous les morceaux qui te composent, toutes tes identités, pour former un autre toi et être en

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paix” (Deglise 2017). (Once you’ve left [your country] once, that’s you done for. You end up fragmented, for ever out of synch with yourself and with your identity, looking for something that no longer exists. And you will go on doing this until you finally gather up all the little pieces that are part of you, that make up your identity, so that you can create a new you, and be in peace.) Yet beyond the initial emigration, there are many other exiles in this narrative—psychological, social, linguistic, and familial—and the important exile from Québec at the end of adolescence. All have had their effect on the writer’s sense of looking for something that she has lost, and attempting to understand that sense of loss. Constant Migrations and a Productive Instability For several years, Aablè lives in dread of the return to Lebanon before she reluctantly goes to live in the country of origin, accompanied by her father and brother, to be reunited with her mother and the rest of the family there. Her anxiety is understandable, as she will be leaving behind her acting hopes and dreams in Québec to live in a new country that is nominally hers but to which she does not feel she belongs. She does not speak the language well, and the practices and cultural codes of Lebanon are alien to her. What she does know of those codes speaks of the oppression of women, embodied in the figure of her mother. Her anxiety also seems to have been aggravated by the father’s nostalgia, and his constant restless uprooting of the family, which heightened her personal sense of displacement as a child. The narrator’s confidence is at a low ebb by the end of the text. Something has been broken in her, and she no longer trusts that she can determine her own future. There is no comparison between this anguished young woman and the child who embodied freedom running on the red earth of Lebanon, nor even with the carefree child of seven who danced to an Arabic song in her Montreal home. It is difficult to say whether her depressed state is more because of the dispiriting mental no-man’s land to which her father subjected her when they were waiting to return to Lebanon for two years, or because of the four years spent in the family haberdashery, cut off from most normal teenage activities, or because she is leaving behind her acting career that was her only escape route into self-­ invention, or because of her fear of what awaits. In any case, Lebanon is very emphatically her father’s country, and the atmosphere is highly oppressive at the close of the novel. The title of her

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autobiographical sequel is prefigured by the narrator’s closing description of her male-dominated country of birth, in the very last words of Toutes celles que j’étais, as the country of her father, where women are hidden away (“le pays de mon père, là où on cache les filles”, 302). Québec had become her second childhood homeland, her “deuxième pays d’enfance” (301) but a new exile awaits. The belonging that Aablè feels is now much less to Lebanon than to Montreal, just as Farhoud’s writerly alter ego Françoise in Le Sourire de la petite juive is imbued with the multicultural energy and kinetic possibilities of her street. Farhoud’s life and work were constantly migrating. She crossed creative categories with ease, moving from playwriting of both autobiographical and fictionalised types to biofiction (Le Bonheur a la queue glissante) to the more strictly novelised form of Le Sourire de la petite juive and later back to an autobiographical but still fictionalised writing in Toutes celles que j’étais.23 I have emphasised her highly connective approach, particularly in Le Sourire de la petite juive, informed by the aspirations of the transculture movement of Québec in the 1980s and 1990s, where reciprocal cultural exchange was seen as richly transformative. She creates a space in literature where characters have a distinct Montreality, in the sense of a multicultural vibrancy. As a writer of migrant background, she is much more than the sum of her parts or her biographical reality, although her lived experience of displacement and self-reinvention informs her humanistic perspective. Through empathy and the creation of an affective space, Farhoud demonstrates connections between individuals who outwardly seem to have unreconcilable differences such as Françoise and Hinda Rochel, and provides readers with the opportunity to access such consciousness in fiction. The characters in Le Sourire de la petite juive are most fulfilled when they go beyond themselves to create friendship and companionship, including those of different ethnic backgrounds to themselves. While this sometimes breaks down, as when Hinda Rochel is afraid to smile at Willa, Françoise and Hinda Rochel have an easier connection through literature. Most importantly, Farhoud shows the potential of reading and of creative writing to be strongly transcultural acts, where the self is allowed to be affected by others in literary encounter.

Notes 1. See Chap. 1 for more discussion of the role played by discussions around transculture in the development of écriture migrante.

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2. While Le Bonheur a la queue glissante has been translated into Italian, as of mid-2023 only a partial translation into English of this novel exists. Jill McDougall has translated sections of Le Bonheur a la queue glissante as “Dounia-a-World” for an edited volume of Arabic-Canadian Women Writers (Farhoud, trans. Jill McDougall 2002, 46–67). McDougall has also translated some of Farhoud’s plays to English, including Game of Patience and The Girls from the Five and Ten for anthologies of plays by women (Farhoud, trans. Jill McDougall, 1988 and 1994), and When I was Grown Up (Farhoud, trans. Jill McDougall 1990). For details of more translated Farhoud works see McDougall (2000). 3. The stagename of Farhoud’s son Mathieu in the group Loco Locass is Chafiik. The “i” in this name is perhaps symbolically doubled in reference to Abla’s larger-than-life father, whose name is spelled Chafic in Toutes celles que j’étais and who features strongly in her work. 4. Like the narrator of Splendide Solitude (Farhoud 2001), Farhoud had a musical husband, but has two children, not three, and a different physique and family context. On this 2001 novel, see Maddox (2010). 5. In August 2020, following an explosion of military-grade ammonium nitrate in the port of Beirut that killed more than 200 people, more than 50,000 people signed a petition to reintroduce the French protectorate, protesting against the Lebanese state’s mismanagement (Pollet 2020). 6. In Jeux de patience, the name of the first village mentioned is that of the father’s village in Lebanon, also mentioned in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante: Bir Barra. 7. Farhoud’s unpublished radio play Apatride for CBC was translated into English in 1997 by Shelley Tepperman (see http://shelleytepperman. ca/wp-­content/uploads/2015/06/translations.pdf Site accessed 20 February 2023). 8. Les Rues de l’alligator and Maudite Machine are particularly full of Québécois expressions and transliteration of accent, having been written for actress Nicole Leblanc. 9. In an interview with me in June 2019, Farhoud confirmed that these were Arabic sayings she heard from own mother. They resonated both within her house and in her memory of childhood. 10. On the importance of cooking as a practice and as a metaphor in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante, see Pruteanu (2016). 11. On difficulties of communication more generally in Farhoud’s work see McDougall (2000, 138). 12. Metatextuality, a self-referential literary device, concerns the relationship between a text and itself, or another text. 13. Magdaline Boutros remarked in her Le Devoir article of 28 September 2019 that a “soukka” (a temporary cabin erected for the feast of Sukkot)

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had been erected in an Outremont park and made accessible to people outside the Hasidic community. Below are details for the first monthly get-­ together of the Friends of Hutchison street, which took place in July 2013 in a library of the Plateau Mont-Royal as part of an attempt to familiarise Montrealers with some elements of Hasidic culture: https://www. facebook.com/events/144428195752270 Site accessed 03 September 2013. 14. Régine Robin, born Rivka Ajzersztejn in 1939 was a French Jewish writer, historian, and intellectual from Paris, of Polish immigrant parents, who immigrated to Montreal and became a key part of the discussions on écriture migrante and transculture in the 1980s and 1990s and remained an intellectual force of nature until her death in 2021. She was a native speaker of French, which she spoke with a Parisian accent in Québec, and she was Ashkenazi Francophone not Ashkenazi Anglophone, as most Jews of Ashkenazi origin in Montreal are (Waller 2008). She also knew and loved Yiddish. As such, she was an ideal candidate to speak of difference and to decry essentialisation. She was hidden as a French Jewish child during the Nazi occupation and lost numerous relatives in the Holocaust. Farhoud’s first play, Quand j’étais grande is from the same year that saw the publication of Robin’s La Québécoite, 1983. Both grandes dames passed away in 2021. 15. Farhoud noted in a press interview that she enjoyed working with “la forme courte” (brief narratives) for the series of short portraits in this text (Lapointe 2011). As De Vaucher Gravili notes, her Montreal tableaux seems like the material for a plethora of potential novels, as though to reflect the possibility of multiple more encounters in Hutchison street, and in the city more generally (De Vaucher Gravili 2013). 16. Some of the translations in my discussion of Le Sourire de la petite juive are by Judith Woodsworth from her 2018 English translation, Hutchison Street (Linda Leith Publishing: Montreal). Where this is the case, they are indicated in the body of the text as “JW translation”. 17. Despite her conflicted feelings about Lebanon, in a conversation with me in June 2019, Farhoud noted with pride that her children were both very positive about having an Arabic part in their names, as Farhoud-Dionne. 18. The 2019 interview with Serge Bouchard and Jean-Philippe Pleau presents Farhoud listening to a recording of herself as a young woman. She noted how quick to laugh, or “rieuse”, her younger self was, and remarked with a chuckle that even in later years she had not forgotten how to laugh. 19. For the importance of the theme of reading in connection with transcultural encounter and youth in works by Azouz Begag, Maryam Madjidi, and Laura Alcoba, see my companion volume on France.

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20. I am grateful to Dr Jonathan Kearney of the School of Theology, Philosophy and Music of Dublin City University for the information on the sound of the name Abla as Aablè in Lebanese Arabic. 21. Like many Farhoud plays, there was a gap between the first production of Quand j’étais grande and its publication. It was written in 1982, produced in 1983, and published in 1994. 22. The religious-based governance of the school system in Montreal ended in the late 1990s. Robert Gagnon’s detailed 1997 article emphasises that the Catholic School Board (Commission des écoles catholiques de Montréal, or CECM) provided schooling in English from the time of its foundation in 1846. This included bilingual French-English programmes but also completely English schools. From its inception, the CECM catered to the demand for Catholic schooling in English by immigrants, including Irish people fleeing the Great Famine in the 1840s and 1850s (Gagnon 1997, 122). In later years, the numbers of children in Catholic schools receiving instruction in English were swelled by the considerable proportion of the Italian community who wanted English-language schooling, particularly post-1930, when the demand for instruction in English rose among all immigrant communities (op cit., 129–31). The CECM also provided instruction in the mother tongue of immigrants during the first two years of school in the more cosmopolitan districts. Gagnon’s point is that the CECM did make linguistic accommodations, and that these were motivated by the wish to avoid apostasy and loss to the Catholic religion, which could occur if Catholic immigrants defected to the mainly English-speaking Protestant school board (op. cit., 129). 23. Au Grand Soleil cachez vos filles is much more novelised than Toutes celles que j’étais. Through a narrative perspective that is split between four different main characters, it deals with Farhoud’s painful return to Lebanon for four years at the age of twenty. Writing this novel was in many ways a cathartic but fraught reconnection with the country for the author (see her interview with Delisle and Tézine at the Cégep Edouard Montpetit in Longueuil, Québec (Delisle and Tézine 2018)).

References Anctil, Pierre, and Ira Robinson, eds. 2019. Les Juifs hassidiques de Montréal. Montreal: Presses universitaires de Montréal. Bouchard, Serge, and Jean-Philippe Pleau. 2019. Entrevue Abla Farhoud: son livre Le Dernier des snoreaux. Radio Canada. 02 June. https://ici.radiocanada.ca/ohdio/premiere/emissions/c-est-fou/episodes/435210/audiofil-du-dimanche-2-juin-2019. Accessed 19 February 2023.

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Boutros, Magdaline. 2019. Apprendre à connaître les juifs hassidiques. Le Devoir. 28 September. https://www.ledevoir.com/lire/563497/essai-apprendre-aconnaitre-les-juifs-hassidiques. Accessed 03 September 2023. Brabant, Annick. 2017. Les séfarades de Montréal, une présence juive francophone. Ville de Montréal. Mémoire des montréalais. 02 June. https://ville.montreal. qc.ca/memoiresdesmontrealais/les-­sefarades-­de-­montreal-­une-­presence-­juive-­ francophone#. Accessed 02 September 2023. Carrière, Marie, and Catherine Khordoc. 2006. Deuils au pluriel: sur deux textes d’Abla Farhoud. Voix et Images 31 (3): 105–125. Cooke, Dervila. 2005. Present pasts: Patrick Modiano’s (auto)biographical fictions. Rodopi: Amsterdam and Atlanta. De Vaucher Gravili, Anne. 2013. Le dernier roman d’Abla Farhoud. Le Sourire de la petite juive. Publifarum 20. https://www.farum.it/publifarum/ezine_articles.php?art_id=251. Accessed 12 February 2024. Deglise, Fabien. 2017. Rencontre avec Abla Farhoud, femme rapaillée. Le Devoir. 29 April. https://www.ledevoir.com/lire/497456/rencontre-abla-farhoudfemme-rapaillee. Accessed 03 September 2023. Delisle, Monique, and Anne-Marie Tézine. 2018. Montpetit entretien, Abla Farhoud. 26 September. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fMnC5_K6_ wM&t=13s. Accessed 19 February 2023. Farhoud, Abla. 1994. Quand j’étais grande. Limoges: Le bruit des autres. ———. 1997a. Jeux de patience. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. ———. 1997b. Quand le vautour danse. Carnières: Lansman. ———. 1998a. Les Filles du 5-10-15c. Carnières: Lansman. ———. 1998b. Le Bonheur a la queue glissante. Montreal: Typo. ———. 2000. Immigrant un jour, immigrant toujours ou comment décoller une étiquette ou se décoller de l’étiquette. In D’Autres rêves. Les écritures migrantes au Québec, ed. Anne de Vaucher Gravili, 45–58. Venice, Supernova. ———. 2001. Splendide Solitude. Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Hexagone. ———. 2003. Les Rues de l’alligator. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. ———. 2005a. Le Fou d’Omar. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. ———. 2005b. Maudite machine. Trois-pistoles: Éditions Trois pistoles. ———. 2011. Le Sourire de la petite juive. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. ———. 2015. Toutes celles que j’étais. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. ———. 2017. Au Grand Soleil cachez vos filles. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. ———. 2019. Le Dernier des snoreaux. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. Farhoud, Abla, and Trans. Jill McDougall. 1988. The girls from the five and ten. In Plays by women: An international anthology. Book 1, ed. Françoise Kourilsky and Catherine Temerson, 103–159. New  York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications. ———. 1990. When I was grown up. Women and Performance 9: 120–143.

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———. 1994. Game of patience. In Plays by women: An international anthology. Book 2, ed. Françoise Kourilsky and Catherine Temerson, 37–84. New York: Ubu Repertory Theater Publications. ———. 2002. Dounia-a-World. In Voices in the desert: An anthology of Arabic-­ Canadian women writers, ed. Elizabeth Dahab, 46–67. Toronto: Guernica Editions. Farhoud, Abla, and Trans. Judith Woodsworth. 2018. Hutchison street. Montreal: Linda Leith Publishing. Gagnon, Robert. 1997. Pour en finir avec un mythe: le refus des écoles catholiques d’accepter les immigrants. Bulletin d’histoire politique 5 (2): 120–141. De Vaucher Gravili, Anne. 2007. Abla Farhoud: entre l’ancrage et l’encrage. In Vingt années d’écriture migrante au Québec, ed. Marc Arino and Marie-Lynne Piccione, 121–131. Bordeaux: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux. Khordoc, Catherine. 2019. Worlded literature in Quebec: Wajdi Mouawad’s Le sang des promesses cycle. Journal of Canadian Studies/Revue d'études canadiennes 53 (3): 495–513. Lapointe, Josée. 2011. Le Sourire de la petite juive: connaître ses voisins. La Presse. 15 May. https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/livres/201105/14/01-4399535-lesourire-de-la-petite-juive-connaitre-ses-voisins.php. Accessed 19 February 2023. Maddox, Kelly Anne. 2010. Écrire au centre de soi-même: Le récit identitaire dans l’œuvre romanesque d’Abla Farhoud. Nouvelles études francophones 25 (2): 128–141. McDougall, Jill. 2000. La voix de l’autre: réflexions sur le théâtre migrant, l’ œuvre d’Abla Farhoud et sa traduction anglo-américaine. L’Annuaire théâtral: revue québécoise d’études théâtrales 27: 134–146. Moss, Jane. 2001. The drama of survival: Staging post-traumatic memory in plays by Lebanese-Québécois dramatists. Theatre research in Canada/Recherches théâtrales au Canada 22 (2): 173–189. Olazabal, Ignace. 2006. Le Mile-End comme synthèse d’une montréalité en devenir. Les Cahiers du Gres 6 (2): 7–16. Perry, Tom, and Imad Creidi. 2020. From golden age to war and ruin: Lebanon in turmoil as it hits 100. Reuters. 27 August. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast-centenary-insi-idUSKBN25N1PO. Accessed 16 June 2023. Pollet, Mathieu. 2020. More than 50,000 sign petition calling for France to take control of Lebanon. Euronews. 06 August. https://www.euronews.com/ 2020/08/06/over-­50-­00-­sign-­petition-­calling-­for-­france-­to-­take-­control-­of-­ lebanon. Accessed 16 June 2023. Pruteanu, Simona. 2016. Cooking, language, and memory in Farhoud’s Le Bonheur à la queue glissante and Thúy’s Mãn. In Dervila Cooke, ed. New Work on Immigration and Identity in Contemporary France, Québec, and Ireland. Thematic Issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18 (4) https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2906.

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Robin, Régine. 1983. La Québécoite. Montreal: Québec-Amérique. ———. 1992. Sortir de l’ethnicité. In Métamorphoses d’une utopie, ed. Fulvio Caccia and Jean-Michel Lacroix, 25–41. Paris, Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle. Siag, Jean. 2011. Alecka: projet de famille. La Presse. 14 May. https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/musique/201105/14/01-4399503-alecka-projet-de-famille.php. Accessed 19 February 2023. Simon, Sherry. 2006. Translating Montreal. Episodes in the life of a divided city. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. St-Jacques, Sylvie. 2015. Abla Farhoud, Toutes celles que j’étais: la mémoire des illusions. La Presse. 07 June. https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/livres/ entrevues/201506/05/01-4875561-abla-farhoudtoutes-celles-que-jetais-lamemoire-des-illusions.php. Accessed 16 June 2023. Waller, Harold. 2008. Montreal, Canada. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ montreal-­canada. Accessed 06 September 2023. Wimbush, Antonia. 2021. Autofiction. A female francophone aesthetic of exile. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Anita Aloisio and Akos Verboczy, Children of la loi 101

Multicultural Realities This chapter seeks to question and break down some of the rigidities of social and linguistic categorisation in Québec, through a focus on work by two Montrealers, Anita Aloisio and Akos Verboczy. Their explorations occur in work with a testimonial flavour in documentary film and prose narrative, often in relation to school experiences. Despite Aloisio’s greater focus on ethnic heritage, there are important points of connection between them. Both are committed to a vision of Québec where dialogue and exchange between its diverse cultural groups are promoted.1 The works under analysis are Aloisio’s documentary film Les Enfants de la loi 101 (2007) and her 2022 documentary Calliari, QC, and Verboczy’s somewhat ironically titled but still celebratory prose work Rhapsodie québécoise (2016). In itself, Verboczy’s title encourages an analysis of the increasingly contested term “Québécois”, which is explored as part of this chapter, along with similarly thorny concepts of “integration” and “values”. Transculturality is explored by both Aloisio and Verboczy (although they do not mention this term), in the sense of going beyond a monolithic perception of culture towards a blended reality, in a manner that should in theory affect each of the cultures involved in a meaningful manner, but which in practice is often less transformative of the dominant culture. The discussion looks at the effects of Québec’s famous language law, la loi 101 (Bill 101), also known as “La Charte de la langue française” (the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Cooke, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45936-8_4

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Charter of the French language) from 1977, strengthened forty-five years later by la loi 96, which came into force in 2023. It would be impossible to discuss transculturality in Québec without a sustained discussion of how some of its immigrants and the children of immigrants and people in Québec as a whole have experienced the effects of la loi 101, which seeks to promote communication through the French language in public space. La loi 101 applies to all of Quebec society, and is by no means a law just for immigrants, although it is often construed as such, even within Québec. La loi 21, Québec’s 2019 law on State secularism, is also discussed in this chapter, since perceptions of cultural othering around those of non-­secular groups (and those of non-Christian religious affiliation) can sometimes accompany the sense of imposition experienced by some of Québec’s linguistic and ethnocultural and Indigenous groups in relation to the language laws. Aloisio was born in 1972 of Italian parentage in Montreal, where she still lives. Verboczy was born in Hungary in 1975 and moved to Québec with his mother and sister at the age of eleven, in 1986. From 2012 to 2014, Verboczy was a political advisor at Québec’s ministry for Immigration and cultural communities, and took up a position as a consultant in public participation at the Office de consultation publique de Montréal in 2016. As such, much of his salaried work prior to the book and directly after it was in intercultural affairs on a political level. Aloisio’s fieldwork and documentary production also explores immigrant participation in Québec’s national life, but is more focused on the juggling of identities and various ways of belonging to Québec by diverse cultural groups. She has been a cultural commentator on community television and radio, and has produced and directed several films on the topic of immigration to Canada, especially in the Italian context. In 2016, she wrote a Master’s dissertation on the “transmemoric process” for Concordia University (Aloisio 2016). Her 2017 mini-­documentary Creatori d’Italicità (creators of Italianness) as part of her creative Masters focused on recent Canadian-Italian directors and their contributions to Canadian society (Aloisio 2017).2 A terminological note is important here. The term of “cultural community” is the official term for those who are not from the historically French or English-speaking populations or from Indigenous groups, as per the 1985 Rapport du comité sur l’école québécoise et les communautés culturelles, also known as the Rapport Chancy, which defines it as denoting “toute communauté distincte des Amérindiens et des Inuits et des communautés d’origine française et britannique” (Ministère de l’Éducation

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1985, 6). While the term has been severely criticised as an essentialist categorisation of alterity (Fontaine and Shiose 1991, and see Rocher et al. 2007, 24), it retains some usefulness when speaking of the disadvantages of discrimination or racism that members of those groups may face. The term “ethnocultural community” is increasingly used. As with “cultural community”, this term does not cover Indigenous groups. Marianne Jacquet very clearly separates ethnocultural communities from Indigenous groups in her article about reforms to the curriculum in British Columbia to address ethnocultural diversity and to introduce Aboriginal content and pedagogy into school contexts (Jacquet 2019). However, a recent search for a definition of “cultural community” in the online Thesaurus of the Québec government included “nations autochtones” (Indigenous nations, which seems to omit Inuit) in its definition, indicating some confusion by the writer of the entry about the concept.3 Following on from the example of the Rapport Chancy, I will use “ethnocultural communities” as a separate category to Indigenous communities, as the distinct status of Indigenous people and the nationhood of First Nations requires. The French language is a strong point of focus for both Aloisio and Verboczy, who both experienced a translingual shift in their lives as children. They were brought up speaking a language other than French at home, but now communicate their ideas publicly in French, and in Aloisio’s case increasingly on social media in Italian, and frequently also in English. In February 2023, she took on a role as Research Associate at the Quebec English-speaking communities research network (QUESCREN) at Concordia, one of Montreal’s two English-language universities. While Verboczy’s linguistic position is focused mainly on a masterful use of French, and his Hungarian language skills are no longer at a level in which he feels he can write fluently or formally, Aloisio promotes the rich linguistic diversity in Québec. Through her speakers who flit from French to Italian and sometimes English, her work argues the benefits of multilingualism while also demonstrating the cultural multiplicity of the people she portrays. Intercultural Collisions in Acts of Transcultural Creation As noted in Chap. 1, a 2007 report prepared by a research team from Ottawa and Québec attempted to define interculturalism (Rocher et  al. 2007). The report highlights in its final pages that the notion of

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“dialogue” is one of the distinguishing features of Québec’s model of interculturalism, and emphasises that this was incorporated from the start, as per the government’s 1981 action plan Autant de façons d’être Québécois: plan d’action à l’intention des communautés culturelles (MCCI 1981; Rocher et al. 2007, 9; 46). In Aloisio’s 2007 documentary, the majority population are shown around a table in dialogue with members of ethnocultural groups in a symbolic and aspirational yet also artistically engineered scene that indeed promotes that notion of exchange and interaction. Her 2022 film sets an Indigenous speaker (Innu musician Kathia Rock) alongside speakers from ethnocultural communities in productive dialogue with each other. However, in that film she does not portray dialogue with the historically established Francophone community, at least not in terms of negotiating differences of opinion. It may be that in the fifteenyear interim some of Aloisio’s faith in the hope for dialogue has broken down. However, her focus on transcultural music from Québec in that film provides important elements of potential exchange and fusion— including with classics of Québec’s pop music—through engaging with artistic creation in the musical domain. The UQAM/Ottawa 2007 report cited above emphasised the recognition of diversity as an integral part of Québec society. Along with calling for intercultural dialogue, it noted that all parts of that society were invited to participate fully in its collective project without discrimination, highlighted the importance of rapprochement and of respectfully accepting differences, declared French to be the language of public usage and of citizenship, and called for awareness-raising of Québec’s “patrimoine commun” or common heritage (Rocher et  al. 2007, 49).4 A significant challenge in applying this model comes from the fact that almost half a century after 1977, the French language is still often perceived as imposed on those not from the historically established Francophone population, as is made particularly evident in Stéphane Leclair and Judith Plamondon’s 2017 documentary, discussed at the end of this chapter. Aloisio’s 2007 film gives space and voice to some conflicted attitudes, dwelling on the pain of some of the transformations involved for the speakers in their childhood at French school, but ultimately presenting a positive view of multilingual experience that includes fluency in French. Verboczy’s socio-political commentary, which is also personal testimony, is written in a highly individual style. It is at times poetic yet also humorous, and always socially engaged. Written in French, it is reflective of the intercultural model to which Verboczy is committed, which

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emphasises what in Rhapsodie québécoise he describes as “ce qui nous rassemble”, or what connects us (Verboczy 2016, 15). As noted, Aloisio’s work also has an emphasis on connections between groups. However, this chapter will also give a sense of some of the cultural ghettoisation of society in Québec, particularly in school contexts, as lamented by Verboczy, and as shown in the abovementioned work from the same time period, Leclair and Plamondon’s Les Québécois de la loi 101. On a literary level, the effect of Rhapsodie québécoise is potentially transcultural, despite its politically intercultural focus. The reader is exposed to fragmentary references to many different literatures, which he or she is free to recompose and engage with, standing to become culturally transformed and deepened in the process. Verboczy’s overt literary reference points include Hungarian literature, Québec literature written by foreign-­ born writers, writings from the Anglophone community, and literature from the majority Francophone population. His incorporation of titles of other authors’ work or of quotations from their texts (often in an intertextual aesthetic) emphasises how internalised a part of him these ethnically diverse writers have become. He makes particularly frequent references to writers from the historically established Francophone community and is also strongly admiring of writers originally from Haiti, who, as discussed in Chap. 1, have played a crucial role in the diversification of Québec culture. The resulting book is an echoing space of transculturality on a personal level. Alongside Verboczy’s personal transculturality, his book is also a vehicle to encourage others to engage in the cultural crossings and connections that occur through literature—and ideally also socially, as Verboczy advocates a much wider interaction between cultural groups. As such, the book in itself can be viewed as a vector for transculturality, in Welsch’s sense of moving out of the cultural bounds of the self (Welsch 1999, also see the discussion in Chap. 1). Aloisio’s 2007 documentary has a similarly transcultural scope and effect, through the viewer’s contact with points of view and experiences of individuals from diverse cultures. Her interviewees and speakers are all connected by their experience of la loi 101 (Bill 101), particularly in their schooling in Québec in the 1970s and 1980s during the time of Aloisio’s own early education. From the Italian, Croatian, and Jamaican communities (Guerrina, Mauro, Tihana and Courtney respectively), with contributions by some speakers from the historically established Francophone majority, their individual testimonies provide highly individual perspectives on the collective project of communicating in French in the public

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space. All these individuals have been transformed in some way by their journey of engaging with French, and with its place in Québec society. Tihana and Guerrina have both whole-heartedly immersed themselves in French-speaking culture, despite challenges at school and, in Guerrina’s case, a linguistic battlefield in the home. Courtney, who is Black Anglophone, and Mauro, who represents the French-resistant elements in part of the Italian community, display a more conflicted outlook, but they too are in approximate alignment with the interculturalist view. Importantly, viewers are intellectually and culturally enriched through coming to know these members of diverse groups, and are influenced affectively by hearing their testimony. These speakers of immigrant background have been affected at a deep level by the linguistic project in Québec, ultimately positively though not without extensive challenges. They have acted beneficially on Québec society through their assistance in the fulfilment of the linguistic aims of la loi 101, and are often invested on a personal level to support the continued strength of French in Québec. However, a question remains as to how the majority population acknowledges their contribution, and the extent to which it notices how it has been enhanced by it. Calliari, QC has at its heart a collection of songs that are a deliberate act of transcultural creation by the title figure, Marco Calliari, who is of Aloisio’s own generation. While the documentary focuses mainly on Calliari himself, who in 2013 produced an album in Italian about cultural crossings, Mi ricordo, the thrust of the film more generally is to encourage viewers to explore the transcultural work of all four musical artists interviewed. The music of Kathia Rock in Innu-aimun forms a particularly intriguing example of encounters between cultures. Showcasing a vibrant mix of Québec-based song from outside the French or English-language spheres, Aloisio encourages listeners to venture into a distinctive and sometimes hybrid cultural realm through an encounter with outwardly foreign but Québec-rooted output in different languages. In the cases of Québec-born Calliari and Rock, who have spent their lives in Québec (and who unlike another interviewee, Paul Cargnello, do not sing in English), they provide listeners with a home-grown experience of linguistic difference, which in Rock’s case is radically distinct from French. However, it is important to emphasise that these singers remain largely niche, due to the funding models and radio play time that favour French. Despite being very much part of Québec (in Rock’s case her title song “Terre des nos aïeux”—land of our ancestors—expresses her claim to

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the very land where Québec arose) they do not have access to the qualifier “Québécois” in the music sphere, because they do not sing in the French language. Aloisio’s two documentaries emphasise that despite the focus in interculturalist discourse on being part of a whole in Québec, its immigrant population and its population of immigrant extraction do not always feel listened to, appreciated, or understood. Verboczy’s text shows that large-­ scale cultural ghettoisation of immigrants exists, and that, in practice, the intercultural project does not always work, despite its purported attention to dialogue between the established Francophone population and other cultural groups (Rocher et al. 2007). Rhapsodie québécoise, like Leclair and Plamondon’s 2017 documentary, emphasises that in parts of Montreal, some schools in the French system are made up wholly of immigrants, who gain little exposure to the traditionally French-speaking aspects of Québec’s history, literary culture, or familial cultural practices. Verboczy’s essays in Rhapsodie québécoise suggest that the historically French-speaking cohort of young people are another group that stands to be culturally impoverished if they do not interact with other groups and if they too are not challenged to reflect on Québec’s history or cultural production. From la loi 101 to la loi 96 The 1977 loi 101, which was strongly (and some say punitively) reinforced by the follow-on loi 96 modifying it, which came into force in June 2023, promotes and enforces French as a common language, with exemptions for established Anglophones, who form between about 7.5 and 10% of the population, depending on definition. Most Anglophones in Québec who were born since the mid-1970s have become fluent in French as a result of this law of common language, although they were not required to do so. However, important historical divisions remain along lines of language and culture. Many of those whose principal language is French remain wary of the attraction of English to young people, and especially to those of the immigrant population who were not already fluent in French prior to arrival. La loi 101 remains controversial today among many of those in Québec whose families are not historically French-speaking, and in the rest of Canada, where it is sometimes simplistically viewed as racist. La loi 101 followed on from long-standing linguistic conflict in Québec, brought to a head by a crisis in September 1969 among the Italian community of the Saint-Léonard area, when a local school board brought in

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unilingual French schooling, causing riots and vocal protest. As English was perceived as the language of social success in Québec (and still is in many respects, due to the attraction of Anglophone Canada and the United States), most immigrants wanted to study in English. For the Francophone majority population, Saint-Léonard became the symbol of the assimilation of immigrants to the Anglophone electoral camp, which was viewed as a strong threat to the speaking of French in Montreal. La loi 63 followed in November 1969, seeking to “promote” French but allowing parents to choose the language of schooling for their children. Francophones were largely unhappy with this law, which was followed by la loi 22, the 1974 law that made French the sole official language of Québec and brought in language testing for those who wanted to attend English school. In 1977, René Levesque’s Parti Québécois brought in la loi 101, stipulating the use of French in all public sectors of society, exempting historical Anglophones. Verboczy is a proponent of la loi 101, and Aloisio also broadly supports it, although she argues that it needs to be more nuanced, and was “devastated” by the introduction of la loi 96 (SMS message of 15 December 2022). Aloisio has emphasised that the discourse around language laws needs to be handled more sensitively, and has argued for more compassionate implementation (Cooke 2020a). It is significant that both Aloisio and Verboczy reached their awareness-raising years of ages fifteen to twenty in the mid-1980s and early 1990s (or in French their years of “conscientisation”), in an era where separatism was hotly debated, between the two referenda on Québec sovereignty (1980 and 1995). The second of these referenda was only narrowly defeated. No doubt influenced by these debates, both have strong sympathy for Québec’s vulnerable status as a French-speaking enclave with a population of approximately 8.5 million in 2022, within a total Canadian population of 38.5 million. The 2021 census report showed that French speakers in Canada form approximately 22% of the total population (22.6% spoke French at home on at least a regular basis), taking Québec together with more than one million Francophones in Canada outside of Québec (Statistics Canada 2022b).5 Québec is bordered by the United States (population approximately 332  million in 2022), and is culturally dominated by English-­ speaking Canada. It must also battle the influence and attraction of the English language more generally as the language of globalisation and international commerce. The 2021 census showed Québec to be 77.5% Francophone when judged on the basis of the main language spoken at

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home (Statistics Canada 2022b), which represents a worryingly low statistic for many of its historically French-speaking inhabitants, who have been described as a “fragile majority” (McAndrew 2013). Many dossier and media pieces exist on the perception of la loi 101, including a study of its portrayal in the press over forty years of its existence (Bernard Barbeau 2018). Aloisio timed the release of her documentary to coincide with the thirtieth birthday of the law, while Verboczy’s socio-biographical account was published the year before its fortieth anniversary. Another film on the same subject, Les Québécois de la loi 101, mentioned above, was released in 2017 by Stéphane Leclair and Judith Plamondon, who are members of the majority population. In 2008, another director from the majority population, Claude Godbout, also produced a documentary on the subject. Godbout’s film focuses on four thirty-something children of la loi 101, including Verboczy himself and his sovereigntist friend Farouk of Malagasy heritage, who also features in Rhapsodie québécoise (Verboczy 2016, 112–115, 121–123). Godbout’s documentary sets these thirty-something figures in contrast with young teenagers in mainstream classes and classe d’accueil (language-focused classes for recent immigrants) in schools in the multicultural districts of Côtes-des-neiges and Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, which very few children from the established Francophone population attend.6 In Sylvie Groulx’s slightly earlier film La Classe de Madame Lise (Groulx 2005), there is a focus on very young immigrant children in their first years at school in the multicultural district of Parc-extension in Montreal, in a context where their only contact with native French speakers is with their teacher (Cooke 2020b).7 La loi 96 was brought in by Simon Jolin-Barette of the Coalition Avenir Québec (CAQ), who proposed it in 2021. It was enforced as law in June 2023. Among other provisions, la loi 96 requires more rapid acquisition of French-language knowledge by immigrants, increases the requirement on smaller businesses in Québec to function in French, restricts the numbers who are allowed to attend English forms of the state-funded Collège d’enseignement général et professionnel (Cégep) system, which provides a two-year programme of transition between secondary school and University, and introduces more wide-spread testing (Cardinal et  al. 2023).8 It is viewed by detractors as divisive, hard-line, a blunt instrument, and defensive. In 2023, la loi 101 reached forty-five years of age, just two years younger than Verboczy and five years younger than Aloisio, who reached

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school-­going age just as it was being brought in. It instituted French as the language of legislation, commerce, and public signage, and of state school education for Francophones born in Québec and for children of immigrants who did not have a family antecedent of English schooling in Québec. Importantly, children living in Québec who do have family antecedents of English education are entitled to attend state-funded English-­ language school. The 2021 census showed 24.3% of those in the Montreal area to be immigrant (Statistics Canada 2022a), though the percentage is lower in the overall Québec population. Prior to the law, 80% of immigrants sent their children to English-language school (Lacombe 2019). Detractors see la loi 101 and now la loi 96 as reducing freedom of choice and self-expression, often using the term of “language police”. However, supporters argue strongly that without a unifying language, French-­ speaking Québec is even more vulnerable to erosion of its cultural identity, and that English is not in need of such assistance. Who Is a “Francophone” in Québec? Québec’s main language groups are commonly divided into Francophone, Allophone, Anglophone, and speakers of Indigenous languages. Before looking at the thorny term of “Francophone”, a discussion of the equally important term “Allophone” is required. “Allophone” came into common usage in Québec around the time of la loi 101 and is now widely used to denote speakers of languages other than French or English. The expression has been criticised as giving primacy to the languages of the two main groups that colonised Canada. It is also overly “neat”, since it ignores the fact that many “Allophones” are also French-speaking (as are many of those officially termed “Anglophone”), or indeed English-speaking, like singer Paul Cargnello of Argentinian and Lithuanian background, who forms part of the focus of Aloisio’s Calliari, QC. The term “Allophone” also blurs differences between the speakers in that overarching category, grouping them all together and minimising their diversity. The title of the book by Greek-born Montreal journalist Toula Drimonis We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada (Drimonis 2022) is an eloquent comment on homogenising and potentially dismissive views of “the Others” as merely that which is different to the dominant paradigm. Drimonis has Greek parents, but writes in English and is fluent in French, so she is also Francophone and Anglophone in those senses. The term “Allophone” also tends to ignore the fact that Québec has the

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highest rate of trilingualism in Canada (12.2%), and that in the Montreal area, nearly one in five people were trilingual in 2021 (Statistics Canada 2022b). For people of immigrant descent, the emotional importance of the heritage language is often a crucial part of their identities, although Verboczy is more ambivalent on this point. In practice, the division of language groups in Québec is often tripartite (Francophone, Anglophone, and Allophone), with little attention given to the existence of Indigenous languages, although a Federal law from 2019 offers some hope on this matter—the Indigenous Languages Act.9 Many of Québec’s Indigenous people speak mainly French, and to an external eye they might appear as Francophone, but more accurately they speak French as a colonial language. For some Indigenous people in Québec the colonial language is English, for example the First Nations people in the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory near Montreal, or Inuit and First Nations in Northern Québec. Indigenous languages are highly important for them emotionally. Côte-Nord-born Innu singer and performer Kathia Rock emphasises this, speaking in French (the language in which her nation was colonised and given the name “Montagnais”), towards minute 44.00 of Aloisio’s Calliari, QC film. She pleads that her First Nations language needs to be allowed a space in the public arena of song, as the colonisers have taken everything else: “prends pas ma langue en plus, prends pas ce qui me reste. C’est tout ce que j’ai” (don’t take my language, don’t take the little I still have. It’s all I have left). Québec newspapers and media are quick to raise alarms about the “decline” of French, as seen in articles on this subject frequently published in the Montreal-based newspaper Le Devoir, and in book titles such as Le Français en chute libre, meaning “French in freefall”, a 2021 book by statistician Charles Castonguay, who has also made a summary of his conclusions available in English on the Internet (Castonguay 2021a, b).10 However, this emphasis on the apparent decline of French in Québec often misses nuances about who speaks French, why, when, and how. The picture may in fact be rosier than the one painted in negatively titled publications. As Verboczy’s Rhapsodie québécoise argues, there is also great potential to support French convivially, by increasing the emphasis on indirect promotion of French-speaking through the social inclusion of immigrants. His text also makes clear that young people of immigrant background often feel instrumentalised and forced into speaking French, and not given adequate opportunity at a young age to understand Québec’s history and culture, and that more cultural inclusion of

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historical Anglophones who speak French would also help support and promote the French language in a spirit of companionship and sharing. Census respondents are only identified as Francophone if they enter French on the form as the language most commonly spoken at home. While this emphasis on what is spoken at home is problematic in itself, and depends on how important home is for the locutor in their personal linguistic context, it should also be remembered that home can be a site of much linguistic multiplicity. Based on the 2021 census, a report had the following to say about linguistic diversity in Canada and Québec (Statistics Canada 2022b): In 2021, 85.5% of the Quebec population reported speaking French at home at least on a regular basis. The number of people who spoke predominantly French at home increased from 6.4 million in 2016 to 6.5 million in 2021, but their proportion in the population fell from 79.0% to 77.5%. Meanwhile, the proportion of the Quebec population who spoke French most often at home equally with another language rose slightly from 2016 (3.3%) to 2021 (3.5%).

The latter note about equal sharing of French with another language in the home could in fact be seen as a heartening statistic. The 77.5% figure of the number of people in Québec who speak French predominantly at home, does not consider the fact than many people in Montreal are trilingual, may wish to maintain their heritage language at home for their own personal identity and for their children’s sakes, and may in fact use more French in their daily lives for work than they use any another language at home. The true number of French speakers in Québec may therefore be higher than officially recorded, and much daily translingualism occurs. Some have argued that the census question should in fact focus more on the main language spoken during the working day, as people in employment spend most of their lives at work. In Québec, those who are officially termed “Allophones” and “Anglophones” often use French throughout their entire day at work, which means that those who speak a different language at home may thus be equally as Francophone as they are anything else. In addition, the language spoken at home may be of a basic quality, as it is an informal context, so that someone who, say, mainly speaks informal Arabic at home, and works and writes in French throughout the working day might in fact feel more Francophone than Arabophone, at least in

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terms of linguistic capacity. However, such a person would feature as Allophone in the census results. In Leclair and Plamondon’s abovementioned 2017 documentary, in which Verboczy plays a prominent role (available on vimeo.com at the time of writing: see the link in the endnotes), we see the example of Cathy Wong as a Francophone who would not be recognised as such on the census form. Wong is a public figure in Québec who speaks Chinese for the small part of her life that she is at home, but uses French in all her other dealings, both socially and at work. Seeking to broaden, or at least question, the term of “Francophone”, I follow the example of Marco Micone, the well-known cultural commentator originally from Italy but a long-time Montrealer, who is a fluent and eloquent French speaker, committed to the nationalist cause of Québec sovereignty. Like Aloisio, Micone is from the vocal and intellectually important Italian cultural community, having immigrated in 1958. He contributed to the transculture debate outlined in Chap. 1, and is an astute analyst of all things related to immigration and language in Québec. In November 2022, while la loi 96 was within six months of coming into force, Micone argued in Le Devoir that people like him who are multilingual can be just as “Francophone” as those born into French-speaking families, but are often classed as “Allophone”. As he had done in 2021 with the label “Québécois”, he pointed out pithily that “on ne naît pas francophone, on le devient” (Micone 2022a). In other words, no-one is born Francophone, and all speakers of French have learned the language, whether from parents, at school, or in wider society. Micone is correct that many of those termed “Allophones”, and a considerable number of “Anglophones”, can also be viewed as Francophone, if that expression is construed to mean “fluent in French” (the term literally means “French-speaking”). Many are in fact entirely comfortable in that language, as just one part of their “linguistic repertoire”, to reiterate the term by translanguaging theorist Ofelia García. For simplicity’s sake, I do not always use inverted commas to denote linguistic groups, but they are often implied. I have tended to use the terms “historical Francophones” and “historically established Francophones”, along with that of “majority population” in this analysis. My intention is of course not to relegate to the past those whose French-speaking families go back 400  years in Québec. It is also important to note that Indigenous people may be uncomfortable with the label of Francophone, as shown in the case of Innu writer Naomi Fontaine, discussed in Chap. 2. I refer to French and English as the colonial languages for Indigenous peoples.

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The Révolution Tranquille, and the Survival of a surconscience linguistique Many cultural critics in Québec are conscious that the language debate there is fuelled by what Lise Gauvin called a “surconscience linguistique” (heightened linguistic awareness or, alternatively, an over-attention to language, Gauvin, Langagement, 2000).11 This attention to linguistic matters was born of two hundred years of linguistic and economic side-lining, during the period of “la Conquête” (conquest by the British) in 1760 and the Quiet Revolution, or Révolution tranquille of the 1960s. Prior to this “revolution”, a disproportionate amount of Québec business interests was controlled by Québec’s historically established Anglophones. During the period of self-affirmation, modernisation, and increased State control of companies of the Révolution tranquille, Québec advanced itself socially and economically and a strong nationalist feeling was encouraged among its historically established Francophones. The period prior to the Révolution tranquille is often named “la Grande noirceur” (Great Darkness). This term is often applied to the Premiership of Maurice Duplessis, a socially conservative supporter of the Catholic Church, who was in power from 1936 to 1939 and again from 1944 to 1959. While the expression “la Grande noirceur” has become entrenched in the popular imagination, the social and cultural regressiveness of the Duplessis era has been somewhat exaggerated. It can in fact be argued that Duplessis and the Catholic Church consolidated, or at least influenced, the nationalism that gave rise to the neo-nationalism of the 1960s. In any case, the 1960s saw the historically established Francophones not only asserting themselves economically, and culturally, and taking a renewed pride in the French language as a means of social empowerment, but also emphasising gender equality and making an abrupt change to widespread secularism. “Mâitres chez nous” (masters in our own home) was the rallying cry of Jean Lesage’s Liberal party, which came to power in 1960. Writing fifty years after the start of the Révolution tranquille, policy analyst Pierre Fortin notes that Francophone-owned businesses in Québec increased their share of employment from 47% in 1961 to 67% in 2003. Fortin also notes that in 1960, men of French origin in Québec earned less relative to men of British origin than Black men did relative to white men in the United States (Fortin 2011). This complicated history means that Québec has become highly protective of its language, with the result that linguistic

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matters are often foregrounded to the detriment of other cultural matters, or at the expense of sensitivities to others, and of intercultural dialogue. Both Aloisio and Verboczy are supportive of the importance of French as a shared language in Québec. However, Verboczy notes that it is detrimental to view a common language in a utilitarian way, or to see it as the only channel that can help interaction between immigrants and the majority population. He laments that an instrumental approach to language-­ learning by both government and immigrants often comes at the expense of meaningful encounter with Francophone culture and with historically established Francophones on the level of direct human connection. La loi 101 has had huge success in terms of the imparting of the French language. However, the crucial question now is whether immigrants feel part of Québec, and the ways in which that may be possible. Québécois Identity as a Societal Construct, Cultural “Othering”, and la loi 21 The term “Québécois” began to be widely used to denote inhabitants of Québec during the Révolution tranquille (Comeau 2010).12 The previous common usage was “Canadien français” (French Canadian). What it is to be Québécois is a subject of much debate, as seen in Marco Micone’s title to his 2021 book On ne naît pas Québécois, on le devient (one is not born Québécois, one becomes one). Micone is well-known for his concept of “culture immigrée” (immigrated culture), which for him concerned the commonalities of much immigrant experience which he notes could have parallels with the culture shock of migration within Québec from rural to urban situations.13 The title of his 2021 book is of course a reference to French feminist Simone de Beauvoir’s famous statement in 1949  in Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex), “on ne naît pas femme, on le devient” (one is not born a woman, one becomes one). As de Beauvoir had done for womanhood, Micone is de-essentialising Québécois identity and emphasising that it is a social construct. As an immigrant, albeit one who has long been established as a cultural critic and respected author in French, as well as a translator, it is significant that Micone felt the need to point out the right of immigrants to the Québécois label in 2021 a few months after la loi 96 on the French language was proposed. His article should also be set in the context of the controversy surrounding la loi 21 on State secularism, proposed exactly two years earlier than la loi 96, in March 2019. This controversial law on

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secularism (in French, “la laïcité”), bans people in positions of authority such as judges, the police, and teachers from wearing religious symbols such as kippah, crosses, turbans, and veils in the workplace. La loi 21 implicitly set the default Québécois identity of historically established Francophones, who had been secular since the 1960s, against other cultural groups who sought to assert religious belonging through symbols or dress. In the essays in On ne naît pas Québécois, on le devient, some of which had been published in Le Devoir newspaper over the previous few years, Micone combats the view that there are Québécois and “others”. For him, all those who have spent considerable time in Québec deserve the right to identify as Québécois. By the same token, Micone notes that someone who is born in Québec, has a birth certificate from Québec, but immediately moves away and spends all his or her life abroad is less entitled to the identifier. In Québec society, the term “Québécois de souche” (old-stock Québécois) is still widely used, often in opposition to “Néo-Québécois”, which is a contested term. Some see “Néo-Québécois” as creating second-­ class citizens, and argue that it is a label that once applied is destined to remain stuck no matter how long one resides in Québec (Bonnet 1999, Kikano 2022). Others insist that it is a welcoming appellation (Pilon 2022). Avoiding the expression entirely in a recent article wondering what Québécois citizenship actually means, Roméo Bouchard prefers the idea of adoption, proposing “Québécois d’adoption”, but this still enforces a binary with “Québécois d’origine” (Bouchard 2022). While “Québécois de souche” does not have the far-right connotation of “Français de souche” in France, it is still divisive, so the term “majority population” will be preferred in this chapter. The analysis will nonetheless look in more detail at who feels Québécois in the cultural works under discussion. Leclair and Plamondon’s Les Québécois de la loi 101 discusses perspectives voiced by multicultural millennial youth contemporary to the film’s production, those who were seventeen in 2017. While the title of the documentary suggests that the directors feel that all the people chosen to be interviewed are Québécois, no matter where they or their parents were born, the interviewed teenagers themselves generally do not share this opinion. The interview base is La Voie multi-ethnic secondary school in Côte-des-Neiges and the Collège Vanier, which is an Anglophone Cégep. Again, Cégeps are a Québec-specific type of educational establishment that forms a transition between secondary (or high) school and University. As Plamondon noted in an interview with Danielle Beaudoin, it may be

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difficult for these young people to call themselves Québécois, because they do not know (Francophone) Québécois culture well, or because this identity is refused to them: “parce qu’ils ne connaissent pas bien la culture québécoise” (Beaudoin 2017). Micone’s frustration with restrictive categories is accompanied by calls to action to focus on matters of social inequities, racism, and the welcoming of immigrants. This is particularly evident in his 1992 work Le Figuier enchanté, published in English in 2022  in a translation by Beatrice Guenther (Micone 2022b).14 Le Figuier enchanté was part of the current migrant writing that had its heyday in 1980s and 1990s Québec, discussed in Chaps. 1 and 3 of the present study. Juxtaposing autobiographical narrative with short analytical and political essays, Le Figuier enchanté promoted an enchanted hybridity. This is encapsulated in the chapter bearing the title of the book, where the emigrant narratorial alter ego for Micone returns to Southern Italy on a visit home, and sees that his grandfather had grafted North American figs onto Italian rootstock, so that it would bear beautiful fruit. However, the tone of this book remained largely aspirational, and showed the difficulties many immigrants experienced being accepted and valued in Québec, both in the 1950s and at the time of writing in the 1990s. Its comments remain relevant today. It is also useful to remember Micone’s 1989 poem “Speak What”, about the challenges faced by many immigrants in Québec (Micone 2001). This was a literary response to Michèle Lalonde’s culturally iconic 1968 poem “Speak White”.15 As part of La Révolution tranquille and the forging of national identity in Québec, Lalonde’s poem was a battle call to Francophones to have confidence in their language, and to shake off the shackles of subservience to their often Anglophone bosses. Micone’s answer to the more confident Francophones of 1989 was that they should not forget the immigrants who were in a similar position of subservience to other bosses, whether English-speaking or, increasingly, Frenchspeaking ones. His poem pointed out the economic and cultural contribution of immigrants to Québec society, presenting their intrinsic value, as opposed to a category of “others” to be exploited or indeed feared. The question of the “apport” or “apport précieux” (precious contribution) of immigrants was emphasised in the 1985 Rapport Chancy on school and the cultural communities, and before that in la loi 101 itself (see Rocher et al. 2007, 3, 5), but Aloisio’s films convey a sense that the “apport” has not been fully appreciated, even in economic terms (Cooke 2020a, b).

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In Godbout’s 2008 documentary on la loi 101 in contemporary multicultural school contexts, many of the teenagers have a difficulty with the idea of full “integration” into Québec. The term of “values” is raised by some, to justify why they do not wish to align themselves with mainstream Québec society. The values issue is a particularly thorny one given the aborted Charte des valeurs québécoises (Charter of Québec values, 2013–2014) and the 2019 law on secularism, la loi 21. The proposed charter and the 2019 law both arise from insecurities about what in Québec is given the sometimes-contested term of “reasonable accommodation” of religious and other cultural differences (contested because the concept of accommodation implies a hegemonic perspective that does not allow for reciprocal influence or compromise). The year 2006 saw the start of a series of court cases and mediatised discussions that led to a greater presence of hard-line attitudes in Québec in relation to cultural (and mainly religious) practices deemed to be at odds with those of the majority Francophone population and Québec’s general secularism. As noted, established Francophones, like their historically established English-­ speaking counterparts in Québec, have been predominantly secular and very attached to gender equality since La Révolution tranquille. The court cases included a case where a Sikh student sought the right to wear a symbolic kirpan, a traditional weapon and marker of Sikh identity that is worn securely sewn into a protective sheath. He finally obtained this right from the Supreme Court of Canada. The 2007 Code de vie d’Hérouxville (Hérouxville Code of conduct for life) in rural Québec, in an area with very few Muslims, where a city-­ councillor drafted a document forbidding practices such as the stoning of women and female circumcision, prompted what would become known as the Bouchard-Taylor Commission on reasonable accommodation of cultural and religious practices different to the secular and default Québec identity norm. This took place over 2007–2008 and culminated in a 2008 report (Bouchard and Taylor 2008), shortly after François Rocher and his team had published their 2007 report on Interculturalism. The BouchardTaylor report emphasises that Québec society needed to demonstrate an “openness and generosity of spirit” for minorities. One of its recommendations was that students who wished to wear religious symbols in class, such as the hijab, kippah, or turban, should be able to do so. Yet many immigrants want more than just “accommodation”, as attested for example in Beyond Accommodation, a book published a decade after the report, presenting everyday narratives of Muslim Canadians, including

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respondents from Québec (Selby et al. 2018). They also seek more than mere recognition (another Taylorian term). The terms of “appreciation” and “respect” are often closer to what people of immigrant background desire. Muslims have been cast in a negative light in Québec since about 2001, as Micone points out in his 2021 book of essays. He states that at the turn of 2000 approximately 60% of people in Québec were against any bans on Muslim headscarves in public space, whereas the situation twenty later was almost the inverse, with approximately 60% in favour. He also points out the irony in any perception of Muslims as undesirable immigrants, writing that 41% of Muslim who have immigrated to Québec have a university degree, double the figure of those possessed by Québécois of Canadian heritage (Micone 2021, 87–93). Asmaa Ibnouzahir is one writer who has provided a personal and political narrative about being a Muslim woman in Québec, in her 2015 publication, Chroniques d’une musulmane indignée. Ibnouzahir immigrated to Montreal from Morocco in her teens in 1994. In her opening remarks to her account of her challenging journey of self-definition, she calls herself a feminist Québécoise of Moroccan, African, and Muslim origins, who feels her culture is being attacked: “Québécoise d’origine marocaine et africaine, musulmane, féministe et indignée” (2015, 11–12). Although not based in Québec, Saïda Ouchaou-Ozarowski is another Muslim woman who has worked on perceptions of Muslim identity in Canada, including in Québec. Of Algerian-Berber background, she was born in France and grew up there, but lives in Toronto at the time of writing in Spring 2023, and is a journalist, news producer, and filmmaker. Her documentary In Full Voice/A pleine voix interviews Muslim Canadian women in different cities, distinguishing Muslim women in all their diversity from the caricature of “the Muslim woman” presented in the media (Ouchaou-Ozarowski 2021). In 2022, her documentary was promoted on the National Film board’s website on International Women’s Day (08 March). Asmaa Ibnouzahir features in the film, as does Kenza Bennis, author of the 2017 book of interviews and reflections, Les Monologues du voile: des Québécoises se racontent (Bennis 2017). In that volume, Bennis, a journalist of Moroccan extraction, interviews and reflects on Muslim women in Québec who wear the veil and who are not often heard in society. It is difficult not to see la loi 21 as stemming from an anxiety in some of the majority population about recognising immigrants’ religious or

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cultural heritage, exacerbated since the fundamentalist Muslim terror attacks globally since 2000. Those who are practising Muslims, along with those whose appearance suggests they could be Muslim, or who have Arab or Muslim-sounding names, have borne the brunt of anti-immigrant sentiment, although anti-immigrant suspicion has extended to other ethnocultural groups. In 2017, a shooting by a gunman from the majority population killed six people and critically wounded several others at the mosque of the Centre culturel islamique in Québec city. Typhaine Leservot is among the academics who have commented on the “ghost of France” haunting those who emigrate from France to Canada hoping in vain to leave discrimination as Muslims behind (Leservot 2020). By “the ghost of France”, Leservot is alluding to France’s colonial domination of many Muslim countries, as well as to French secularism, which is often perceived as being anti-Islam. While eager to form part of Québec society, many immigrants, whether Muslim or not, seek a greater place in the discussion and to escape from the feeling of being othered. Yet others simply plan to leave Québec. As noted in Chap. 1, a 2022 survey with an executive summary of results published online in 2023 showed that almost 70% of students polled who wear a religious symbol said they were likely to leave Québec to work elsewhere (Elbourne et al. 2023). Aloisio’s work, which we will now examine, focuses not on religious symbols but on linguistic diversity and heritage, which she argues need to be respected. Alosio shows her intimate connection with Italy and her desire to connect with her Southern Italian gastronomic roots in Basilicata Secrets (2021), written in English in order to appeal to a global audience of the Italian diaspora. This project was both a personal ethnographic journey and a highly embodied celebration of Italian food. It is also a homage to the Italian language through the evocative names of recipes, including those drawn from the vast array of types of pasta.16 Italy is at the heart of the book, but the author implicitly asserts her Québecness on several occasions, writing of memories of gathering bleuets (the locally rooted French-Canadian term for blueberries, which the French call myrtilles), or when she mentions the coureurs des bois (Canadian travelling backwoodsmen from the colonial era), when she is given a hearty meal called “il piatto dei vacanti”. She calls this “the nomad’s meal”, perhaps in reference to her own feelings of nomadism of identity. Equally, the small-­ scale, artisanal nature of the food preparation she encounters is delightfully foreign to her as a city dweller cut off from some of those practices in her daily life in Montreal. The book therefore expresses her overlapping

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cultural belongings. As seen in Chap. 1, a strong connection to the Italian language is also seen on the Facebook page of her 2019-formed Alliance Donne: femmes italiennes du Québec, Italian women of Québec, promoting women of Italian heritage. The Facebook posts in Italian coexist with those in French and English, and all three languages marry easily in a translingual virtual space. By contrast, the experience of school depicted in Les Enfants de la loi 101 is a much more rigid and divisive environment.

Les Enfants de la loi 101: Aloisio’s Wish for Conversations Around a Table André Loiselle writes that no top grossing film in Québec since 1950 has had the experiences of minority cultural groups at its core. He writes of “folk homogeneity” and the fact that French-Canadian interests tend to be at the centre of the narrative (Loiselle 2019), citing Mommy, and La Grande Séduction among others. Nonetheless, several important films do provide main characters who are not from the historically established Francophone group. These include Monsieur Lazhar, X Quinientos, Incendies, Là où Atilla passe, L’Ange de Goudron, and the aforementioned A Place of Tide and Time (Temps et marées), as well as films about Indigenous experience, such as Ce qu’il faut pour vivre, and Mesnak, which is by an Indigenous filmmaker, and more recently Fontaine and Verreault’s Kuessipan. The film element in this chapter on Aloisio and Verboczy is based on documentary film about school, where immigrants and minority groups are the main focus. Those who seek discussions of cultural diversity in Québec in fiction films will find material in the endnotes.17 Les Enfants de la loi 101 is a forty-seven-minute documentary film on the human experience of la loi 101. It points out where tensions exist and suggests some ways in which they could be resolved. The film is semi-­ autobiographical, since Aloisio is a child of la loi 101 herself. She has stated that Guerrina, the conflicted woman of Italian heritage in the film, resembles her in many ways (Cooke 2020a, 158). The film follows four main subjects of immigrant descent who were the very first to experience the effects of La loi 101 at school. It also creates a space for other voices, including two teachers working at the time, the parents of the children involved, and some representatives of the majority population at the time of filming. The film focuses on Montreal, but includes reference to Québec city, where one of the film’s main subjects grew up. The vulnerabilities of

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childhood are foregrounded, and to some extent also those of adolescence, along with the effects, both negative and positive, on today’s adults. The narrator and interviewer, who does not identify herself as Aloisio initially, is described at the end of the documentary as “Anita Aloisio, une enfant de la loi 101” (Anita Aloisio, a child of Bill 101). The film is dedicated to “ma fille, Ophélia” (my daughter, Ophelia) in a poignant gesture that brings into focus once more the transmission from parent to child of languages and cultural identities. In fact, generational issues are key to any understanding of the issues involved in the film. Aloisio highlights this by including many scenes of parents with their children, whether grown-up or young. A Sandwich Generation Before looking at the film’s content, resonances, and imagery, it is important to note a point of contrast with the co-temporaneous films by Godbout and Groulx mentioned above, La Génération 101 and La Classe de Madame Lise. The schools in the films by Godbout and Groulx are made up almost entirely by children from the non-majority population. This is also the case with the schools attended by Verboczy from 1986 to the mid-1990s, and by the young people in Leclair and Plamondon’s documentary, whose views are given in 2017, as described in the section on Verboczy. By contrast, Aloisio’s film highlights a time during the very earliest years of la loi 101 when children of immigrant extraction generally found themselves a minority in schools made up of long-established French speakers. This created a particular dynamic which differed greatly from the more recent experiences, where schools have become spaces of cultural ghettoisation in many instances. In Aloisio’s film, a feeling of exclusion occurs quite strongly for two of the film’s four main subjects. One (Courtney) is Black, Anglophone, and of Jamaican origin, and is an important representative of the “minorités visibles et audibles” in Québec (audible and visible minorities). At thirty-­ five he is still traumatised by the insensitive approach displayed by his teacher upon his arrival as a tiny child, as one of only four Black boys at school in Montreal (the other three were from Haiti and spoke French). The other figure who experienced a strong distress because of insensitively handled ethnic difference is Tihana, a young woman of Croatian extraction who was born in Québec. As the only child with a foreign name in her middle-class school in Québec city in 1980, she felt her difference very

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strongly. As an adult, she realises that her teachers could have tried to mediate the situation, but that they had no training to do so, given that non-majority population children were valued primarily as future French-­ speakers, in an instrumental manner. As this study goes to press in 2023, forty-five years on from the introduction of la loi 101, the school situation has improved, with the PELO and PELO intégré programmes and other programmes described in the section on heritage in the discussion of Verboczy. Those initiatives today validate multilingualism and an openness to the languages of others, and to cultural heritage. However, no such emphasis was present at school for the first children to experience la loi 101. The aim of the discussion here is to showcase individual testimony from this “guinea pig” generation of the law, and to note some implications of that testimony in 2023. Guerrina and Mauro are of Italian descent but have different experiences and somewhat divergent viewpoints. Both sets of parents wanted their children to go to English school, but while Mauro’s parents were able to smuggle him onto the bus for English school (where his classmates were 95% Italian), Guerrina had to go to French school, where she became politicised in the Québec nationalist cause. Guerrina is one of the most important figures in the film in terms of a “language and values” parent-­ child generational conflict. She now speaks mainly French to her own two children, having switched from Italian after their babyhood, feeling what she calls an “emotional” need to speak to them in French. All of this causes great friction with her parents, to whom she also speaks mainly in French in a series of highly fraught scenes, where they express their disappointment with her, and their desire that their grandchildren learn English and speak better Italian. They speak to Guerrina mainly in Italian (she answers them in French), but her environment is translingual as her parents do sometimes also use French, of which they have a manifestly high command. Mauro speaks mainly in English with his entourage, including to his wife Amina, who is of Portuguese extraction, and to Aloisio herself, as the interviewer behind the camera. In some senses, he reflects the attitudes of his parents, identifying with them in the very first interview extract we see with him: “Why did my parents have to fight so hard to do something so simple [send me to English school]?” he exclaims with some anger. However, by the end of the film we see him speaking of the benefit of having a good command of French. He wants his two-year-old daughter to know French (as well as English and her heritage languages of Italian and

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Portuguese), so that she will have more choices, and will not feel shut out from French-speaking society, as he did because of attending English school. Like Verboczy, Mauro eventually improved his French through sporting activities (in Mauro’s case ice hockey). However, unlike Verboczy who at post-secondary school level attended French-speaking Cégep and advanced greatly in knowledge of the language and of Francophone culture, Mauro’s French remains at the level of informal communication. This is a source of regret for him, and it is noteworthy that Mauro is now determined that his child will have it all, in terms of languages spoken and her Italian and Portuguese ethnocultural heritage. The transmission of languages and cultural identities is highly conflicted in Guerrina’s case. At one point in the film, Guerrina declares that she views herself as being part of a “génération sandwich”, positioned between a generation of immigrant parents and the generation of her own children. Her feelings of suffering stem more from her linguistic conflict with her parents than from her experiences of being placed in a French school as a child who only knew Italian. Unlike her parents, who came to Montreal from post-fascist Italy seeking freedom, Guerrina was in her early twenties at the time of the debates around sovereignty during the 1995 referendum, like Aloisio herself, and like Verboczy. In these formative years, she became deeply aware of the struggle in Québec to define national identity through French, and sympathetic to that position. Speaking of the painful conflict with her parents that she experienced growing up, she expressed the certainty that her daughter will not have to go through the same context: “Ma fille n’aura pas à le vivre”. By this she means that her children will go to French-speaking school and be supported and validated in that experience by herself as a parent. Vulnerability and Resilience In many senses, the thirty-something adults presented in Aloisio’s film are examples of cultural resilience. Cornelius Holtorf defines cultural resilience as the ability “to absorb adversity, deal with change and continue to develop” (2018, 639). In 2014, Marie-Hélène Urro wrote of transcultural resilience (“résilience transculturelle”) in a piece on the Vietnamese-­ Québécois writer Kim Thúy, drawing on similar terms used by Canadian literary critic Afef Benessaieh, to describe how individuals cope with cultural collision or uprooting by developing strategies of self-growth (Benessaieh, 2010). Aloisio’s speakers have traversed culturally painful

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experiences and have emerged as confident and reflective adults, and can be said to be resilient in Holtorf’s sense. Yet the notion of children as pawns in society is a powerful one, and their vulnerability is evident in multiple images in the film. Perhaps the most poetically symbolic element of the film is Aloisio’s use of the image of a fence after the initial archival sequence. The opening credits roll at this point and we see a group of schoolchildren playing in a yard enclosed by tall wire. Aloisio has explained that this image was extremely important for the film (Cooke 2020a, 164). Also present on the cover art, the most obvious effect of this fence is to underline the idea of barriers within society, but it may also subtly suggest that the initial “enfants de la loi 101”, especially those of immigrant extraction, were involved in a social experiment, as the image is of children viewed from behind a fence as though being observed in a zoo.18 It is crucial to note that the experiment or project appears to have worked for Québec society as a whole, at least in terms of creating a lingua franca. Courtney, schooled through French, occasionally makes slight errors with genders and object pronouns in French, but speaks extremely confidently and naturally with a flawless Québécois accent. By contrast, Mauro admits his French is “un Français avec limites” (French with limits), having been less immersively acquired in adulthood. Despite successes such as Courtney, Guerrina, and Tihana, the law was certainly clumsily applied at its inception. Importantly, Aloisio spoke of her own trauma as a schoolchild in an interview with Toula Drimonis, noting that she was moved four times in six years due to lack of space for her at school, since the law had been brought in with little attention as to how to manage it (Drimonis 2022b). Commenting on la loi 101, she emphasised the need for such laws to be nuanced and compassionate, and less of a one-size-fits all approach (Cooke 2020a). The risk of lack of nuance also applies to the loi 96 in 2023, for example in the sensitive situation of Indigenous speakers near Kahnawake, for whom English is the main colonial language (Huron 2023). On a less instrumentalist level, for some of the people of immigrant background in the case studies, la loi 101 not only gave them opportunities in French but also created a sensitivity to the linguistic vulnerability of French in Québec (most visibly in Guerrina and in Tihana). This was no doubt due to the strong presence of voices from the majority population as their classmates, who were numerous at that time, by contrast with the ghettoised situation that developed in subsequent years. Indeed, the last

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words heard in the film are an unidentified male voice saying softly (so softly that one might strain to hear it) that “the language barrier is broken down”. Not only have the four speakers learned French, but they have become adept at explaining the benefits of knowing French, and in the cases of Courtney and Mauro they also promote the added advantages of multilingualism. The three who were most vulnerable as children (Guerrina, Tihana, and Courtney) now display an impressive resilience and an ability to argue their positions. Guerrina’s past vulnerability as a young child speaking only Italian and suddenly immersed in French at school is nonetheless clear. It is not dwelt on, but we hear of the distress of her sister in a classe d’accueil, whom she must console during school time. Guerrina’s own linguistic shock as a small child may be surmised. Guerrina also alludes to her suffering as a fifteen-year-old, when she felt torn between her Italian and Francophone contexts. At that age, she lacked the proper words (“les mots me manquaient”), both in Italian and French, and she notes succinctly that it was painful for her: “j’en ai souffert”. Experiences of linguistic turmoil at school in early childhood may be part of the reason she turned from speaking Italian with her own children to French once they had passed babyhood, since having French to start with would mean not facing linguistic upheaval when starting school. Tihana’s trauma is evident in her initial emotional discussion of how she felt as a “foreign” child in her culturally homogenous school in Québec city. Clearly affected by the memories here, she almost breaks down in front of the camera. Later, noting that she also felt like a foreigner when speaking Croatian, she states that it was not an easy childhood. Yet she now works in French for the Québec ministry for Immigration, and like Guerrina has wholeheartedly taken on board the need for French as what she calls a “ciment” or cementing factor for social cohesion in Québec. Courtney notes that “Le prix que j’ai payé dû à la loi 101 c’est une gros [sic] partie de mon enfance” (the price I paid because of Bill 101 is a large part of my childhood). As a very young child starting school, having immigrated from Jamaica at the age of four speaking only English, Courtney recalls sitting through long days of French school with very little comprehension of what was going on, noting that he caught little bits of the discussions but that large amounts passed him by: “Il y avait des petits bouts que je catchais, des gros bouts que je ne catchais pas”. He recounts how on his first day of school he was faced with an angry female teacher who followed him into the boys’ toilet and shook him violently in front of

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the urinals, aggressively warning him not to stir up her classroom. Courtney notes that educational resources for language and cultural adaptation at school have developed greatly, but laments that they did not exist for his age group. He now works with Black and Hispanic children, some of whom are at risk of joining street gangs, if they do not get a chance to feel that they belong to non-violent sections of Québec society. He is inclusive and warm and makes everyone feel valued at his mainly Anglophone resource centre, making sure to heap praise on those who say they can speak French as well as English. He especially praises the child in his group who can speak three languages. Although Courtney feels that la loi 101 was negative for him personally, he acknowledges that it may benefit the children he works with. However, he emphasises that it needs to be rethought with a view to helping visible minorities succeed. Courtney’s challenge now that he is a parent himself is to try to convince his twelve-year-old son Kurtis of the benefits of knowing good French, since Kurtis is resisting the language to a certain extent. We nevertheless see shots of Kurtis studying and reading a French language-­learning manual at a relatively high level, with help from his father. Courtney makes the point that while Kurtis needs to know his Jamaican origins, he also needs to be able to see French as something that can help him, and even make him a better person: “une meilleure personne”. Both Courtney and Tihana have become strong and altruistic adults, who work for the benefit of others and who communicate across languages. Tihana notes that if la loi 101 had not caused her to develop her great fluency in French, she would not be working for the Ministry of Immigration and would not be able to say that she can sincerely believe in what she is doing there. Tihana, like Guerrina (but apparently without the parental battles) is completely at ease in French, and completed all her education in French. Tihana speaks of her prowess in French as a rebellious gesture, a “pied de nez”, which she espoused already as a very young child to her Francophone classmates and teachers, as her way of letting the majority population know that she could be even more fluent and accurate than them in French. Tihana appears to speak easily to her parents in Croatian (and to herself and to her cat), and to everyone else in French, and can discuss the finer points of la loi 101 with only slight hesitation in English. She is a striking example of the one in five trilingual Montrealers who contribute greatly to the rich linguistic mix of this multicultural city.

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The Value of Explanation and Debate At the start of the film, Mauro asks the rhetorical question “Why would you want to speak a language if you are being forced to learn it?” Guerrina’s mother talks intelligently about the fact that on immigrating from a country with a history of fascism they expected to have choice (“la scelta”) in their children’s education. The sense of debate and explanation of positions is one of the significant positive forces of this film. The whole thrust of the film is an explanatory one that privileges self-expression and discussion. Aloisio has stressed that the reasons for la loi 101 and its benefits needs to be constantly explained to everyone, including to the majority Francophone population (Cooke 2020a, 164–165). Additionally, there is a sense in which the painful and conflicted experiences of the children of immigrant background need to be given voice too, for those in the majority group to hear, as occurs in this film. The film is teeming with interlocutors, of which Aloisio is just one example. She is the interviewer for all four main subjects but we do not hear her speak, since the focus is on her interviewees giving their own personal testimony and telling their own stories. Courtney speaks to a Black colleague, to a friend from primary school and to his son Kurtis. Tihana speaks to young immigrants at her workplace, and (also in French) to two friends, one of whom is of Asian extraction and like Tihana is entirely fluent in Québec-inflected French. Luigi di Vito, a fifty-year-old representative from Italian community radio points out the good fortune (“la chance”) that the “enfants de la loi 101” had to be able to learn French and that the majority population needs to realise that they are all part of the same society. Two school teachers express the sense of confusion around what was happening at school at the time of la loi 101. Twelve-­ year-­old Kurtis, who feels he might be able to function without French in Québec is also given a voice, although his father points out how much better the opportunities would be for him with French. He explains calmly to his son that if he wants to become a businessman French will be needed in order to progress. Later, he adds to Kurtis that it is also a question of needing to integrate (“s’intégrer”). As noted, Courtney also explains the benefits and value of multilingualism to Black and Hispanic children at risk, as some of them resist the French that they are learning at school. Tihana actually makes her living from explaining, presenting French-­ speaking life in Québec to new immigrants.

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Like Tihana and Courtney, Guerrina comes across as a very articulate “explainer”. Guerrina continually answers her parents calmly, clarifying for example why she uses French in daily life to the people she encounters, unless someone is clearly far more comfortable in English. She also attempts to convey to her parents why she understands the feelings of cultural and linguistic fragility experienced by Québec’s historical Francophones, the abovementioned over-awareness of language, or “surconscience linguistique”. This is despite the provocative nature of some of her parents’ statements, and the sustained invective by them against la loi 101. Unlike Guerrina, who benefited from discussion at school with classmates from the majority population, her parents remained more focused on the Italian community and had less of an opportunity to view the law from the perspective of the historically established Francophones. Homes and Intercultural Spaces While exploring viewpoints from the official category of “les communautés culturelles” in Québec, the film also focuses on the intercultural community that Québec is now, or purports to strive towards. Community radio and Black community centres are juxtaposed with Tihana’s work at the centre interculturel and her own and Guerrina’s discourse on interculturalism. Home is often a site of heritage language expression, but is also a place of translingual code-switching, though one that sometimes bubbles with tension around language learning, as with Courtney and Guerrina. However, public space is presented as a space for French. While the four main subjects in this film are all filmed in their own dwelling places, Aloisio’s camera constantly moves between images of home to the street, and to external places of encounter such as Tihana’s workplace, the Black community centre, a radio studio, and the offices of school representatives. Courtney and Kurtis are visually shown to belong both in their place of residence and in the snowy Montreal street, for example. Through this, a wider sense of home is engendered, that encompasses many aspects of Québec society. All the main interlocutors move across languages easily. Striking examples are di Vito’s introductory segue from Italian into French, Courtney’s fluid movement between French and English, and even Mauro’s trilingual moment where he tells his daughter “Say ‘merci’. Papa legge, I’ll read you a book” (Say thank you. Daddy will read to you), while speaking in English

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to Aloisio. To use Ofelia García’s terminology, the speakers here are engaged in translanguaging, which breaks down hierarchies of language by giving space to the full linguistic repertoire of any individual, especially those who are bilingual or multilingual.19 In these moments, the film becomes less concerned with French in itself, and more focused on linguistic potential more generally and with the benefits of multilingualism. The latter benefits are expounded most forcefully by Courtney and Mauro, and to an extent by Guerrina’s parents, although they are less enthusiastic about French (her mother feels that “i Quebecesi” have made themselves into second-class citizens by their opposition to English). The question of linguistic heritage is a difficult one for Guerrina. Although she is trilingual, her parent’s promotion of Italian at the expense of French has caused her to resist embracing her heritage language fully. Lack of parental buy-in to the linguistic political situation seems to be the greatest factor in making identification with her Italian side difficult for her. While she does see the functional benefit of English for her children, and will be sending them to private English lessons to help them with secondary school, she is less able to engage with Italian, and she communicates with her children mainly in French. Her mother thinks she is psychologically blocked (“bloccata”), in terms of her attitude to Italian and to English. There is some mental blockage, but this is because of the pressure her parents have put on her to follow their linguistic choices, and their reluctance to accept the importance of French as a lingua franca for cultural mixing. This in turn arises from inadequate explanation of this by politicians and cultural spokespeople, a failing that has been ongoing since the time of the introduction of la loi 101. Many have argued that this is also due to an emphasis on obligation rather than common necessity for the greater good again, partly stemming from the lack of an Interculturalism law that would define the continuing project of societal self-definition in Québec (Carpentier 2022; Cornellier 2023). However, Guerrina has a clear interest in other cultures. Aside from her enthusiasm for the history of established Francophones, we see her using chopsticks at the dinner table with her children at home, and attending an Egyptian belly-dancing class. Nonetheless, a split mirror at the dancing class serves as a device to embody her divided sense of self, torn by her wish to self-define in an overly conflicted environment. Some positive inclusion of her linguistic or ethnocultural heritage in a school context might have gone some way to help Guerrina feel that she did not have to block out Italian in the face of parental pressures. Measures since the turn

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of the millennium include the Élodil linguistic and cultural inclusion project in schools (Armand et  al. 2004; Armand and Maraillet 2013). In British Columbia there has been recent curricular reform incorporating Indigenous content and aspect of Indigenous pedagogy and promoting an understanding of ethnocultural diversity that is now being brought into multicultural classrooms. As Martine Jacquet writes in the latter context, such policies promote an intersubjective understanding of alterity, an ability to adapt to change, and an emphasis on recognition of identity rather than its denial (Jacquet 2019, 371), the latter aspect being most lacking in the case of Guerrina. Another symbolic device used to great effect is that of the shared table of food, in what appears to be Mauro’s home. Towards the latter half of the film, Aloisio introduces a series of scenes around this table, with a rolling series of guests, where Mauro and Tihana are usually present. These table scenes are interspersed between more individually focused scenes. The table scenes are translingual moments that expand the linguistic horizon, serving to allow Mauro to show his ability in French, and revealing Tihana’s prowess in English while also introducing interlocutors from the historically Francophone population. One of the speakers complains that because he was a Francophone child, la loi 101 meant that he did not have the choice to go to English public school. However, another person from the historically Francophone population rather poignantly speaks of his delight at encountering fewer situations where he feels a foreigner in Québec linguistically, since he can now expect salespeople to be able to answer him in French rather than in English. It is at this table that Tihana speaks of French as the cement for social cohesion, even though the discussion includes varied points of view. This deliberate emphasis on the table as a place for constructive and informed debate, sharing ideas as well as meals, seems to be meant as a metaphor for an ideal Québec society, and in a June 2019 conversation with me, Aloisio confirmed that the table was an extremely important symbol. This contrasts with images of Guerrina almost choking on her food at home in highly tense discussions with her Italian parents. However, the last image we receive of their context shows Guerrina’s family at a larger table, with three generations attending a child’s birthday. Guerrina and her mother engage in a conciliatory embrace, suggesting that the heated and apparently tense discussions between them have in fact helped them to understand one another a little better.

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From Conflict to Cautious Optimism Structurally, the film moves from a whirlwind of conflict to a cautious but balanced optimism. The opening minutes are full of protestations and contestations. Opening to shouts of “Le Québec en français” from the late 1960s, we move swiftly through images of politicians Jean-Jacques Bertrand, Robert Bourassa, and René Levesque who brought in various language laws to attempt to solve the linguistic crisis, along with Camille Laurin, often referred to as the father of la loi 101. We see placards reading “McGill en français” (McGill University education should be in French), in reference to the demonstrations by Francophones in 1969 against what they saw as the overly significant place of English in Québec’s university landscape. A woman rallies a crowd to the shout of “Nous sommes une race qui refuse de mourir” (We are a race that refuses to die), in a reference to the iconic novel from Québec, Maria Chapdelaine.20 A placard held by a young Black man reads “Sorry I don’t speak French”. We are shown ten-­ year-­old children taking part in protestations on different sides. We see riot police managing the crowds during the “Crise de Saint-Léonard”. There are images of little children from the 1970s being tested in English, to be triaged into English or French schools later. The initial mood is sombre and conflicted. By the end of the film, however, anger has given place to some joy and at least some rational pragmatism in most cases, as evident in the five “vox pop” snippets of the end sequence. There, a twenty-something Muslim woman in a veil exclaims, with the accent of metropolitan France that attests to her journey through cultures, that she is delighted to be speaking French in North America: “parler français en Amérique du nord, c’est vraiment quelque chose de formidable!” After her, a Francophone from the majority population in his thirties calls Bill 101 an excellent law to preserve French: “une loi excellente pour préserver le français”. He is followed by a Black man of broadly similar age who says in English “I think it doesn’t make sense in North America”, in a direct contrast to the woman in the hijab. A woman with a Spanish or Hispanic accent in her thirties says she would had liked her children to have gone to English school: “J’aurais voulu que mes enfants aillent à l’école anglaise”. A slightly older man who looks South Asian underlines the functional need for French now: “Honestly, it’s now necessary to speak French”. This final section is neither wholly celebratory nor wholly negative but serves to complement the discussions in the film. The law is viewed in these brief clips as needing

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to be embraced for social and economic purposes, but also, by some, as a positive force. For the woman in the hijab, it allows her to move across cultures in a language that she may already have had. However, it is important to note here the feelings of curtailment of choice voiced by the Hispanic woman, and that the law, thirty years after its adoption, remained incomprehensible to some in 2007. Although the end sequence re-establishes place for dissent, the main mood is celebratory of the contributions of the “enfants de la loi 101” to affirming “le caractère francophone du Québec” (the Francophone character of Québec), as Aloisio notes at the start of the film in her role as narrator. In bearing witness to their struggles as well as these contributions, it also celebrates the valuable perspectives that each of the interlocutors brings. As a child from a visible minority, whose appearance marks him as other, along with his accent and the language that he currently favours, Kurtis is ultimately one of the most important figures in the film. With most of his life in front of him, it remains to be seen how he will decide to negotiate the linguistic landscape in Québec in his own life. Because Kurtis’ father Courtney has grown up in Québec and because of his efforts to work with French, he feels that he has the right to a certain recognition: “une certaine reconnaissance”. He also feels that a part of him is “Québécois”. He says this with a wry smile, as though Kurtis may not believe him, and Kurtis initially seems to find the thought amusing. This brief but significant moment highlights the difficulty that many people who are not historically established Francophones have in accessing this qualifier, and confirms the political and social charge with which the word is imbued. The following discussion will look in part at Marco Calliari, a Montreal-born musician who feels Québécois, but whose music is not considered part of Québec music if he sings in Italian, despite its strong influence by music and subject matter from Québec.

Aloisio’s Calliari, QC: Marginality, Multiple Identities, and Loving Québec in Another Language Song and music have proved a particularly fertile ground for self-­expression in Québec. While the use of English in song can be a way of breaking into a global market, it is often seen in Québec as a threat to those battling to preserve the French language. Its global appeal means that some fear it could potentially take over the music scene. Yet song in Québec makes

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itself heard in many forms and with great dynamism. Song provides much of the energy for the Leclair and Plamondon documentary discussed below as part of the Verboczy section, through the particularly interesting figure of Ogden “Robert Nelson” Ridjanovicen.21 Meryam Saci, vocalist with Nomadic Massive, sings in English and Arabic, while other band members bring in Creole and Jamaican patois. Loco Locass, the hip hop group featuring Abla Farhoud’s son Mathieu, sing in French and are ardent defenders of the French language. Webster, a rapper whose real name is Aly Ndiaye, was born in Québec to a Senegalese father and Québécoise mother, also sings and writes in French, and conducts historical tours of Montreal discussing places with links to the slave trade. Inuit singer Elisapie sings in English, Inuktitut, and French. Régine Chassagne of Arcade Fire sings in French on some of the group’s songs. All these musicians are, or grew up as culturally mixed young people, expressing their lived realities in song. Aloisio’s 2022 documentary, Calliari, QC, continues the emphasis on the need for conversations around a table. As noted above, the film has four main interviewees (singers from different minority backgrounds, including an Indigenous singer). The Calliari of the title is Québec-born musician Marco Calliari of Italian parentage, who struggles to gain recognition within the Francophone media and festival milieu. Although he has a strong fan base, and performs up to two hundred shows a year, his songs are consistently classed as World Music if he does not sing in French. His songs in Italian are little heard on French-speaking radio, since he must compete for slots along with big international names in rock due to the quota system favouring French-language music. Calliari did his schooling at French school in Québec, and is perfectly at ease in French, and expresses a strong love of Québec in the film. He started his musical career with Montreal Heavy Metal group Anonymus, who sometimes sing in French, but he gradually lost official recognition when he returned to his roots and starting to sing in Italian. It is crucial to note that Calliari’s Italian songs have strongly intertextual references to Québec song. Through his 2013 album Mi ricordo, Calliari expresses a transcultural sense of self, taking elements from both French-speaking Québec and Italy and merging them to form a new entity. In his quest to affirm a hybrid identity, he seeks to engage with his heritage language and to create something blended. Yet he does not feel adequately supported or recognised to do this in the Québec music sphere.22 Although his approach was not understood by many in the

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Québec music scene (because he sang in Italian), his album remains transculturally creative, and was the subject of an academic article by Aloisio to this effect (Aloisio 2015). In a scene around a table towards the end of the film, the film’s four main interviewees discuss the challenges of being accepted in the Québec musical domain. At this point, the film shines a light on Mamselle Ruiz, who is originally from Mexico and who currently sings mainly in Spanish with some French and English and occasional Portuguese, and whose music is a blend of musical influences from Latin America, Mexico, and Québec. We also meet Paul Cargnello of Argentinian and Lithuanian heritage from Montreal, who sings in English and French, and whose main recognition has come through his songs in French. Importantly, Aloisio also includes Indigenous singer Kathia Rock, whose music in Innu-aimun in her 2022 album Uapen Nuta/Terre de nos aïeux is potentially culturally transformative for non-Indigenous audiences. Rock has an emotional attachment to singing in Innu-aimun, and emphatically points out that her language was one of the first languages of Canada. By contrast with the wider-ranging scope of Aloisio’s film from fifteen years earlier, which contained a vox  pop and included established Francophones in the discussion, there are no members of the majority population at this table (and few in the film as a whole), highlighting Aloisio’s wish to make linguistic diversity the central focus. However, cultural mixing with the majority population is asserted by the emphasis that the Calliari family was a very open one, and Francophone neighbours were frequently asked to the house and to the dinner table in their house in the Saint-Michel area. His parents alternate between Italian and French when the family chat around their translingual dinner table. One of the most poignant aspects of this film is that Marco’s father says he is greatly proud of his son for his manifest talent, and it seems clear that he would like him to be appreciated more fully in Québec. By the end of the film the situation still seems difficult for Calliari, but he will continue to follow his artistic need for expression. There are scenes of Aloisio dancing to Calliari’s music in the film, which can be understood as a deliberate embodiment of resistance to the linguistic side-lining of music that does not fit the Québec paradigm. As Toula Drimonis notes, “The film asks the questions, ‘What’s authentic Québécois music? And if those born and raised here are also performing in their other languages aside from French or English (and sometimes only in their other

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languages), are they, too, not also an authentic reflection of Québécois identity?’” (Drimonis 2022b). Songs that Blend, Unsettle, and Transcend In 2014, around the time of release of Mi ricordo, Calliari spoke of his belief that listeners would recognise what he had done with the melodies of the eleven Québec classics that his album reworked in Italian. He had merged Italian and Québec cultural references and changed the musical style, but kept the heart of the pieces. Among the reworked pieces were “Lindberg” by Robert Charlebois, “Julie” by Les Colocs, and “Si j’avais un char” (meaning “If I had a car”) by Stephen Faulkner, which became “Se avessi una vespa” (If I had a vespa). All are by Québec artists, as the very Québec-anchored “char” reference in the Faulkner song attests, “char” being how French speakers in Québec refer to a car, as opposed to “voiture” in France. He was convinced that audiences would recognise the tunes and realise that the soul of the piece had been kept, but reworked with his own self-expression. He declared that his aim was to take these songs “out from here” to bring them to a different place: “Le but était de sortir ces chansons-là d’ici et de les amener ailleurs” (Leclerc 2014). The “ailleurs” or different place to which Calliari is referring is a transcultural space of musical fusion. However, the intelligence and subtlety of his intertextual approach has not yet been fully appreciated by the Frenchspeaking music scene in Québec. Indigenous singer Kathia Rock seems to have engaged with the point made by Cargnello about the importance of making one’s mark in French in her first album “Terre de mes aïeux”, released in 2022 after twenty-­ five years of musical and theatrical performances. Yet while it has the title song in French, written by Louise Poirier, all of the subsequent songs are in Innu-aimun. There is a strong irony in the fact that this Innu singer should come to prominence in French with this acerbic song and its accompanying videos, as it is a protest song about the scandal of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, whose lives were corralled and shaped over generations by the French settler system. “Terre de mes aïeux” is a reference to the Canadian national anthem, “O Canada”. The English translation of these lines is “Our home and native land”, which Indigenous activists like to point out should be “our home on native land”. Rock’s place within the lived reality of Québec is on its margins, both musically and more generally. She states towards the middle of Aloisio’s

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film that when she travels abroad she feels like an ambassador for Québec but that she is very unsure whether Québec itself sees her as an ambassador for its culture. Sharing Calliari’s predicament, she is disgusted that her songs are categorised as World music (“musique du monde”) even though Québec is her land, her home: “mon propre pays, chez moi”. Nonetheless, her work is a vehicle for transcultural encounter—even more strongly than Calliari’s songs in French’s cognate or sister language of Italian. This is highlighted in Youtube videos of non-Indigenous and Indigenous people at her concerts dancing together in shared-but-different appreciation of her songs in Innu-ainum. Decidedly and self-assertively “other” (but no longer “othered”, for the space of the concert at least), Rock’s Innu-­ language lyrics confront her audiences with the linguistic autonomy of Indigenous peoples and encourage non-Indigenous listeners to look beyond themselves. Sometimes using French as a lingua franca allows Rock to convey her message more clearly. A fascinating instance of transcultural mediation as vehicled by Rock herself occurs in her presentation in French of one of the songs she sings in Innu-aimun from the Uapen Nuta album, “Tshin Nemushum” meaning “Toi, mon grand-père” (you, my grandfather). In her Youtube presentation, uploaded by not-for-profit music organisation Musique nomade, Rock provides an introduction in French to this song with its pop-rock and country influences, pointing out that it was written by the acclaimed Innu poet Joséphine Bacon over a meal that Rock and she shared in a Montreal café. Rock also remarks the song was finished in a taxi, as though to emphasise its nomadic content and quality (Rock 2021). Rock notes that she herself has been living in Montreal for almost thirty years and that the song is about a young female creative person like her from a smaller community who arrives in that metropolis and feels disorientated because of culture shock (“une fille qui arrive à Montréal et qui ne sait pas trop combien combiner sa culture avec la vie urbaine en tant qu’artiste”). She notes how the song conveys a sense of who she is and of her life and creative approach: “cette chanson-là qui me ressemble beaucoup, et qui ressemble beaucoup à ma vie, surtout à ma demarche”. The French-language part of Rock’s presentation in this case clarifies and deepens the encounter that non-Innu-speaking listener-viewers then have with the song, but the powerful otherness of the Innu-aimun language gives the listening experience most of its impact. While music is a universal language that connects people across languages and that transcends linguistic barriers, the language in which a song is sung is an

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integral part of its effect. Aloisio’s film underscores the sense that language remains vibrant when it is not completely understood, and that its foreignness can indeed lend it an added force, once listeners accept to engage with its linguistic autonomy.

Verboczy’s Rhapsodie québécoise: from “d’où viens-tu” to “où allons-nous”? Published in 2016, Rhapsodie québécoise, itinéraire d’un enfant de la loi 101 was translated into English in 2017 by Casey Roberts, with Montreal publisher Baraka Books, as Rhapsody in Quebec, on the Path of an Immigrant Child (Verboczy and trans. Casey Roberts 2017). It won the Grand prix littéraire de la presse québécoise in 2016 and was a finalist for the prix de la diversité Metropolis bleu in 2017. A film adaptation by Babel films was mooted in 2016 but was abandoned due to funding difficulties. In her preface to the English translation, Greek-born Québec journalist and writer Toula Drimonis (who applauds the book while disagreeing with some of its content), encourages Anglophones in Québec and across Canada to read it, as well as those of immigrant background who are more comfortable in English. It contains fifty short chapters recounting Verboczy’s departure from Hungary aged eleven, and his integration into Québec, where he became a political adviser on intercultural affairs and on democratic participation. The word “integration” is used often and without complex in this book of autobiographical and political reflections, as is the term “Québécois de souche”. However, because of the right-wing associations of the equivalent expression in France where it has a different context, I will tend to avoid it in this analysis, especially since Verboczy is so fully part of Québec society himself, and repeatedly notes his own selfdefinition as Québécois, and his obvious right to the label. Given the book’s political thrust, I will look first at some of its most salient political and sociological elements. I will then examine its presentation of youthful experience on a level that is more personal to Verboczy himself. I will contrast his context and experience with the generation of young people born long after the last referendum on Québec sovereignty in 1995, who often have less of an interest in Québec’s national project. From the start of his narrative, Verboczy makes sure to emphasise that all immigrants have different contexts and expectations, and that he is just one of the million immigrants who have arrived in Québec in the last

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thirty years, some arriving by chance, others by choice, some intending to stay, others coming to Québec merely to obtain a passport before moving on (13). He does not condemn any of this. He is also aware that he is fortunate to be “invisible” because he is white, as when he performs his ethnographic observations of the demographics along the Montreal metro lines in the “Tango de Montreal” chapter. There, he describes himself as hidden behind his white skin and his newspaper: “caché derrière ma peau blanche et mon journal” (184). He does not seek to be the benchmark by which the perfect immigrant is measured, noting that it is better to have realistic expectations when it comes to integration: “En matière d’intégration, mieux vaut avoir des attentes réalistes” (221). He ends his narrative on the simple point that those who speak French, become friends with people from the majority population, and learn about the culture of the majority will be better integrated than those who do not (222–223). More Québécois than the Established Québécois? Rhapsodie québécoise is an often-ironic, savagely intelligent, intellectual tour de force that is sincerely committed to an aspirational or rhapsodic Québec that Verboczy would like to see as a sovereign state. Committed to an interculturalist vision of society, Verboczy would love this rhapsodic Québec to be socially inclusive but proud of the Francophone culture, history, and language that makes it distinctive. However, the level of cultural knowledge and intertextual reference in the book makes it likely to be misunderstood, or not understood, in somewhat the same way as Calliari’s deeply Québec-rooted references in the abovementioned Mi ricordo album passed many listeners by. Deeply rooted in French-speaking culture, Verboczy’s 2013 piece in Montreal’s Métro newspaper entitled “Ils sont fous, ces anglos” (those Anglos are nuts) was misconstrued by Anglophone politicians in Québec, who called for him to be fired from his job as political advisor at the Parti Québécois. The article’s title was a reference to the recurring phrase “ils sont fous, ces Romains” (those Romans are nuts) in the bande dessinée series Astérix, by French author René Goscinny. Like Verboczy, Goscinny was of immigrant extraction and Jewish, and thus well placed to comment on feelings of being dominated culturally, as Jews were in Europe. Critics of Verboczy’s piece did not understand the literary reference to the small country of Gaul feeling swamped by the Romans, and they also omitted to mention the conciliatory words towards Anglophones in Verboczy’s

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article. Importantly, they also ignored its context. It was written directly after several friends of Verboczy barely escaped with their lives at a Parti Québécois victory speech event, during which a terrorist shooting was carried out by anti-separatist Richard Bain, who killed a stage technician and critically wounded another person. Verboczy notes that, ironically, the waters were only calmed by a message from Toronto’s English-language newspaper Globe and Mail, which pointed out the cultural reference to Astérix. Verboczy appreciates the role of supportive Anglophones and indeed suggests that Québec and Canada fail to adequately promote and make visible the considerable swathe of Anglophones who do not feel that immigrants need to be “Anglicised” (200). He is nonetheless irked by what he views as divisive behaviour by some Anglophone politicians in attempting to gain votes and strengthen their own camp by rallying immigrants to the cause of freedom of linguistic choice, which some of those politicians present as the right to live one’s life in Québec entirely through English. Vocally sovereigntist, Verboczy pokes fun at federalism and at multiculturalism from the start, showing the darker side of multiculturalism later in the book. His chapter entitled “Multiculturalisation” highlights his view that multiculturalist politics is based on tokenism and what he sees as an empty promotion of diversity for diversity’s sake, which he also notes at the start of the book. He prefers to highlight what connects us all: “souligner ce qui nous rassemble” (15). In the opening pages, he makes the tongue-in-cheek comment that his hybridity as an immigrant has given him a long list of multicultural identifiers: “Hongro-Québécois, judéo-­ chrétien, d’expression française, Est-Européen d’Amérique du nord” (12–13). He states that he is more than happy to use these identifiers to gain grants and invitations to speak at events. Yet he also finds this complexifying of identity amusing, saying that it makes him feel like Elvis Gratton, a federalist character from tv and film in Québec. In an iconic scene known by many in Québec, Gratton was asked by a French man if he is “Canadien” and exposed his uncertainty of identity by famously describing himself in a strong Québécois accent as a “Canadien québécois, un Français canadien français, un Américain du nord français, un francophone québécois canadien, un Québécois d’expression canadienne française française [sic]…” Gratton and his female companion continued, “On est des Canadiens américains francophones d’Amérique du nord, des Franco-Québécois…On est des Franco-Canadiens du Québec, des Québécois canadiens… C’est ça!” Gratton’s long list of constantly

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qualified identifiers, with “Canadien” present in nearly all of them, is an example of a slightly nutty and unsatisfactory “multiculturalised” identity. Verboczy’s reference to this scene, which he does not explain, but which he assumes his readers know, anchors him from the start in Québec’s identity and culture debates. The character of Elvis Gratton is a staunchly federalist bumpkin fond of American ways, and devoted to the American dream of individual success in a consumerist system. Gratton was created by Pierre Falardeau and Julien Poulin after the defeat of the first sovereignty referendum in 1980, to poke fun at federalists who in their view suffered from uncertainty of identity. What is most striking about the above scene is that it suggests that Elvis could not bring himself to say “Québécois” as a simple identifier. This is primarily because of Elvis’ federalism, but it may also hint at an underlying insecurity surrounding national identity in Québec more generally. As noted above, the commonly used term “Québécois de souche” (old-­ stock) when referring to historically established Francophones is understandably viewed by some as divisive (Cooke 2016). The term of “majority population” or “population majoritaire” is one option, and has been used in academic circles in France in recent years. The TEO (Trajectoire et origines) research group in France defined this term as follows: French people who are not immigrant, and who are not children of immigrants, nor children of people born in overseas departments of France. Included in the group are French people who were born abroad, and their children. It includes French people who were repatriated from the colonial empire and any of their children born in mainland France. Grandchildren of immigrants are part of the majority population group (Beauchemin et al. 2010).23 The TEO’s emphasis on the grandchildren of immigrants as being part of the majority population is sometimes aspirational in France, depending on one’s physical appearance, name, and culture of heritage, and may also be aspirational in Québec for the same reasons. Those whose grandparents were Arab, Asian, Black, or Latino immigrants may feel more distinct from the majority population in France or Québec (or may find it more difficult to be accepted as part of the majority population) than those of white Irish or white British background, or than some people whose grandparents immigrated from Southern or Eastern Europe, for example. In Québec, any definition of “majority population” would be slightly different in any case, and would have to include Indigenous groups as an important minority population.

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Verboczy’s choice to use the term of “Québécois de souche” is best understood as a type of shorthand, and again, it is a term commonly used in Québec. His use of the term seems to stem from his clear admiration for the literary culture of the nation into which he found himself thrust, and the struggle for national self-definition in Québec. He finds it strange and sad to feel the need to remind French-speaking readers in Québec—the initial target audience—that the established Francophone population has a distinct culture with its own cultural production, albeit one that is formed in a North American context and in tandem with Anglophone culture, with which it shares many commonalities but also important differences. He wants Francophone culture to be celebrated and known by people from all backgrounds in Québec, whether in the form of song, film, poetry, history, or popular cultural traditions, so that all those living in Québec will have common reference points: “des choses à se dire”, “des références communes” (220). His own immersion in Francophone culture is a large part of the richness of the identity that he holds today, which he is happy to call “québécois” (14, 119, 220). Intertextuality as Pluriform Literary Home, and a Celebration of North American Culture The chapter headings and epigraphs spin an intertextual web in a masterful virtuoso performance, to follow the musical metaphor referred to in the title through the reference to Franz Lizt’s Hungarian rhapsodies. There are many headings and epigraphs from French-speaking Québec culture, including the literary writer Gaston Miron, nationalist singer Félix Leclerc, Jacques Poulin (the hero of popular culture in Québec mentioned in Chap. 1, whose Gaspésie to San Francisco road novel Volkswagen blues was published just two years before Verboczy arrived in Montreal), and other immigrant writers in Québec such as Dany Laferrière and Rodney Saint Éloi whom he greatly admires, both of Haitian origin (170, 195). The “La grande séduction” chapter evokes the 2003 film of that name, where residents in a remote Québec village try their best to lure an out-of-­ towner to stay, as they need his medical expertise. In this chapter, Verboczy creates a parallel between this and what he decries as the seducing of immigrants to Québec, who are then only considered for their utility value, in their case for their economic input as consumers and members of the badly paid labour force.

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Several of the initial headings evoke Hungarian or Eastern European writers, and wide-ranging references to literature and culture from France also appear, including to Albert Camus, Jacques Prévert, and Enrico Macias, the Jewish-born French singer of Algerian origin. Anglophone literature from Montreal is included through a reference to Mordecai Richler.24 North American popular culture is also referenced, for example through James Brown’s “Living in America” and the film Back to the Future. All of this demonstrates the vast extent and richness of culture to which Verboczy has been exposed, mainly through his own through explorations and reading. While these cultural products are largely French-­ language sources, the author’s curiosity about works of art and his voracious consumption of culture are not narrowly bound to ethnicity. He seems to be underlining that he is of course a product of where he initially came from, but also very much of the North American, mainly French-­ speaking society where he now lives. Anglophone cultural history is included in the patrimony that Verboczy says belongs to all those in Québec, for example in his reference to “boulingrin”, a French-language deformation of the word “bowling green”, to refer to the very British institution of lawn bowls. For him, this has become part of Québec culture, as much as the country’s museums or fast-food stands, and he includes it indiscriminately as part of a sample list of what it means to belong to Québec (220). More sustained inclusion of Anglophone identity in Québec is seen when Mordecai Richler’s 1974 novel The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is accorded a chapter full of intertextual reference to that famous Montreal work of Jewish coming of age. Verboczy is ethnically Jewish through the matrilinear line of mother and grandmother, but he only realised this ethnicity by accident, at the age of nine. By his own humorously wry admission, his Jewishness was more of a useful instrument than an emotional attachment when he arrived in Québec (13, 69, 79). It is noteworthy, however, that Richler’s book is referred to in its French translation, and Verboczy also manages to slip into the discussion the fact that the famous icon of Québec nationalist literature Gaston Miron was born in the area where Richler sets his coming-of-age novel, and where Verboczy himself was an assistant at Jewish summer camp (127). This is not political or linguistic point-scoring but seems meant to emphasise the intermingling of different stories in a common history, and, in the case of the French title of Richler’s work, to show Verboczy’s greater level of comfort in French.

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There are numerous subtle references to Miron throughout the text, most notably in the titles “Commencer par arriver” and “Arriver à ce qui commence” of two of the narrative’s three main sections. This is a reference to Miron’s line “je suis arrivé à ce qui commence” (I am now at the point of what is about to begin) in his famous collection of poetry about Francophone identity in Québec: L’Homme rapaillé. “Rapaillé” is a Québec term for something that is pieced together and reworked, and Miron’s collection was reworked over multiple editions over many years. In the same way, Verboczy’s identity has been a long journey, pieced together from his Hungarian boyhood up to age eleven, and all the other elements he has absorbed in Québec from that point onwards. Most important for him is his assemblage of a Québécois identity from literary, historical, and cultural sources. Verboczy’s identity is still in process, gathered up along the way, just as Québec identity itself is still uncertain. In his poem entitled “Sur les chemins de ce pays” (Following the paths of this land), written to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nuit de la poésie poetry festival in Québec, he called Québec a place that had not quite achieved the status of country, neither when he was a teenager nor at the time he was writing, in 2020: “ce pays qui n’en était pas vraiment un” (Verboczy 2020, 48). A similar sense of identity as uncompleted or inchoate emerges in the epigraph to Rhapsodie québécoise’s concluding chapter, which is drawn from a work of English literature, Lawrence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. Sterne’s book has a rambling and incoherent form, which Sterne calls a “rapsodie [sic]”, and this underlines the peripatetic nature of Verboczy’s book. Yet this is no aimless wandering, rather a way for Verboczy to emphasise the in-process nature of his own identity and of others in Québec. Social Ghettos, and How to Transmit Québec’s “patrimoine commun”? Verboczy attended French-speaking school and was the only representative of his ethnic group at school. As in Abla Farhoud’s case, most people from his cultural background chose English-language school, having generally arrived before la loi 101. However, Farhoud was a rarity as an immigrant in her French Catholic school, while a generation later Verboczy as a very secular Jew attended a multi-ethnic (and nominally Protestant school) in the immigrant area of Côte-des-neiges ten to fifteen years after

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la loi-101, where there were no members of the majority population apart from some of the teachers. He therefore had to find a sense of connection with historically French-speaking Québec identity for himself, and portrays this as a challenge that he accomplished with considerable hard work and commitment. Verboczy’s first point of contact with established Francophones was through his interaction with the majority population at fencing classes from the age of thirteen or fourteen. Everything took place in French there, down to the names of the techniques and equipment. Unusually, this continued even at Canada-wide level, as the international language of fencing is French, in deference to the cultural heritage of the Three Musketeers. He was welcomed with open arms into the fencing community. A resounding “il est des nôtres” (he’s one of us), closes this chapter, as the teenager is depicted undergoing the codified drinking ritual of becoming part of the group (103). He toured Canada with his fencing friends, hung out in their basements, went to the theatre on their spare tickets, was given space in their cars, and was welcomed by their Francophone mothers.25 This is no doubt why he called for host families, “familles d’accueil”, for each immigrant, in a radio interview with Michel Lacombe a few years after the publication of the book (Lacombe 2019). Verboczy’s integration was enhanced at post-secondary level when he chose to attend French-speaking Cégep, which was such a momentous change from his school (where the majority population were only present as teachers) that it felt like a second immigration. It was not until he arrived at this Cégep, situated in the area of Rosemount (a part of Montreal where Abla Farhoud coincidentally spent her happiest years too) that he was able to lap up the philosophy, history, sociology, and literary culture of which he had been starved. He went on to attend the French-speaking University UQAM, Université du Québec à Montréal (see the chapters “Les Mousquetaires”, “Le Québécois”, and “La vie devant soi”). Verboczy was an oddity in his peer group in choosing to study at a French-speaking Cégep after secondary school, as 80% of his immigrant peers chose English Cégep (139). The rigid social segregation of the Côte-­ des-­neiges area where he lived and went to school, meant that the students of his almost ghettoised school had very little interaction with the majority population. At his secondary school, there was in fact only one student from the historically established Francophone group, whom the others called “le Québécois”, and that student stayed in the school for just one year. Verboczy seems mystified to have encountered any historically

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established “Québécois” in his class at all. His description of this boy implies that he was not well off financially, and he notes that all the other majority population children in the catchment area had been sent by their parents to private school, to avoid the poorer social classes. Somewhat surprisingly, in his 2019 radio interview, questioner Michel Lacombe seems astonished to hear Verboczy talk of this segregation. However, the “Them” and “Us” division in immigrants’ perception of the majority Francophone population is a constant in the documentary films of Godbout, Groulx and Leclair and Plamondon in relation to the children of la loi 101. In the chapter “La danse la moins jolie”, a reference to a song by Québec singer Félix Leclerc, Verboczy notes that, to his great shame today, he may—as part of the whole school group—have participated in the booing of young Québec folk-dancers who visited the school as part of a multi-ethnic dance festival in which the students showcased national dances from their ethnic groups. A similar rejection of the majority population occurs in Leclair and Plamondon’s 2017 documentary. There, a young woman at the Anglophone Cégep Vanier speaks dismissively of “les Francophones”, and this seems to be because she herself felt spurned by them. She did not attend French-speaking secondary school, and may never have interacted meaningfully with anybody whose main language was French or who chose to speak it outside of places where it was obligatory. She seems completely distanced from the majority French-speaking population and considers “Francophones” as just another community within a communitarian view of Québec: she calls them “cette communauté-­là” (that community: Leclair and Plamondon 2017: 06.30–06.50). “Patrimoine commun” (shared French-speaking cultural legacy) and “parcours historique” (historical experience) are key terms in the interculturalist project (Rocher et al. 2007; ANQ 2019). In Rhapsodie québécoise, Verboczy sees the majority Francophone population as greatly lacking in self-confidence about their own culture, and unwilling or unable to impart it in schools, where the discourse is utilitarian (173, 140). He often speaks of cultural poverty: “inculture” or “pauvreté culturelle” (127, 131, 140). He writes of having met young Francophone Québécois backpackers on travels abroad, who have nothing to say about their culture except Englishlanguage references (131–132). He felt that the classe d’accueil or linguistic reception class that he joined at age eleven in the last year of primary school had the atmosphere of a child-minding facility, a “garderie” (75), as though anything of any depth might be perceived as too challenging for

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the children. While he concedes that some of them had arrived barely literate to Québec, he stresses that he was highly advanced in terms of reading in his own language and therefore felt infantilised in French. In Hungary all his peers had read novels by Ferenc Molnár and Frigyes Karinthy by the age of ten or eleven, but in Québec Verboczy was given just three or four novels to study over the entire five years of his secondary education (141). In the chapter titled “Sneedronningen”, which is the Danish name for “The Snow Queen” tale by Hans Christian Andersen, he expresses his admiration for Danish secondary school children who study classics of Québec literature through French. He studied no poetry at secondary school, although his 2020 poem shows how much he was marked by poetry in his late teens when attending French-speaking Cégep. More broadly, Verboczy notes that culture and history suffer in Québec because of the greater interest in economic forces that govern immigration as well as Québec and Canada’s consumer society more generally. Symbolically, a history museum that fascinated him as a boy of eleven is torn down to make yet another shopping centre in the chapter entitled “Une épopée en Amérique”, which could be translated as “North American epic” (51). He laments that consumer society is the cultural glue of North America: “le liant culturel” (117). He complains that this emphasis on consumption distracts people from engaging in more philosophical matters of how best to ensure social harmony. He considers multiculturalism to be based on consumerism, with an exoticising and folklorising impetus. This is evident in the chapter “Le désespoir est assis sur un banc”, an intertextual nod to the title of the poem by French writer Jacques Prévert. There, Verboczy exposes the exploitation of the ethnic culture of immigrants for consumerist purposes, which blinds people to the economic and social exploitation of poorer people from certain ethnic backgrounds. He cites voodoo sessions or oriental body waxing as immigrant products that exist for the delectation of the dominant social classes (168). An Immigrant’s Ambivalence About (Immigrant) Heritage Communitarianism, or entrenchment in ethnocultural communities, is anathema to Verboczy, whose personal trajectory makes him conflicted about the importance of his Hungarian heritage. In fact, “heritage” is a word that he does not want to bore us with (136).26 However, he introduces it in a deliberate manner early on, declaring himself to be in the

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lineage of the Québec that adopted him and that he ended up adopting too: “de l’héritage de ce Québec qui m’a adopté et que j’ai fini par adopter” (14). As someone from a communist, and therefore socialist, secular, background, he is wary of any surfeit of emphasis on diversity, and he makes sure to point out that he is only a “demi-Juif” (half a Jew), and a firmly atheist Jew at that (210). He considers that some proponents of multiculturalism exploit the notion of heritage in order to surround ethnocultural communities with a sense of their own difference, and that this occurs at the expense of the common linguistic and national project that he wants for Québec. He laments that this sometimes happens for personal and political gain, as in the “Roussalka” chapter. Yet, ever self-aware, he notes that his immigration context is personal to him. He makes the point that if his Hungarian community in Montreal had been more vibrant, he might have had a stronger sense of wanting to belong to it (44). Verboczy makes only brief reference to the PELO heritage language project in Québec, which is available to certain schoolchildren depending on resources, and he claims not to be overly concerned about handing his own language on to any potential progeny. He notes that he cannot now write a letter in Hungarian without making a mistake (130, 185, 193).27 However, fostering excellence and enjoyment in plurilingualism (including in heritage languages) has been proven to increase transcultural knowledge and enhance student confidence and their sense of belonging, as well as overall linguistic and general cognition (Cummins 1996; Jessner 2018; Cummins 2021; Dolas et al. 2022). Mainly available at primary school, PELO provides an opportunity for schoolchildren to learn a heritage language. The languages taught are usually dependent on the largest cultural groups attending a given school. It is sometimes also possible to attend PELO if the heritage language one wishes to study is not one’s own. A “PELO intégré” option also exists, using the language of origin to help students learning French as an additional language. It is worth noting that the website of the Centre de services scolaire de Montréal (sic) emphasises the fact that learning a heritage language can improve the learner’s knowledge of his or her own language, as well as of “la culture québécoise”. They note that “le PELO permet aux élèves de faire des transferts d’une langue à l’autre, d’une culture à l’autre. Il sert à établir et à consolider les repères linguistiques et culturels” (PELO allows students to make links between languages and cultures. Its purpose is to establish and consolidate linguistic and cultural frameworks) (CSSDM 2023).

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Nuancing his general reluctance to celebrate heritage, Verboczy devotes a whole chapter to what he calls his “Rhapsodie hongroise”, referencing the series of musical “Hungarian rhapsodies” incorporating folk music that formed a large part of the life work of Franz Liszt in the nineteenth century. Although it is not stated anywhere in the text, Liszt bears some resemblance to Verboczy in certain aspects. He was an emigrant like Verboczy and left Hungary at the age of nine, spending the next two decades in Vienna and Paris. Although intensely patriotic to Hungary, Liszt grew up in a German-speaking part of Hungary and was unable to speak Hungarian well. He was a cosmopolitan figure who inspired Hungarian nationalism through his music and his association with the cause of Hungarian independence from Austria. Verboczy is cosmopolitan like Liszt, and over the years he develops a palpable love and passion for the culture of his country of origin, as well as for Québec. After constantly being questioned on Hungary by curious interlocutors in Montreal, he was forced to start to read up about it and eventually became an ambassador and explainer of his country’s customs, literature, and song. Hungarian heritage is also what provides the strongest emotional power of this chapter, and of the book more generally. In the “Rhapsodie hongroise” chapter, an affective force arises from the strong connection that Verboczy ultimately gains with a certain number of tangible objects that he uses to tell his personal story. These include an old Hungarian metro pass from 1920, his father’s engraved flask, old family photographs, and his grandmother’s baby shoe (135). All of these allow him to form a deeply personal connection with Hungary through family traces. It is in this chapter that he gives a dictionary definition of “Rhapsodie”. The first two meanings chime with Lawrence Sterne’s usage as described above, a rambling epic poem made up of badly fitting bits and pieces by an itinerant singer. Yet despite the disparate nature of the influences in his life, he says the whole is more or less harmonious: “plus ou moins harmonieux” (136). However, after his lyrical exposé of his personal, family-based sense of what Hungary means to him, he reasserts his firm feeling that his rhapsody is no longer Hungarian but Québécois, “non plus hongroise mais québécoise” (136). While he is deeply attached to what he came from on a personal level, he is most solidly anchored in his country of adoption. At the time of publishing his text in 2016, Verboczy had been living in Québec for thirty years, and had spent only his first eleven years in Hungary. His is a case where the instinct to call a writer “migrant” needs to be avoided, as he anchors himself so solidly in Québéc and calls himself

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Québécois. However, his book does share one of the common tropes of migrant writing, that of exile. The suddenness of his mother’s decision to uproot the family for economic purposes and out of a desire for a new life caused a great shock to him and his sister, and he muses wryly on the supposed resilience of children that adults invoke as he and his family prepare to leave (24, 38). The first chapter recounting his trajectory, “Wartburg blues” starts with a light narrational touch, but ends on the poignant wrench from his beloved grandparent, Mamie. The combined upheaval of moving house, moving country, and leaving loved ones behind is intensified when Verboczy describes his grandmother as a small figure waving goodbye to him, his sister, and his mother, standing in the doorway of her socialist apartment with tears running down her cataract-blurred eyes. In the era before Facebook and free phone and video calls, such an emigration was a painfully sharp break, by contrast to today’s immigrants who have the “illusion” of not having left their country (54). Likewise, the departure scene at the Hungarian airport is heart wrenching, where more people are left behind, like his mother’s friend Károly and his father. He is certain his father was at the airport but has no memory of the last hug, perhaps having wiped it from memory as it was too painful (36). In that chapter, titled “Adieu mon pays”, he describes himself as having been torn apart like a strip of Velcro, implying that he has left part of himself in Hungary, and that the part that came with him to Québec will not ever fully stick to other surfaces (36–37). His account of life as a boy in Hungary shows great attachment to his friends, and to the Pioneer group of Communist boy scouts of whom he was the leader, and whose solidarity and group identity may have informed his later wish to help others as part of a group in Québec. Two years after his emigration, he returns to Hungary and is interviewed about what he misses, and his answer is simple: “notre Mamie et les amis”, our Granny and my friends (89). There are numerous references to Mamie through the narrative, and the moment where he writes that she has become senile, no longer knowing who he is, five years after his emigration, is equally poignant despite the apparent flippancy of the tone (134). It is also noteworthy that, as though to deflect attention from some of this pain, he maintains an emphasis on arrival in this section, which bears the section title “Commencer par arriver”, and not on departure as one might expect. Mamie’s attachment to French, the language she admired most of all her many languages, may also have influenced his determination to master it,

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and his fierce defence of it to those who consider it unnecessary or a “patois” (48). Leclair and Plamondon’s Les Québécois de la loi 101: Where to from Here?28 In his appearances in Leclair and Plamondon’s 2017 film, Les Québécois de la loi 101, Verboczy focuses again on the cultural patrimony of French speakers in Québec. He continues his lament that he was given little knowledge of French-speaking culture at secondary school, partly because he was offered so little to read about it. Many of the seventeen- and eighteen-­year-­old students to whom he speaks at the Anglophone Cégep Vanier in Montreal are of immigrant extraction but were born in Québec, and attended French school because they had to, escaping into the English system as quickly as they could. One of the girls agrees with Verboczy about the lack of contact with Francophone culture in her school work. She stated that she learned more about Québec culture in one year of Anglophone Cégep than she did in her whole French-language schooling. It is striking that at school level, the English-speaking system seems the most invested in the cultural patrimony of French-speaking Québec, as a willing participant in the interculturalist vision of the responsibility to protect French-speaking legacy as well as to promote rapprochement with cultural groups other than itself. However, cultural divisions remain strong in this film, despite its aspirational title. Significantly, when questioned by Verboczy about whether they see themselves still in Québec in ten years, the answer is a resounding “no” from most of these Vanier students. There is little sense of belonging to Québec among them. The explanation for this seems less because they are attending Anglophone Cégep and more because they have not been given a sense of belonging at secondary level in the French-language system. Additionally, and importantly, some have tried to be accepted as Québécois but have been consistently rebuffed because they speak better English than French, or because of their accent, or because of their skin colour. One says she wants to be Québécoise as well as Anglophone but does not feel that she can be accepted as both. She feels unable to break through the stereotype of the Québécois as historically established Francophone (Leclair and Plamondon 2017, 06.00–06.30). The celebrated Montreal English-language writer Heather O’Neill expressed a similar sentiment in

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2018: she would like to write in French and call herself Québécoise but does not feel validated to do so (Gladel 2018). Lorena Gale, the Black Montreal writer mentioned in Chap. 1, produced a remarkable play in English with French snippets about her experiences as a Black Anglophone writer growing up in Montreal, provocatively titled Je me souviens, first produced in 2000 (Gale 2001). As Marco Calliari did with his Mi ricordo album title in 2013, the text by Gale borrows the Québécois provincial motto, meaning “I remember”, which is often perceived as a veiled allusion to the wounds of past oppression by a more dominant cultural group—in Québec’s case the historically established Anglophones after La Conquête, and in Gale’s case the Francophone majority group. Her subtitle is equally provocative: “Memories of an expatriate Anglophone Montrealaise, Québecoise exiled in Canada” (She “emigrated” to Vancouver aged thirty: see Hustak 2010). Hope for a sense of belonging to Québec nonetheless remains. Some of the slightly younger immigrant students who are visible minorities at the multi-ethnic La Voie secondary school are hopeful that they may eventually be able to be accepted as Québécois, although the term is mumbled softly and uncertainly. As Leclair and Plamondon suggest in their film, there is a need for a greater Québec project now that the objective of a common language has been more or less achieved. It is striking that the strongest example of a humanist mingling occurs through engagement with creative cultural production, including literature. At the end of the film, the students at La Voie school are handed photocopied extracts from dramatic work by classic Montreal twentieth-century writer Michel Tremblay, whose writing is often seen as difficult or very colloquially Québécois. This comes directly after a scene where Verboczy vaunts the merits of challenging students with works that are apparently different from their culture (using the example of a Pakistani reading Tremblay in Québec) but that underline universal connections between humans. The immigrant students are shown engaging with it eagerly and laughing at its humour. They learn a little about the majority population in the process, but above all they draw on universal experience in order to understand this play, and can therefore realise their similarity with the imagined Other (Leclair and Plamondon 2017, 40.00–41.20). Literary encounter is the key connective force in Rhapsodie québécoise too, as a vector for the sharing of experience from one human being to another. Verboczy ends his narrative on a reference from Québec literature, Gilles Vigneault’s poem “Mon pays”, which he often used with his

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immigrant students, when teaching French as a foreign language. The lines are generous, open, and welcoming: a table is offered, a place is laid, a guest is welcomed. Yet in Rhapsodie québécoise, Verboczy nonetheless seems uncertain about the future, feeling that the current era is obsessed with difference: “notre époque est obsédée par les différences” (15), and that today’s generation of young people in Québec see themselves more aligned to Canada than to Québec. Verboczy comments, perhaps somewhat unfairly, that Québec’s young people are children of what he sees as the individualist 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and no longer children of the more group-focused charter of the French language (224–225). He remarks that immigrants to Québec think that they are coming to Canada, not Québec, are thus surprised when Québec does things differently, and that sovereignty could help in this respect. Yet as the politician Louise Beaudoin points out in Leclair and Plamondon’s film, the fact that many immigrants feel that there is a gulf between them and Québec culture is largely of Québec’s own making and responsibility: “en bonne partie de notre responsabilité”. While not a cure-all, Verboczy’s idea of “host families” may not be all that far-fetched. Places at tables in houses where those of immigrant and non-­immigrant background would meet and engage in real exchange, would deflect from a focus on difference and might help in some small way to stem the flow of those who wish to leave Québec. The notion of the established population as the only “giver” or host would need to be addressed, as the newcomers would educate the established population with the cultural riches that they themselves bring to the table, in a shared perspective of reciprocity. Slimbach’s 2005 essay on the transcultural journey notes in its abstract that “transcultural persons may be sustained through transnational corporations, grassroots organizations, professional societies, and advocacy groups. But they are also identified at the level of simple, cross-­cultural friendships made with residents of local communities” (Slimbach 2005).

Mingling and Exchange: Must One Choose Between Heritages? Verboczy goes far beyond the language debate in Rhapsodie québécoise. He not only highlights the social segregation of immigrants into neighbourhoods uninhabited or deserted by the majority population but decries

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what he sees as the educational infantilisation of young people in Québec, whether historically French-speaking or immigrant. He is disappointed that, as he sees it, young people from the majority population do not receive adequate opportunity to learn about their rich cultural tradition and that those from the “cultural communities” often do not learn much about that “patrimoine culturel” either, especially if they are in schools that keep them apart from the majority population. If Verboczy the young immigrant boy has become more Québécois than the historically established Québécois themselves, this has been due to the beneficial impact of social interaction with French speakers, initially in a non-threatening and self-chosen way through sport, subsequently greatly helped by attending Cégep and indeed university in French, along with his own enthusiasm as an immigrant to know about the culture he has come to live in. This reflects similar existing and potential enthusiasm in other immigrants. Yet without more social interaction and an improvement in the provision at school of exposure to the social history or cultural production of Québec, he argues that there will be little chance that immigrants will identify with Québec’s cultural vulnerability within North America, or share its societal aims. Verboczy’s own passion and erudition and his confident cultural hybridity as a self-declared Québécois are an argument for the promotion of the richness of Francophone culture in school. A knowledge of such treasures, he contends, and more interaction between the various groups, would aid the cultural and intellectual enrichment of all in Québec and make Québec society more cohesive, with more common reference points and the abovementioned “choses à se dire”. He is less vocal on the need to learn from the cultural communities, but his own provision of intriguing notes from Hungarian literature goes some way towards hinting at what such interaction could bring. The “patrimoine commun” of 400 years of French-speaking in what is now called Québec is just one of the heritages of Québec, a crucial and in many ways defining heritage of course, but one that exists within Indigenous territory and that has received the imprint of the cultures of recent immigrants, and contains a long history of Anglophone presence. Aloisio’s films plead for more recognition and respect for the various linguistic and cultural heritages to which she gives a voice, including those of First Nations.29 Régine Robin, in her essay entitled “Sortir de l’ethnicité”, written in the immediate aftermath of the 1980s movement of transculturation and transculture (see Chap. 1), argued for a destruction of

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certainties of identity: “la dissolution des certitudes identitaires” (Robin 1992).30 She preferred an understanding of cultural groups as incomplete and open to outside influence. However, some certainties are needed, including a sense of belonging to one’s cultural and linguistic heritage (Robin herself was deeply attached to Yiddish). Acceptance of cultural legacies is important, and the personal testimonies in Aloisio’s films allow Marco Calliari and Kathia Rock to express a deep connection with their culture of heritage, which they transmit through their musical creations. Must one choose between heritages? Tihana, so expressively fluent in French and so competent in English, who speaks Croatian to her cat and to her parents (and would no doubt speak it to her children) is an example of the riches that the vibrant cultural mix of Québec has created, partly, it must be reiterated, as a result of la loi 101. With one in eight people in Québec and 20% of the population of Montreal trilingual like Tihana, and like Aloisio and Verboczy in their own translingual lives, this is a gift that should not be ignored.31

Notes 1. I came to Verboczy’s work upon Aloisio’s recommendation of it, despite her points of divergence from his thinking. 2. Aloisio is the co-producer of My Grandmother (2004) and the director of the autobiographical film Straniera come donna (Aloisio 2002), which could perhaps best be translated as “Stranger-woman”. One of the strangers in question was an Italian grandmother, whose name she bears but whom she did not know well. The film was explicitly self-searching and concerned her quest for a sense of where her parents had come from, when she visited the ancestral homeland in her thirties. 3. The definition of “cultural community” from the Québec government online thesaurus of terms was accessed here: https://www.thesaurus.gouv. qc.ca/tag/terme.do?id=2891 Site accessed 10 September 2023. The Thesaurus site is due for decommissioning in January 2024 and terminological matters will move to the “Vitrine linguistique” section of the Office québécois de la langue française. 4. On the term of citizenship, Rochel et al. note that this qualifier started to be used during the government of the Parti Québécois, after the failed 1995 referendum, and particularly in the period 1996–2003 (Rocher et al. 2007, 26–27).

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5. The over one million native French speakers outside of Québec live in places like the country’s capital city Ottawa, and in the provinces of New Brunswick and Manitoba (Government of Canada 2019). 6. For an autofictional portrayal of classes d’accueil in France see Maryam Madjidi’s 2017 work Marx et la poupée, discussed in my France-focused companion volume. 7. Like Aloisio’s 2007 film, Claude Godbout’s documentary examines the trajectories of four immigrant children from the era of la loi 101 from childhood to adulthood. Godbout’s film includes the subsequent 2007 electoral campaigns of some of them as highly politicised adults, contrasting them with secondary school students in 2007, who have less of a sense of belonging to Québec’s national project. On sociolinguistic aspects in this film see Oakes and Warren (2011). 8. The Cégep system, founded in Québec in 1967, functions through state-­ funded and private colleges, in both French and English. Aloisio herself chose to study through English at Cégep level. Many young people in Québec attend school in French and then go to English Cégep, whether because English comes more comfortably to them or as a political statement, or because they feel that they now need to work on their English. The ability to attend Cégep in whichever language one chooses has long been contested by Francophones who worry about the encroachment of English. While it is a locus of fear for some in the established Francophone group, it remains a totem of linguistic freedom for many in Québec. For several discussions of how la loi 96 affects attendance at Anglophone Cégeps, see Cardinal et al. 2023. 9. The Indigenous Languages Act received Royal assent in June 2019. It seeks to establish measures, including funding, that facilitate the long-term project of reclamation, revitalization, maintenance and strengthening of Indigenous languages, in agreement or arrangement with Indigenous groups. It establishes an Office of the Commissioner of Indigenous Languages, and says it will outline the role of federal institutions in providing access to services in Indigenous languages, subject to capacity and demand and taking established regulations or agreements into account. 10. Le Code Québec (Léger et al. 2017), a mass market book (now a podcast and television series and updated in 2021), has “victime” (a victim mentality) as one of the seven specificities that the authors see as distinguishing Québec from the rest of North America. Some of the pronouncements are to be taken with a large grain of salt (for example that racism in Québec mainly has to do with secular society’s difficulties with religion). However, it is useful as a précis of identity myths among the majority population in Québec. In its English version entitled Cracking the Quebec code in 45 minutes, it is worth noting that “Quebecers” is used as a translation for “les

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Québécois”. This suggests that the English version of the book is aimed at outsiders looking at Québec, as the term “Quebecers” is not typically used by people who are from the historically Francophone population in Québec. 11. On Québec’s obsession with language, see also Chantal Bouchard 1998 work La Langue et le nombril, which has been translated into English as Obsessed with Language (Bouchard and trans. von Flotow 2009). 12. The Révolution tranquille or Quiet Revolution also saw Expo 67, Montreal’s showcasing of its own modernity as it hosted the World Fair. During this period, new mandates were granted to Hydro-Québec, the huge Québec company involved in dubious land deals and government claims on Indigenous land, as described by Naomi Fontaine (see Chap. 2 of this volume). 13. For an introduction to the Italian experience in Québec, see Caccia (1998). 14. Beatrice Guenther’s preface to her translation situates Le Figuier enchanté in a contemporary context following on from her 2011 article on the text (Guenther 2011). On the work’s aspirational quality, see Cooke (2011). 15. “Speak What” was republished with an analysis by Lise Gauvin in 2001. For a history of the poem “Speak White”, see Ruschiensky (2018). 16. The blog that served as preparation for Basilicata secrets can be consulted here (Aloisio 2013): https://basilicatasecrets.com/news/ (Site accessed 10 September 2023). 17. For those who seek discussions of cultural diversity in Québec in fiction films, see Jean-Sébastien Dubé and Sherry Simon (1997), Daniel Chartier (2009), Denis Bachand (2013), Subha Xavier (2013), and Laura Ilea (2019). On lack of cultural diversity, see André Loiselle (2019). Benoît Pilon’s 2008 film Ce qu’il faut pour vivre depicts Inuits suffering from tuberculosis in the 1950s, where an older Inuit man who has been transplanted to a Montreal sanatorium is helped to regain hope and meaning in life by an Inuit child who speaks Inuktitut and French. The child mediates between two worlds and learns about his ancestral culture from his Inuit elder. Yves Sioui Durand’s 2011 film Mesnak recounts the journey “home” of a young Indigenous man whose adoption as a young child broke the link with his ancestral cultural heritage, and who struggles to make sense of Innu culture on being invited to visit his mother’s reserve. Juan Andrés Arango’s 2016 film X500 (in Spanish, X Quinientos) includes a Filipina character transplanted to Montreal. 18. In Leclair et Plamondon’s documentary, there is a similar shot of children playing behind the wire fence of a schoolyard, viewed from the outside world of the street. 19. Translanguaging is discussed in more detail in Chap. 1, but for a concise explanation of the concept as it applies to education see François Grosjean’s interview with García (Grosjean 2016).

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20. This is a deformation of the original quotation: “une race qui ne sait pas mourir”. 21. Ogden Ridjanovic, a multilingual and resolutely sovereigntist hip hop artist with Alaclair ensemble, is interviewed at length in the Leclair and Plamondon film. Born in Québec, he added “Robert Nelson” to his name in honour of the English-speaking leader in the Rébellion des patriotes of 1837–1838. His adoption of the pseudonym is an inclusive act that honours an English-speaking Québec nationalist (see Dagenais 2021), although Ridjanovic sings in French. 22. Calliari’s 2021 single “Molotov, mon amour” is in French, partly as an attempt to gain some financial support by grant agencies (he is shown in the film at a moment of being refused support). 23. In its original French, the definition of “population majoritaire” by the TEO (Trajectoire et origines) research group in France is as follows: “Population majoritaire: Ensemble des Français qui ne sont pas immigrés ni fils ou filles d’immigrés ou de personnes nées dans les DOM. Ce groupe comprend les Français nés à l’étranger et leurs enfants, ce qui inclut les rapatriés de l’empire colonial et leurs enfants nés en France métropolitaine. Il inclut également les petits-enfants d’immigré” (Beauchemin et al. 2010). 24. Verboczy’s substantial intertextual inclusion of Mordecai Richler goes some way towards celebrating the cultural wealth of the historical Anglophone group. However, there are many other Anglophone writers that Verboczy has not included, understandably perhaps, as he is so dismayed at the lack of transmission at French-language school of Frenchlanguage authors and culture from Québec. See the 2017 newspaper article by Martine Letarte on the “communautés anglophones” and the term of Anglo-Québécois, published in the year of the fortieth anniversary of la loi 101 (Letarte 2017). 25. Verboczy’s experience of this sporting activity can be called “transnational”, practising fencing (a French sport) in Montreal, as a native Hungarian. Yet he places more stake on the interpersonal experience, so that his experiences of this kind may be more appropriately termed “transcultural”, as argued in Chap. 1. 26. Verboczy’s 2023 novel, La Maison de mon père, which appeared as this study was going to press, is nonetheless an attempt by Verboczy to reconnect with his own Hungarian roots while also asserting the differences that have arisen due to his embrace of his trajectory in Québec. As the author put it in email correspondence with me of June 2023: “This is also a story of various forms of grief (‘deuils’): for a father who died too soon, for a country, and for what the narrator could have become if he had never left his ‘fatherland’”.

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27. On the Programme d’enseignement des langues d’origine (PELO) which was established in 1977, the same year as la loi 101 was enacted in Québec, and the same year as the Heritage Language Program in Ontario, see McAndrew and Ciceri (2003). An evaluation report of the PELO is available online (Ministère de l’Éducation 2009). 28. In 2023, Leclair and Plamondon’s Les Québécois de la loi 101 was visible here: https://vimeo.com/227455783/d6eb707974 Site accessed 10 September 2023. 29. First Nations and other Indigenous people assert a belonging to what many of them call Turtle island (the continent of North America), and “cultural group” is preferable as a term to “ethnicity” in their case. 30. In “Sortir de l’ethnicité”, Robin notes that she is writing in 1991, a time of large-scale violence among cultural groups worldwide. In a long list of instances, including Yugoslavia, Ireland, ETA in the Basque Country, and Mohawk Indians during the Oka crisis in Québec, she laments that such cultural violence tends to impose “another confinement”, that of ethnicity in its botanical concepts of roots, stock, etc. “Du mouvement Pamiat en Russie, la Russie profonde à la Lituanie, du Causase à feu et à sang à la Yougoslavie désintégrée, des mouvements de désespoir des Indiens Mohawk au Québec à l'ETA basque ou à l’IRA irlandaise, tout, dans la nouvelle conjoncture mondiale, tend à nous imposer un nouvel enfermement, celui de l’ethnicité, de la culture au sens botanique du terme (les racines, les souches, les arbres, les branches, les rameaux)” (Robin 1992, 25). 31. By “translingual” in Verboczy’s case I am referring to his fluent French and Hungarian as his language of origin and his command of English. The latter is not vaunted in Rhapsodie québécoise, but was evident in email correspondence with me in Spring 2023 when he suggested several sentences for the manuscript that preceded the final version of this book. See the endnote above about various forms of grief in La Maison de mon père.

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Léger, Jean-Marc, Jacques Nantel, Pierre Duhamel, and Philippe Léger, 2017/2021. Le Code Québec: les sept différences qui font de nous un peuple unique au monde. Montreal: Les Éditions de l’Homme. Leservot, Typhaine. 2020. The integration of Muslim Maghrebis into Québec: France as the model not to follow. In Citizenship and belonging in France and North America, ed. Ramona Mielusel and Simona Emilia Pruteanu, 115–133. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Letarte, Martine. 2017. La Loi 101 a transformé les communautés anglophones. Le Devoir. 06 May. https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/497889/40ans-de-la-charte-de-la-langue-francaise-la-loi-101-a-transforme-les-communautes-anglophones. Accessed 23 February 2023. Loiselle, André. 2019. Popular Quebec cinema and the appeal of folk homogeneity. In The Oxford handbook of Canadian cinema, ed. Janine Marchessault and Will Straw, 367–389. London: Oxford University Press. McAndrew, Marie, and Coryse Ciceri. 2003. L’enseignement des langues d’origine au Canada: réalités et débats. Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 19 (1): 173–194. McAndrew, Marie, and Trans. Michael O’Hearn. 2013. Fragile majorities and education: Belgium, Catalonia, Northern Ireland, and Quebec. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press. Micone, Marco. 1992. Le Figuier enchanté. Montreal: Boréal. ———. 2001. Speak what. Montreal: Vlb éditeur. ———. 2021. On ne naît pas Québécois, on le devient. Del Busso: Montreal. ———. 2022a. Du ‘racisme’ linguistique. Le Devoir. 24 November. https://www. ledevoir.com/opinion/libre-opinion/772016/libre-opinion-du-racisme-linguistique. Accessed 23 February 2023. ———. 2022b. The enchanted figtree. trans. and preface by Beatrice Guenther. New York/Bern: Peter Lang. Ministère de l’Éducation. 1985. Rapport du comité sur l'école québécoise et les communautés culturelles. Ministère de l'éducation: Québec. ———. 2009. Évaluation de programme. Programme d’enseignement des langues d’orgine (PELO). https://cdn-contenu.quebec.ca/cdn-contenu/adm/min/ education/publications-adm/education/evaluations-programmes/ Programme-enseignement-langues-origine-rapport-evaluation.pdf. Accessed 31 December 2023. Ministère des Communautés culturelles et de l'Immigration. 1981. Autant de façons d'être Québécois. Plan d'action à l'intention des communautés culturelles. Montreal: Direction générale des publications gouvernementales. Oakes, Jane, and Leigh Warren. 2011. Language policy and citizenship in Quebec: French as a force for Unity in a diverse society? In Uniformity and diversity in language policy: Global perspectives, ed. Catrin Norrby and John Hajek, 7–21. Bristol and Buffalo and Toronto: Multilingual Matters.

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Ouchaou-Ozarowski, Saïda. 2021. In Full Voice/À pleine voix. Canada: National Film Board of Canada. Pilon, Benoît. 2008. Ce qu’il faut pour vivre. Canada: ACPAV, Arico, Téléfilms Canada. Pilon, Laurent. 2022. Citoyen canadien par défaut. En réponse à la lettre de Faten Kikano, ‘Ne m’appelez pas néo-Québécoise’, publiée le 23 novembre. La Presse. 24 November. https://www.lapresse.ca/debats/opinions/2022-11-24/replique/citoyen-canadien-par-defaut.php. Accessed 24 August 2023. Robin, Régine. 1992. Sortir de l’ethnicité. In Métamorphoses d’une utopie, ed. Fulvio Caccia and Jean-Michel Lacroix, 25–41. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle. Rocher, François, et al. 2007. Le concept d’interculturalisme en contexte québécois, généalogie d’un néologisme: Rapport présenté à la Commission de consultation sur les pratiques d’accommodement reliées aux différences culturelles (CCPARDC). Canada: University of Ottawa and Université du Québec à Montréal. Rock, Kathia. 2021. Tshin Nemushum. Musique nomade. 10 August. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=uxCyTLa80V4&t=56s. Accessed 09 September 2023. Ruschiensky, Carmen. 2018. Revisiting ‘Speak White’: A lieu de mémoire lost and found in translation. TTR 31 (2): 65–87. Selby, Jennifer, Amélie Barras, and Lori Beaman. 2018. Beyond accommodation: Everyday narratives of Muslim Canadians. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Sioui Durand, Yves. 2011. Mesnak. Wendake/Sept-Îles: Kunakan Productions, Les Films de l’Isle. Slimbach, Richard. 2005. The transcultural journey. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 11(1): 205–230. Statistics Canada. 2022a. Immigrants make up the largest share of the population in over 150 years and continue to shape who we are as Canadians. https://www150. statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-­quotidien/221026/dq221026a-­eng.htm. Released 26 October. Accessed 17 June 2023. ———. 2022b. While English and French are still the main languages spoken in Canada, the country’s linguistic diversity continues to grow. https://www150. statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/220817/dq220817a-eng.htm. Released 17 August. Accessed 23 February 2023. Urro, Marie-Hélène. 2014. Kim Thúy. De l’écriture migrante à l’écriture transculturelle. Masters dissertation. Ottawa: University of Ottawa. Verboczy, Akos. 2016. Rhapsodie québécoise. Itinéraire d’un enfant de la loi 101. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal. ———. 2020. Sur les chemins de ce pays. L’Inconvénient 81: 47–50. ———. 2023. La Maison de mon père. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal.

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Verboczy, Akos, and Trans. Casey Roberts. 2017. Rhapsody in Quebec: On the Path of an Immigrant Child. Montreal: Baraka Books. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality – The puzzling form of cultures today. In Spaces of culture: City, nation, world, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 194–213. London: Sage. Xavier, Subha. 2013. Monsieur Lazhar and the ethics of hospitality in Québec cinema. Québec Studies 56: 17–28.

CHAPTER 5

Conclusion: Inscribing Home in Québec

Introduction to the Conclusions All the creative practitioners in this volume have had to grapple with a shifting sense of self and a state of cultural flux as children and as young people. Depending on the case, this was due to migration or having to learn a new language through which to express their sense of self (as for Aloisio, Verboczy, and Farhoud), or when they became aware of their own difference within a majority context, as when seven-year-old Naomi was transplanted from the Uashat reserve to the classroom in Québec city, where hers was the only brown face in a sea of white and she sought to occlude her Innu-ness. Out of these experiences, they all developed an ethnographic impulse and intelligence—part emotional, part analytical— to observe, comment, and bear witness, while Farhoud’s careful observations also fed her talent and urge for engendering new identities through her acting and fictional creations. While the creative people discussed in this study are culturally mixed, the mixing has not been unproblematic for any of them. Especially in the cases of Fontaine and Farhoud, it has manifestly brought with it loss and pain as well as gain: Lamberto Tassinari’s “perte et gain” (Tassinari 2006, 23). I cite Tassinari here, yet, as noted, the vision developed by the thinkers in the circle around the Vice Versa magazine of transculture and transculturation—though greatly important in working against the essentialisation of cultural groups—does not always fit very comfortably © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Cooke, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45936-8_5

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with the experiences of Naomi Fontaine and First Nations in Canada. In particular, the hugely skewed balance of power held by the settler-colonial groups since their arrival, and the devastating cultural losses and domination experienced by Indigenous people make it difficult to speak of transculturation in any predominantly positive sense, or with a strong sense of Indigenous agency. However, as noted in Chap. 1, some Indigenous people do employ such terms when they find them suitable to express aspects of their reality, often in a more neutral sense of crossing between cultures. Fontaine finds a home in writing and in her public speaking, in a subtly forceful manner of self-assertion. As noted in Chap. 2, the concept of “writing home” as a decolonising practice seems to fit well with Fontaine’s work. She writes to those at home, but also about those at home, partly to reduce non-Indigenous society’s sense of the alterity of Indigenous people. She does this by asserting the hopes, wishes, and human strengths and frailties of the Innus she knows. She also writes about where she feels most spiritually at home (by the river, or in Nutshimit), and creates a personal homeland of thought and creativity through writing and reflection. It is helpful to remember here Maximilian Forte’s remark in relation to another Indigenous group, Inuit people who have left their home communities to find work in the bigger cities, that while there are complex relationships between long-established urban Inuit, their relatives in Northern Canada, and new arrivals, all are held together by a shared feeling of ancestral place, “even if seemingly out of place” (Forte 2010, 11). A sense of place is certainly a large part of what Fontaine seeks to transmit. By writing in the lingua franca of French about the physical spaces most strongly associated with Innu presence, she can reach those still inhabiting the home where her sense of community was founded, while also addressing an audience that knows nothing of that home, in order to assert its validity and its specificity. It is nonetheless crucial to remember that Fontaine has many homes, including in her own nomadic writing, and that, as she points out, Innus are Innus wherever they are. Forte’s comment that the centrality of place persists even when Indigenous people are “seemingly out of place” evokes a deep bond with territory, land, and community that subsists in memory and in human relationships even when an Indigenous person is not in constant contact with the physical place of origin. All four cultural creators deal differently with how they negotiate their place in the world and how they make sense of how others see them. Farhoud and Verboczy had radical linguistic and cultural uprooting thrust upon them as children. Aloisio and Fontaine are not migrants but they

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seem inhabited by an intergenerational nostalgia, as their parents or ancestors have known cultural uprooting. All have either made an initial crossing from a culture of origin, or have inherited a cultural legacy. For all four, the cultural heritage or underpinning has retained a strong place in their psyches, foregrounded to a greater or lesser extent at different times in their output. They cross over and back between the dominant culture of appropriation and the culture that was foundational to them or their parents, or in the case of Fontaine, their ancestors. They do this to differing degrees in their daily lives, channelling such crossings through their personal accounts and fictional recreations.

From Inter-Trans-culturality Towards Reciprocity and cum-nascere1 Fontaine and Aloisio challenge cultural hegemony, by proclaiming the intrinsic value of their own heritage, which differs from the 400-year-old history of Francophone settlers in Québec, while also overlapping with it.2 For his part, Verboczy enthusiastically seeks to adopt the more recent parts of that historic cultural heritage, while asserting his pleasure in the smorgasbord of influences that inform his personal cultural mix, many of them literary ones gleaned from writers who come from many different groups: French-Canadian as well as Anglophone, and from Hungarian writers as well as migrant writers in Québec. Along with a declared love of some of Americanised popular culture, he also claims cultural influences from France, through his fencing and love of French literature. Verboczy in that sense implicitly declares a very transnational identity. He also feels Québécois, and supports the idea of a Québec nation, but there need be no contradiction in this. The fact that Aloisio, like Verboczy, supports Québec’s nationhood, as does Fontaine in Shuni through her admiration of nationalist singer Félix Leclerc, and that Farhoud’s Lebanese father also did so, is evidence of the understanding that minority groups commonly display towards others who experience a threat to their cultural continuation. This rich vein of sympathy is valuable to Québec. As Ursula Mathis-Moser and Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner put it, writing that concerns cultural displacement and dislocation (often written from the perspective of a culture in contact with a more dominant one) still tends to view cultural contact as a process of exchange between two autonomous cultural entities (“deux entités

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culturelles autonomes”), while also recognising the strangeness and heterogeneity inherent in every culture: “l’étrangeté, l’hétérogénéité inhérente à toute culture” (Mathis-Moser and Mertz-Baumgartner 2014, 59). As respectful observers and reflective commentators, all the creative practitioners in these case studies accept and respect the value of the French-speaking cultural patrimony of Québec, However, in Fontaine’s case, the colonial language of French is felt and lived as an imposition, despite her poetic engagement with it in Kuessipan and her masterful manipulation of the language in her more didactic texts. Fontaine would have preferred to have French as a second language. Yet she welcomes dialogue in French, provided that the non-Indigenous inhabitants of Québec finally accept to listen to Indigenous people. Julien Defraeye called Fontaine’s Shuni the start of a dialogue: “l’amorce d’un dialogue”. He no doubt chooses the verb “amorcer” (meaning to set in motion or begin) to evoke Fontaine’s agency as a speaker but also to highlight the absence of proper dialogue and listening that has accompanied the settler-­ colonial diminishment and exploitation of Indigenous people (Defraeye 2019, 170). An interest in dialogue and an eagerness to debate and to listen is in fact a key point of intersection for Verboczy, Aloisio, and Fontaine in particular. As products of multicultural Québec but also as minorities within it, and in Fontaine’s case as someone with a minority Protestant background within the Innu nation, they also display strong respect for differences, as summed up in Fontaine’s many ways of being Innu. Farhoud’s humanist work transcended boundaries of all sorts, including of gender, religion, and nationality. The smiles that connect the characters in Le Sourire de la petite juive do not always lead to conversations, but they are evidence of an abiding awareness of shared humanity that is at the core of her work. Her assemblage of highly diverse characters in more or less peaceful coexistence in the reimagined space of Hutchison street proclaims her sense of belonging to Montreal, and particularly to the edgy cultural mix of Mile End/Outremont. In the aspirational debates and discussions around transculture and transculturation in the 1980s and 1990s, a concept that gained strong traction was the idea that contact between cultures had reciprocal effects. Pierre Nepveu, one of the leading writers involved in the debates on cultural porosity and multiplicity at that time and still a major figure in 2023, was conscious early on of the founding importance of Indigenous presence in what is now called Canada, and in the Americas more generally.3

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In a piece on Nepveu’s recent work Géographies du pays proche (2022), Christian Desmeules points out Nepveu’s humility and his profound sense of being marked by the Indigenous worldview whereby we belong to the land, and the land does not belong to us (Desmeules 2023). While it has been a long time coming, it is now possible and important for non-­ Indigenous people to listen respectfully and carefully to Indigenous thought and creative production, enabled by the transcultural space of the Internet where we can listen to Kathia Rock on Youtube or painfully hear the stories of survivors of Residential schools, read articles and testimony of the survival and preservation of heritage, and be marked by more traditional forms of media and dissemination like the recent upsurge of anthologies of creative work and writings by Indigenous thinkers in Québec and Canada. Fulvio Caccia, aware of the tokenism of much of the discourse around cultural diversity asks the following question (my translation): “Can the expression of cultural diversity contribute to redefining how we live together in society in the early years of the twenty-first century, or is it on the contrary the acceptable face of ultraliberalism, a mask that is used to legitimise the inequalities that it engenders?”: “L’expression de la diversité culturelle peut-elle contribuer à redéfinir le vivre-ensemble à l’orée du XXIe siècle ou, au contraire, est-elle le masque avenant de l’ultralibéralisme pour légitimer les inégalités qu’il génère?” (Caccia 2018, 15). What Caccia advocates is an approach seeking knowledge and human connection, expressed in the French word “connaître” (to know a person or to experience a sensation, in the sense of “je connais ce sentiment”: I know that feeling). Caccia emphasises its Latin roots of cum nascere, meaning “naître avec” or “to be born with”. To learn to know someone can mean to be reborn in humility of that person’s autonomy and difference. This is at the basis of Fontaine’s Shuni, and of all her work. In fact, as noted, in Shuni she highlights this very term of “connaître” in her opening remarks. Speaking in a spirit of friendship to her childhood friend Julie, now a missionary-cum-social-worker, she notes firmly but powerfully that before attempting to help anyone one needs to understand that person on a human level, simply by getting to know them first. Rejecting the “missionary” and colonial approaches, whereby solutions and decisions are imposed in a patronising or authoritarian manner, at the heart of what Fontaine wants is a conversation, although the Whites must accept to listen first. Her remark in Tracer un chemin, about the importance of that act of listening, “écouter”, makes the forceful point that Indigenous people need

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to be allowed to tell their stories and be heard, before any meaningful reconciliation can take place. The interview form mixed with observed dialogue employed by Aloisio in her documentary techniques also facilitates the transmission of testimony and the voicing of opinion, allowing listeners, including Aloisio herself, to come to share each speaker’s personal life-knowledge and experience. Farhoud for her part constantly sought to expand the borders of her own knowledge, and was inhabited by a lifelong urge to try to understand what made others tick through imaginative identification, which she did through her acting and in the plays and fictions she created. And while Verboczy’s project in Rhapsodie québécoise has elements of a didactic approach (a legacy no doubt of his work with young people and his sense of responsibility towards his adoptive nation), his personal reasons for encouraging readers and students to engage with the cultural legacy of Francophone presence in Québec stem no doubt less from a sense of duty and more because he wishes to share a sense of how literature can revitalise mindsets through an awareness of a shared underlying humanity.

Self-assertion and Self-reconfiguration Arguably, a sense of being slightly off-kilter is what prompts all the creators discussed in this volume to write and create.4 This sense of the constantly reconfigured self can be productive for the authors and inspiring for their listeners and readers, despite the pain and conflict that can lie at its heart. For Farhoud, because of her multiple migrations and repeated exiles and forced departures from loved ones, it would be glib to ignore the great sense of upheaval and bereftness that ensued. Yet, writing and acting, along with reading and the discovery of the riches of the French language, were able to counteract much of the trauma in her case. Her highly humanist and connective writing stems from what in Chap. 3 I have termed “a productive instability”. Each of the four practitioners seeks something from their creative production. Whether this is perceived as a need to find answers to blurrily perceived inner questions, as with Farhoud, or a full-blown quest for her Innu roots in the case of Fontaine, they all have within them a niggle that only writing and creating can address, whether through fiction or through thoughtful non-fictional analysis and explanation, as for Aloisio and Verboczy, and for Fontaine in Shuni. For Fontaine, what is sought is very

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explicitly freedom, an escape from a feeling that identity is being ascribed by others. For Verboczy, the goal is to establish what it means (to him) to be Québécois, and in La Maison de mon père five years later also what his Hungarian roots mean to him. Aloisio often focuses on the lives of others (despite some very personal accounts also), to explore how the experiences of other people reflect her personal journey. An interest in others, and often in how others negotiate difference, seems to come hand in hand with creative production concerned with cultural crossings. Although the works discussed in this volume are mainly testimonial with a strongly autobiographical slant—and even Aloisio’s documentaries are indirectly personal—few of them focus wholly on the self. In Rhapsodie québécoise, Verboczy portrays himself as an observer as well as a storyteller. For Verboczy, a family connection with socialism and communist ideology perhaps makes it natural to be interested in the welfare of others, but there is undeniably more at play. A lived experience of cultural hybridity seems to foster a person-centred interest in others, at least in those who are drawn to create or write. In her commentary on Québec society, Aloisio makes sure to include the suffering of Courtney, of Black Jamaican origin, and of First Nations Innu singer Kathia Rock. Although she is of Middle Eastern Arabic cultural descent, Farhoud is drawn to explore Hasidic Jewishness in Le Sourire de la petite juive, and creates important Black characters, such as Willa in that novel, or the female half of the duo in her radio play Apatride. Her imaginative journeys into mental distress display an attempt to understand those affected, like her own brother, and she inhabits characters of both genders. More remarkably, despite centuries of oppression, Fontaine has a sense of solidarity with the historically established Francophones in Québec. She is aware of their challenges, and parts of Shuni show her attempt to understand some of the insecurities they experience.5

Stories and Transmission, Readers and Listeners All of these creators feel compelled to tell stories, proving Thomas King’s insight that stories are at the heart of human existence. Through their narratives of cultural crossings, these writers and thinkers bear witness, not only to their own lives, but also to convey a sense of the experiences of their parents and others around them, and often also to transmit knowledge of historical events and realities. Fontaine’s stories pay homage on an individual level to the tenacity of her people, including her own

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grandparents, who kept Innu tradition and language alive as well as they could against the odds, and produced many offspring to continue the fight. Farhoud’s characters are subsumed by story, like the autobiographical persona of Aablè who reconfigures herself through engaging with other people’s expressions of experience through her acting and in reading, and as emblematised by Hinda Rochel Hertog, who immerses herself in fiction. Aloisio’s documentaries tell stories of others that are also reflections of herself. The most affecting parts of Verboczy’s narrative in Rhapsodie québécoise come from his personal testimony of having lived through exile. In that future-focused text (which otherwise steers away from any account or memory of personal pain), his relating of his human ties and his sense of dislocation bear witness to life and to loss. Somewhat tempering the frequent celebration in academic writing of cultural hybridity and transculturality and the creative absence of certitude, the most deeply distressing events in these case studies often relate to loss of stability (for example of home or of homeland) or to metaphorical imprisonment, or to the trauma of no longer knowing who one is due to linguistic and cultural uprooting. Yet the drive to remember and to work through what has occurred allows some healing. For Fontaine, personal memory becomes intertwined with collective memory when she emphasises that the remembrance of what it is to be Innu is revitalised every time someone from the community visits the ancestral forest and hunting grounds of Nutshimit, as well as in song, language, and ceremony, wherever an Innu person happens to be. Aloisio’s personal but other-focused production allows her to foster pride in the cultural multiplicity of the individuals she portrays (and through them her own coexisting diversities), with a very strong emphasis on individual cultural heritage. Her work shows how feelings of cultural hybridity can be transformed into art, as with Calliari and Rock’s work and her own documentary creation. Verboczy follows his predecessor Marco Micone in Le Figuier enchanté in 1992 to mix individual remembrance with sociologically focused material (Micone 1992). For both Micone and Verboczy, the pain of exile is transmuted into a rhapsodic hybridity, but one that is slightly ironic due to the recognition of the challenges encountered along the way.6 Farhoud for her part seems to need to write as much as she needs to breathe, in order to constantly reconfigure and work through the memories of cultural intermingling (and culture clash) that she has stored. For some of these cultural creators there are psychological difficulties relating to return. Farhoud did not visit Lebanon after 1992, even though

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the civil war had ended. In Rhapsodie québécoise, on returning to visit Hungary after three years in Canada, Verboczy feels disconnected and out of place, as expressed in a chapter entitled “L’énigme du retour” (the enigma of return), a nod to the 2009 novel by the same name by another famous migrant to Québec, Haitian-born novelist Dany Laferrière. The reference suggests that the literary homeland now possessed by Verboczy is perhaps more solidly anchored in him than the country he left behind at age eleven. Yet reconnection with the culture of origin can be joyous. Aloisio’s gastronomic ethnography in Basilicata Secrets and the Italy-inspired impetus behind Calliari’s songs in Italian show that return to an ancestral country can inspire an enriched sense of self. It also shows that the draw to the old country can exist strongly in the second generation, reiterating Aloisio’s sense that more emphasis is needed in Québec on the cultural enrichment that can arise from the nourishment of linguistic and cultural heritage, and from its transmission. For Innus in Québec, it is still possible to return to Nutshimit, where Innu people feel that a connection with wild nature can still heal the soul, despite threats to it from plans by white people or big business for exploitative clear-cutting for mining and power lines. Even in terms of the reserve, although Fontaine sees it as a “ghetto” and although her narrator in Manikanetish leaves the reserve once the school year ends, there is something restorative about Yammie’s return there to teach. Each one of these creative practitioners needs a reader or a viewer to activate their work. Farhoud’s strongly autofictional slant in her 2015 and 2017 novels constructs a relationship of confidence with her readers, to whom she hands versions of herself with a nod and a wink, challenging them to make autobiographical links and connections retrospectively in the œuvre. Just as importantly, the writers often foreground their own experiences of reading or of receiving inspiration from books, whether this be the refuge of reading for Farhoud as an immigrant child, or the engagement with French-speaking culture that inspired Yammie in Manikanetish to dare to teach a seventeenth-century French classical play to her Innu teenagers. In Rhapsodie québécoise and his 2020 poem in homage to poetry, and in Leclair and Plamondon’s film, Verboczy argues cogently for the importance of reading to inspire reflection, explain sociological contexts, and broaden the mind, including through the creation of empathy.

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Language and Powerful Alterities Language loss and language gain underlie all the works under discussion. Fontaine and Farhoud use heterolingual elements to foreground the layered quality of the culturally mixed self through a scattering of Innu and Arabic words, and sometimes to express a sense of what can only be rendered in that language. Yet foreignness has other more subversive aspects too. Dounia’s Lebanese Arabic sayings reproduced in Arabic script in Le Bonheur a la queue glissante create a powerful sense of her alterity and autonomy. So too do the songs that Kathia Rock sings in Innu, or the moments when readers cannot understand the Innu words in Naomi Fontaine’s works, at least initially until she provides a translation or they seek out the meaning by engaging with a dictionary. The listener or reader is productively unsettled in these instances. Aloisio’s moments of translanguaging also question linguistic hierarchies in their own subtle ways. In these narratives of cultural transformation and of hybridity of heritage, the French language is handled with great precision, care, mastery, and a confident appropriation. For Farhoud, learning to understand, read, and pronounce French with excellence represented something that she chose to conquer as a child. It also gave her the resources that enabled her to escape into the beauty of the well-crafted written and spoken word. Those who have had a closer relationship with French growing up, where it was expected to govern their psyche, sometimes depart from it, as Calliari does in Aloisio’s film by choosing to sing in Italian. Yet Calliari has also internalised—and appropriated—the Québec source songs, which makes the effect of his Mi ricordo album even more transcultural. Verboczy’s wordplay in Rhapsodie québécoise shows his spirit of independence, an attribute he shares with all these cultural creators. Fontaine uses and teaches the language of the coloniser in order to take back agency, in a related act of self-assertion.

Places and Spaces of Potentiality The geographical and physical spaces in which the culturally mixed self evolves are often marked by urban environments, although we see Fontaine’s literary alter ego leaving Québec city behind in order to reconnect with a stronger sense of Innu-ness. Cities, particularly Montreal, are conducive to cultural fermentation, and Farhoud’s Le Sourire de la petite juive is the strongest example of how truly connecting with others in a

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multicultural neighbourhood can provide enriching transcultural encounter. In the filmic adaptation of Kuessipan by Verreault and Fontaine, the main character Mikuan leaves the reserve for the vibrancy of the city, perhaps because of its mix of cultures and the sense of possibility it affords. Nonetheless, like Fontaine, Mikuan also finds a strong sense of self in the isolation and pure landscape of Nutshimit, as does Yammie in Manikanetish. To an extent, and somewhat paradoxically, since Fontaine sees the reserves as ghettos and seeks their abolition, Yammie also encounters the beginnings of freedom on the reserve, through reconnection with Innu solidarity and tradition. Freedom to be who one chooses to be is underlined by resistance to stereotype, including by Fontaine in Shuni, and by Marco Micone and the respondents in the Leclair and Plamondon film discussed in the Verboczy section of Chap. 4. That chapter opens the idea of what is—or could be— Québécois to a far wider understanding than is currently the case, despite government discourse about welcoming immigrants as néo-Québécois. The label of “Québécois” should be accessible to those of any background should they wish it, if they have grown up in Québec or adopted it as their home, whether from the historically established population like Anglophone writer Heather O’Neill, or of Black Jamaican background like Courtney in Aloisio’s documentary, or indeed of Innu heritage like Kathia Rock, if a First Nations person should so choose. Due to their experiences of cultural crossings and interactions, these creative people all live on shifting ground, but in a way that leads to an independence of mind and self-empowerment and often to healthy analysis of self and others. They each assert their right to belong (for most without the force implied in State discourse on “integration”), and to be at home on their own terms in the societies in which they live, creating bridges to other cultures.

Where Worlds Collide Some final thoughts will set together some aspects of transculturality, Indigenous ways of knowing and the sometimes nebulous project of interculturalism in Québec. These are less uneasy bed-fellows than might be initially surmised. Québec’s project of intercultural education as laid out in the 1985 Rapport Chancy was summarised in that document as aiming to educate people to be able to appreciate (“apprécier”) the diverse

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cultures that live together in a multicultural society, and to be able to accept that they will change in contact with the surrounding cultures (“évoluer au contact de ces cultures”) (Ministère de l’Éducation 1985, 141).7 This has resonances with more recent concepts of transcultural education, and transcultural development, based on transcultural competencies (Slimbach 2005 and also see Christoph Wulf 2010). Asaf Zohar and David Newhouse draw on Indigenous practices in nature, inspired by Willie Ermine, a Sturgeon Lake First Nations philosopher, to show how education can promote working together across cultures in a way that respects differences, acknowledges common ground, and seeks to create new knowledge collaboratively. For Zohar and Newhouse, transcultural education can occur in both non-­Indigenous and Indigenous contexts, and they describe how Indigenous pedagogies can be brought into the mainly non-Indigenous classroom and combined with Western thought in an act of co-creation (Zohar and Newhouse 2019).8 The acts of combining cultures and using them for co-­creation are the radical elements here. Régine Robin was sometimes impatient with the discourse of interculturalism, which she felt was rose-tinted (marked by “angélisme”). She preferred the concept of a project or a continual work in progress, which for her lay at the heart of transculture. Writing in 1992 about “le projet de la transculture”, she summed it up as follows: “Non pas articulation interculturelle dans l’angélisme de la croyance que forcément dans l’interculture tout irait bien, non pas la crispation identitaire qui enferme et rejette, mais dans ce qui est entre, ce qui assume l’appartenance multiple, l’indéfinition, l’ouverture, la non complétude des groupes”: Not an intercultural perspective with the rose-tinted belief that everything will of necessity turn out fine, nor the tightened fist of essentialised identity that encloses and rejects (“crispation identitaire qui enferme et qui rejette”), but that which lies in the in-between spaces, that which takes on multiple belongings, accepts lack of definition, seeks a state of openness and asserts the in-­ completeness of groups (my translation, Robin 1992, 37–38). Aspects of the 1985 Chancy report are in essence not too far removed from Robin’s concept of a project, especially in the report’s emphasis on accepting that the diverse cultures that live together need to accept that they will change in contact with those cultures. This is a particularly striking concept if one of the cultures that is meant to be open to change is the dominant Francophone one. The Chancy report, despite its inability to compete with Robin’s literary eloquence, is in some respects close to

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Robin’s desire for “ouverture” (openness). Yet the great merit of Robin’s vision of “transculture”, informed by her own challenges with her French-­ Jewish-­ Polish-Yiddish-Montreal identity as an immigrant, is that it acknowledges the difficulties inherent in much of the experience of cultural hybridity: its instabilities, uncertainties, and sometimes outright clashing of perspectives. Evoking difference but also emphasising what connects, Anishinaabe scholar Niigaan Sinclair deliberately and productively merged Indigenous and Western worldviews in a 2017 article in Toronto’s Globe and Mail when he set Indigenous nationhood alongside the famous definition of nation by French philosopher, historian, and philologist Ernest Renan in his 1882 lecture Qu-est-ce qu’une nation? (What is a nation?). In the light of Québec’s recent modification of the Canadian Constitution to assert its nationhood at a federal level, and its self-definition as a hospitable society (société d’accueil), the reflections may be fruitful. For Renan as for Sinclair, a nation can be viewed as a soul, a spiritual principle (“une âme, un principe spirituel”), a rich legacy of memories, the desire to live together, and the will to perpetuate the value of the heritage that one has received in an undivided form: “le désir de vivre ensemble, la volonté de continuer à faire valoir l’héritage qu’on a reçu indivis” (Renan 1882, 26). Sinclair notes the closeness of the definition to an Indigenous concept of nationhood, and goes even further to emphasise commonalities by using the term of “immigration” to show that First Nations often crossed territorial boundaries, which they had to negotiate each year, leading to war, conflict, and reparation. While drawing such comparisons is the prerogative of an Indigenous thinker, I will leave some of the final words here to Indigenous scholar Shaelyn Wabegijig of Algonquin background, who notes that “being equipped to engage multiple perspectives allows for meaningful engagement” (Wabegijig 2020).9 Wolfgang Welsch’s notion that a transcultural attitude is a question of adjusting one’s “inner compass” also seems to chime with Sinclair’s position here. As Welsch put it in his famous essay on transculturality: “It is a matter of readjusting our inner compass: away from the concentration on the polarity of the own and the foreign to an attentiveness for what might be common and connective wherever we encounter things foreign” (Welsch 1999, 201). Yet crucially, Sinclair also points out key differences in Indigenous and Western worldviews, using the Indigenous notion of kinship to outline the important subtleties that distinguish it from Western

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concepts around the same word. He argues very strongly against assimilation, noting that “attempts to homogenize, consume, and destroy Indigenous nations must stop. We must be recognized for what we are: different and diverse” (Fontaine would certainly agree, as would Aloisio). In a statement that has universal resonance about legacy and heritage, and particular relevance for the four case studies explored in this book, Sinclair concludes with a note about what one inherits and the importance of going beyond it: “Indigenous nationhood can solve many of the problems this country faces. We just have to have the bravery to be more than what we inherit” (Sinclair 2017). Between belonging and dislocation, hybridity and distinctness, culturally mixed identity seems to move from one shifting crossroads to another. In Pierre Nepveu’s terms from l’Ecologie du réel, a strong pluralism is required (“un pluralisme fort”), as opposed to a weak one (“un pluralisme mou”), so that multicultural realities and contact between cultures can come to be seen as an acceptable “untidiness”: “un désordre à assumer” (Nepveu 1988, 215).

Notes 1. A research group exists in  Alberta named the  Groupe de recherche sur l’inter-transculturalité et l’immigration (GRITI), founded in  2009, with  a  “mandate to  study theoretical and  practical perspectives to  tackle immigration and  integration/inclusion”. See the  homepage for  this group here: https://www.ualberta.ca/fr/campus-saint-jean/recherche/ groupes/l-inter-transculturalite-et-l-immigration.html. Site accessed 09 September 2023. 2. As Ben Rosamond writes in a summary of the Marxist and Gramscian concept of hegemony, the term can be defined as “the dominance of one group over another, often supported by legitimating norms and ideas” (Rosamond 2013). It derives from the Greek term hegemonia ̄ (“dominance over”), which was used when describing interaction between city-states. 3. Pierre Nepveu’s Intérieurs du nouveau monde, for which he won the prix du gouverneur général in 1998, included references to Indigenous writing, in a pre-millennial example of paying respectful attention to Indigenous self-expression. 4. Writing on a similar sense of in-betweenness in the 2021 female banlieue autofictional novel Pour que je m’aime encore by Franco-Iranian writer Maryam Madjidi, Ana Belén Soto calls this “l’entre-deux” (Soto 2022, 104). This term is often used in French to describe in-betweenness, and does not indicate a position “in the middle”, rather somewhere on a per-

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ceived axis between two poles. Madjidi, who also foregounds the question of accueil (welcome) is discussed in my companion volume to the present study, devoted to autofictional accounts of transcultural youth in France. 5. Somewhat similarly to Fontaine’s indications of empathy with Québec’s minority status, Cathy Wong, a public figure of Chinese descent who works for equity, diversity, and inclusion in Québec, expressed solidarity with First Nations in Québec during the “Montreal 375” year of commemoration, in a newspaper article on the notion of accueil (Wong 2017). 6. The societally aspirational quality of the title of Micone’s 1992 text and of its content bears a strong resonance to Verboczy’s Rhapsodie québécoise. 7. The original French of the Rapport Chancy is as follows: “on peut appeler interculturelle, l’éducation qui vise à former des personnes capables d’apprécier les diverses cultures qui se côtoient dans une société multiculturelle, et donc accepter d’évoluer au contact de ces cultures pour que cette diversité devienne un élément positif, enrichissant la vie culturelle sociale et économique du milieu” (Ministère de l’Éducation 1985, 141). 8. Zohar and Newhouse’s approach aims “to engage learners from different cultures and knowledge traditions with the purpose of guiding them through ideas and processes of imagining, listening, speaking, and working together in a way that respects differences, acknowledges common ground, and seeks to co-create new knowledges. Bringing together Indigenous and Western knowledges in this manner creates a unique context that can potentially build the mindsets, skills, and dispositions that are needed for living and managing sustainably” (Zohar and Newhouse 2019, chapter summary). 9. Wabegijig is drawing here on Willie Ermine’s notion of ethical space, a framework that examines the diversity and positioning of Indigenous peoples and Western society.

References Caccia, Fulvio, and pref. Jean Musitelli. 2018. La Diversité culturelle. Vers l’État-­ culture. Paris: Laborintus. Defraeye, Julien. 2019. Fontaine, Naomi. Shuni. Voix plurielles 16 (2): 185. Desmeules, Christian. 2022, Géographies du pays proche: Pierre Nepveu, le proche et le lointain. Le Devoir. 30 April. https://www.ledevoir.com/culture/704970/essais-quebecois-geographies-du-pays-proche-pierre-nepveu-leproche-et-le-lointain. Accessed 28 August 2023. Forte, Maximilian, ed. 2010. Indigenous cosmopolitans: Transnational and transcultural indigeneity in the twenty-first century. New York: Peter Lang.

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Mathis-Moser, Ursula, and Birgit Mertz-Baumgartner. 2014. Littérature migrante ou littérature de la migrance? A propos d’une terminologie controversée. Diogène 2–3 (246–7): 46–61. Ministère de l’Éducation. 1985. Rapport du comité sur l’école québécoise et les communautés culturelles. Québec: Ministère de l'Éducation. Nepveu, Pierre. 1988. L’ Écologie du réel. Mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal. ———. 1998. Intérieurs du Nouveau monde: essais sur les littératures du Québec et des Amériques. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal. ———. 2022. Géographies du pays proche. Poète et citoyen dans un Québec pluriel. Montreal: Éditions du Boréal. Renan, Ernest. 1882. Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? Conférence faite en Sorbonne le 11 mars 1882. Paris: Calmann Levy. Robin, Régine. 1992. Sortir de l’ethnicité. In Métamorphoses d’une utopie, ed. Fulvio Caccia and Jean-Michel Lacroix, 25–41. Paris: Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle. Rosamond, Ben. 2013. Hegemony. Britannica.com. https://www.britannica. com/topic/hegemony. Accessed 09 September 2023. Sinclair, Niigaan. 2017. Indigenous nationhood can save the world. Here’s how. The Globe and Mail. 12 September. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/ opinion/recognizing-indigenous-nations-niigaan-sinclair/ar ticle36237415/#. Accessed 06 September 2023. Slimbach, Richard. 2005. The transcultural journey. Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad 11 (1): 205–230. Soto, Ana Belén. 2022. Enjeux et défis de la mobilité sociale dans Pour que je m’aime encore de Maryam Madjidi. Cédille 22: 91–115. Tassinari, Lamberto. 2006. Sens de la transculture. In Le Projet transculturel de Vice Versa, ed. Anna Paola Mossetto and Jean-François Plamondon, 17–30. Bologna: Edizioni Pendragon. Wabegijig, Shaelyn. 2020. Ethical space and the two-eyed seeing approach: centering Indigenous perspectives in public engagement in a pandemic era. Intercouncil Network. 09 July. https://icn-rcc.ca/en/ethical-space-the-twoeyed-seeing-approach-centering-indigenous-perspectives-in-public-engagement-in-a-pandemic-era-2/. Accessed 10 September 2023. Welsch, Wolfgang. 1999. Transculturality – The puzzling form of cultures today. In Spaces of culture: City, nation, world, ed. Mike Featherstone and Scott Lash, 194–213. London: Sage. Wong, Cathy. 2017. 375 ans d’accueil. Le Devoir. 19 May. https://www.ledevoir. com/opinion/chroniques/499153/375-ans-d-accueil. Accessed 01 February 2023.

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Wulf, Christoph. 2010. Education as transcultural education: A global challenge. Educational Studies in Japan: International Yearbook 5: 33–47. Zohar, Asaf, and David Newhouse. 2019. Educating for a sustainable world: Bringing together Indigenous and Western knowledges. In Intellectual, Scientific, and Educational Influences on Sustainable Research, ed Rosario Turvey and Sreekumari Kurissery, 121–138. Hershey: IGI Global.

Index1

A Accent, 72, 122, 133n8, 134n14, 163, 170, 171, 178, 189 Accommodation/accommodements, 17, 19, 21, 135n22, 156 Accueil, 18, 36n16, 122, 184, 217, 219n4, 219n5 See also Welcome Acculturation, 4, 8, 35n7 Acting/actors, 71, 75, 77, 94, 98, 106, 112, 113, 115, 119, 121, 125, 127–131, 205, 210, 212 Ageing, 103, 117 Ageism (lack of), 63, 115 Allophones, 15, 20, 55, 148–151 Anger, 32, 37n18, 63, 69, 85, 99, 100, 116, 161, 170 Anglophone experience, 37n18, 38n24, 143, 149, 151–152, 160, 165, 178,

184, 185, 190, 192, 194n8, 196n24, 215 literature, 23–24, 38n24, 88n20, 181, 190, 196n24 Appearance, 120, 128, 158, 171, 179 Armed conflict, 98 See also War Aspiration/aspirational, 17, 86, 107, 117, 132, 142, 155, 177, 179, 189, 208, 219n6 Assimilation/assimilationist, 50, 52, 146, 218 Autobiography/autobiographical, 2–8, 12, 25, 31, 34n1, 47, 67, 78, 95–97, 99–101, 112, 118, 125, 132, 155, 159, 176, 193n2, 211, 213 Autofiction, 99–101, 111, 116–119, 124–128

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 D. Cooke, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45936-8

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INDEX

B Bearing witness, 31, 171, 205, 211 Belonging, 1–34, 62, 72, 101, 102, 109–111, 119, 132, 140, 148, 154, 159, 186, 189, 190, 193, 194n7, 197n29, 208, 216, 218 See also Integration Bill 21 (la loi 21), 19–20, 140, 153–159 Bill 96 (la loi 96), 3, 20, 33, 37n19, 140, 145–148, 151, 153, 194n8 Bill 101 (la loi 101), 3, 20, 31, 33, 34n4, 53, 129, 139–193 Black Québec, 23, 34n4, 38n23, 119, 144, 152, 160, 165–168, 170, 179, 190 C “Canada 150,” 21 Children, 3, 15, 16, 19, 21, 36n12, 50–52, 54, 58, 61–63, 65–69, 71, 79, 83, 87n11, 94, 99, 102–104, 111, 115, 116, 121, 123, 127–129, 133n4, 134n17, 135n22, 139–193, 205, 206 Circles (of life), 60, 63, 82, 83 Clothes and apparel, 51, 72, 76, 153, 157–159 Colonial past, 62, 75–82, 86, 88n18, 97, 148–149, 151, 158, 163, 179, 206, 208, 209, 214 Communism/Communist, 186, 188, 212 Confidence, 66, 70–71, 115, 131, 155, 186, 213 Crossing, 9, 27, 30, 33, 47, 48, 75, 87n9, 143, 144, 206, 207, 211, 215

D Décalage, 130–131 See also In-betweenness Dialogue, 4, 15–18, 56, 59, 80, 99, 142, 145, 153, 208, 210 Displacement, 25, 27, 28, 38n30, 49, 95, 100–106, 121–124, 126, 131, 132, 207 E Écriture migrante, 9, 22–27, 33, 37n22, 38n25, 38n29, 59, 93, 100, 134n14 Education, 2, 4, 5, 15, 36n12, 48, 51, 54, 62, 65, 69–71, 74, 82, 84, 103, 105, 143, 148, 154, 165, 166, 170, 185, 192, 195n19, 215, 216 See also School Emotion/emotional/emotivity, 12, 24, 32, 34n3, 61, 74–76, 99, 111, 116, 119, 121, 124, 126, 149, 161, 164, 173, 181, 187, 205 Empathy, 26, 32, 57, 59, 60, 107, 132, 213, 219n5 Ethnography/ethnographic, 32, 78, 101, 158, 177, 205, 213 See also Observers/observation Exile, 5, 11, 12, 22, 25–27, 32, 38n29, 48, 49, 57, 95, 96, 99, 103, 117, 120, 126, 130–132, 188, 190, 210, 212 Exoticism, 185 surrounding Arabs, 129 surrounding Indigenous people, 28, 85 Explaining (as a deliberate act), 57, 61, 164, 166–167, 187

 INDEX 

F Fathers, 49, 69, 72, 76–79, 84, 85, 96, 97, 102, 120–124, 126, 127, 131, 132, 133n3, 133n6, 165, 166, 170–173, 187, 188, 196n26, 207 Feminism/feminist, 88n19, 94, 154, 157 See also Gender; Matriarchy; Patriarchy Fighting spirit, 75–78 Films (additional), 35n5, 66, 147, 157, 195n17 First Nations, 3, 12, 19, 21, 28, 33, 34, 39n32, 39n34, 48–50, 52–55, 61, 63, 69, 76, 80, 83, 85, 86, 88n16, 88n20, 129, 141, 149, 192, 197n29, 206, 211, 215, 217, 219n5 Forgiveness, 77–78 Fragments/fragmentation, 26, 27, 31, 52, 59–63, 65, 97, 102, 130, 143 Francophone (contested definition of), 149–152 Freedom, 3, 5, 7, 16, 31, 52, 80, 81, 96, 97, 100, 113, 117, 120, 127, 128, 131, 148, 162, 178, 191, 211, 215 G Gender, 63, 64, 112–113, 152, 156, 208, 211 See also Feminism; Matriarchy; Patriarchy Generations, 51–52, 83, 115, 122, 123, 144, 160–162, 169, 174, 176, 182, 191, 207, 213 See also Fathers; Mothers/ motherhood; Parents Genocide, 14, 19, 50 cultural, 14

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Ghettos, 25, 36n17, 49, 143, 145, 160, 163, 182–185, 213, 215 See also Social class Grandparents, 52, 54, 63, 64, 72, 79, 82–84, 98, 100, 102–104, 107, 129, 155, 161, 175, 179, 181, 188, 193n2, 212 H Heritage language, 2, 5, 12, 14, 15, 87n11, 110, 149, 150, 161, 167, 168, 172, 186 Heterolingualism/heterolingual, 12–16, 56–57, 87n10, 97, 102, 106, 125–128, 214 History (lack of knowledge of), 54, 183–185, 189–192, 196n24 Home (feelings of or about), 5, 75, 79–81, 97–99, 101, 104, 110, 120, 150, 153, 168, 175, 181, 196, 205–218 See also Writing home Home country/homeland, 5, 6, 35, 60, 75, 96, 98, 104, 106, 110, 119, 120, 124, 131, 155, 174, 193n2, 205–218 Humour/humorous, 67, 95, 115, 134n18, 142, 190 Hybridity/hybrid, 7, 11, 25–27, 58, 71, 155, 178, 192, 211, 212, 214, 217, 218 I Imprisonment (real or metaphorical), 81, 112, 113, 121, 128–130, 212 In-betweenness, 109, 120, 128–131, 218n4 See also Décalage Indian Act, 48, 52, 70

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Indigenous thought, 20, 21, 30, 39n32, 50–51, 53–55, 75, 145, 150, 209, 212, 217–218 Innu culture, 70, 72, 80, 195n17 identity, 30, 72, 73, 78, 79, 85 language, 2, 54, 59, 81, 175 Integration, 4, 122, 128, 139, 156, 166, 176–178, 183, 215, 218n1 See also Belonging Intercultural, 14, 16–21, 23, 36n14, 140–145, 153, 167–169, 176, 215, 216 as a concept, 18 Interculturalism, 16–18, 141, 142, 156, 167, 168, 215, 216 as a political model, 23 as a term/concept, 17–18 Interculturalist, 14, 23, 144–145, 178, 184, 189 Interculturality, 18, 36n14 Intertextual/intertextuality, 6, 13, 76, 143, 172, 174, 177, 180–182, 185, 196n24 Inuit Québec, 39n33, 48, 51, 88n20, 141, 149, 172, 195n17, 206 J Jews, 106, 107, 114, 117, 134n14, 177, 182, 186 Hasidic, 11, 16, 106–107, 110, 112–114, 116–117, 134n13 L Language gain, 32, 214 Language loss, 55, 86n1, 97, 127, 214 Letters, 12, 54, 58, 62, 68, 70, 71, 78–86, 186 Listening, 19, 50, 68, 77, 78, 81, 111, 145, 175, 208–212, 219n8

M Margins/marginality, 26, 32, 35n7, 49, 97, 121, 171–176 Matriarchy/matriarch/matriarchal, 84, 88n29, 106, 116 See also Feminism; Mothers/ motherhood Melancholy, 103, 119 Mental illness, 26, 31, 94–95, 116 See also Melancholy Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, 84, 174 “Montreal 375,” 21, 55, 219n5 Montreality, 106–119, 132 Mothers/motherhood, 48, 49, 54, 60, 61, 63, 64, 67, 69, 71, 74, 78, 82–84, 86n4, 93, 100–106, 112, 120, 122, 123, 127–129, 131, 133n9, 140, 166, 168, 169, 181, 183, 188 See also Feminism; Gender; Matriarchy Moving house, 97, 120, 131, 188 Multiculturalisation (ironic view of), 178 Multiculturalism, 16, 178, 185, 186 Multilingual/multilingualism, 14, 15, 36n12, 87n11, 110, 141, 142, 151, 161, 164, 166, 168 Music, 32, 39n31, 51, 95, 114–116, 126, 133n4, 142, 144, 145, 171–175, 179, 180, 183, 187, 192, 211, 214 Muslim identity, 20, 156–157, 171 N Nation (concept of), 6, 9, 30, 33–34, 155, 163, 177, 180, 186, 194n7, 217 Nationalism, 35n7, 152, 187 Québec, 97

 INDEX 

Nature, 60, 63, 66, 67, 108, 110, 158, 213, 216 Nomadism/nomad, 26, 27, 47, 59, 61, 62, 64, 81, 122, 158, 175, 206 See also Travel/travelling Non-Innus, 13, 56–58, 64, 66, 78, 80, 83, 175 Nostalgia, 12, 13, 26, 34n3, 97, 102, 103, 122, 131, 207 O Observers/observation, 139, 205, 208, 210, 211 See also Ethnography P Parents, 3, 16, 52, 60, 67, 70, 79, 83, 94–97, 102, 103, 111, 112, 125, 126, 129, 146, 151, 154, 159–162, 165, 167–169, 173, 184, 193, 193n2, 207, 211 See also Fathers; Generations; Mothers/motherhood Patriarchy/patriarchal, 6, 97–99, 101, 103, 105, 114, 127–128 See also Feminism; Gender Q Québécois as a term/concept/feeling, 34, 37n20, 85, 86, 140, 154, 155, 172, 174, 190, 191, 193n3, 197n28, 207, 211, 215 Québécois de souche, 155, 177, 180 Quests, 8, 64, 99, 172, 193n2, 210

227

R Readers, 6, 10–15, 30, 32, 56–60, 62, 64, 67, 68, 70, 75, 78, 80, 97, 99, 102, 112, 116, 118, 119, 129, 132, 143, 179, 180, 210, 212–214 as activators, 99, 213 Reading act of, 9, 11, 14, 15, 26, 50, 55, 65, 86, 94, 96, 100, 111, 117, 118, 120, 132, 134n19, 165, 181, 185, 190, 210, 212, 213 as self-definition, 11, 14, 15, 65, 94, 96, 170, 185, 210, 212, 213 as transcultural practice, 10–12, 118, 132, 134n19 Reconciliation, 19, 50, 81, 99, 210 Reserves, 2, 28, 30, 47–49, 52, 54, 58–62, 65, 67–69, 71–75, 78–81, 85, 87n11, 195n17, 205, 213, 215 Residential schools, 21, 50, 51, 58, 61, 79, 87n11, 209 Resilience, 66, 78, 101–106, 162–165, 188 Resistance, 29, 39n32, 54, 57, 69, 78, 173, 215 Respect, 2, 6, 16, 17, 21, 47, 63, 68, 72, 77, 100, 105, 106, 110, 121, 122, 142, 157, 158, 192, 208, 216, 218n3, 219n8 politics of, 47 Return (pull of, feelings about), 5, 34, 49, 51, 60, 63, 71, 94, 99, 113, 122, 172, 188, 212 Routes, 61, 66, 82, 131

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INDEX

S School, 4, 5, 15, 21, 50–55, 58, 61, 62, 65, 67–71, 74, 75, 79, 87n11, 94, 96, 97, 112, 120–122, 124, 126, 127, 129, 135n22, 139, 141–148, 151, 154–156, 159–170, 172, 182–186, 189, 190, 192, 194n7, 194n8, 196n24, 209, 213 See also Education Secular/secularism, 18, 19, 37n17, 107, 110, 140, 152–154, 156, 158, 182, 186, 194n10 Self-affirmation, 2, 15, 32, 66, 82–83, 114, 152 See also Self-definition Self-definition, 157, 168, 176, 180, 217 See also Self-affirmation Self-determination, 5, 82, 86, 96, 102, 112, 114 Settler-colonial, 18, 23, 36n15, 48, 50, 52, 55, 58, 77, 81, 86n2, 175, 206, 208 society and dynamics, 58, 62, 77, 78 Social class, 106, 147, 161, 184, 185 See also Ghettos Solidarity, 3, 5, 65, 69, 74, 97, 122, 188, 211, 215, 219n5 Stereotypes, 11, 20, 49, 69, 71, 75–78, 82, 84, 85, 189, 215 T Transcultural/transculturality, 7–13, 18, 22–28, 30, 34, 36n9, 77, 94–97, 99–101, 104, 106–119, 132, 134n19, 139–145, 162, 172, 174, 175, 186, 191, 196n25, 209, 212, 214–217, 219n4 as a term, 11–12

Transculturation, 8–10, 26, 28, 35n7, 192, 205, 206, 208 Transculturalism, 7–9 Transculture, 3, 7–12, 15, 22, 26, 33, 93, 95, 107, 132, 132n1, 134n14, 151, 192, 205, 208, 216 Translanguaging, 14–15, 151, 168, 195n19, 214 Translingual code-switching, 167 dialogue, 56 general, 15 memoir, 21 shift, 141 situation, 14, 127 as a term, 13–14 Translocal, 24, 38n28, 38n30, 101, 102 Transmission, 5, 6, 30, 60, 71, 78, 79, 82, 83, 111, 160, 162, 196n24, 210–213 Transnational, 22–27, 29, 33, 34, 191, 196n25, 207 Transpersonal, 30–32 Trauma, 32, 59, 60, 94, 99, 100, 163, 164, 210, 212 collective, 5, 98 intergenerational, 52 personal, 5 Travel/travelling, 4, 25, 27, 60, 85, 120, 158, 175, 184 See also Nomadism U Uprooting, 96, 97, 120, 131, 162, 188, 206, 207, 212

 INDEX 

V Values, 8, 18, 19, 74, 81, 97, 139, 155, 156, 161, 166, 180, 207, 208, 217 W War, 5, 37n17, 76, 98, 99, 126, 213, 217 See also Armed conflict; Genocide

229

Welcome, 18, 36n16, 58, 81, 110, 114, 122, 183–184, 191, 208, 219n4 See also Accueil Worlding/worlded, 22, 98 Writing as healing, 60, 61, 83–85, 94, 118, 212 Writing home, 79–81, 206 Writing as resistance, 29, 39n32, 57, 69, 78