Strong roots
Pauline Johnson was born on March 10, 1861 on the Six Nations Reserve, English by her mother, Mohawk by her father. This enriching duality is reflected in her grandfather's name, Tekahionwake (double wampum), which she borrowed as an adult. But the young woman has another asset besides this cultural richness, she excels both orally and in writing, and it is by declaiming her poem A cry from an Indian wife on January 16, 1892 at the Young Men's Liberal Club that she immediately gets noticed. A fame that would transcend her early death following a long illness in 1913, since The Song my paddle sings is still taught to schoolchildren. The song of the Amerindians and nature that she loved so much can be read in French, for example in the poetic editions Les 17 muscles de la langue. Another example of double culture is the Englishman William Kirby who, as a teenager, immigrated to the United States with his family and settled in Niagara-on-the-Lake as an adult until his death in 1906. In particular, he will leave to posterity a historical novel, Le Chien d'or
, which is based on events that took place in a Quebec house and serves as a pretext for giving a Loyalist version of the creation of Canada.Better known, and easier to obtain in French thanks to the good care of Omnibus Editions, which republished it, the Jalna
series (sixteen novels) describes the life of a family at the head of a large farm, the Whiteoaks, over four generations and a century, from 1854 to 1954. A great pleasure to read due to the pen of Mazo de la Roche (1879-1961), a writer who was finally quite discreet, whose characters, with their strong characters, still haunt the streets of London, an Ontario city that has dedicated a few sites to them.Another classic is Morley Callaghan, born in 1903 in Toronto, where he will breathe his last in 1990. Although somewhat neglected on this side of the ocean, Callaghan entered literature by recounting his Parisian escapades in the company of Hemingway and Fitzgerald (the famous American Lost Generation in Paris in the 1920s), whose biting portrait he portrays in his autobiographical tale That summer in Paris. Coming from an Irish Catholic family, religion permeates his first novels set in his hometown during the crisis of the 1930s, a good moral perhaps a little too strong that disappears completely in the second part of his career, when he returns to writing after having had to work as a journalist to survive. In The loved and the lost
(1951), for example, he does not hesitate to depict the relationships between people whom, at the time, everything seems to separate: origins, classes and languages. This refreshing open-mindedness earned him the Governor General's Literary Award.The Ontario of the 1930s proved to be fertile, witnessing the birth of three giants that can easily be found on the shelves of our bookstores: Timothy Findley in 1930, Alice Munro in 1931 and Margaret Atwood in 1939. Findley - whose Pilgrim, republished in Folio, is a marvel of humour and erudition, telling the story of a man whom death refuses and whom Carl Jung will take care of - made his Hollywood debut as an actor after some very classical Canadian studies. He earned his first success as a playwright and screenwriter when he failed to win top billing for his systematically rejected novels. However, he will be granted success as his work is marked by the powerful themes, loneliness or madness, that he explores. Alice Munro, for her part, is the author of the little things, and if the Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded to her in 2013 to salute her career as a short story writer, it is because she has the art of detail and realism that serves her strange portraits of women. A particular style that may or may not be seductive, but which has been challenging since her first collection, La Danse des ombres heureuses, published in 1968. Carried by the publication in magazines, it also inspired Pedro Almodóvar to make his film Julieta
. Finally, is there still a need to present Margaret Atwood, so much so that the triumph of the serial adaptation of The Scarlet Maid has brought her work back to the forefront? This dystopia describes a totalitarian system in which women are only a small part of humanity, to be worked to death and enslaved to all the dirty work. This novel, which dates from 1985, and which continues with Les Testaments, should not make us forget that the author is also a poetess(Laissez-moi te dire... published by Bruno Doucey), that she wrote for young people(Tout là-haut dans l'arbre, published by Rue du Monde) and that she even tried her hand at comic strips(Angel Catbird, published by Glénat). Another writer, Joy Fielding, born in Toronto in 1945, also took an interest in women and set her heroines in blacker-than-black novels.An important multiculturalism
The century continues and shows itself to be just as rich, both in its literary offerings and in its multicultural plurality, as in the case of Michael Ondaatje, born in 1943 in Colombo, Sri Lanka, but a Canadian citizen living in Toronto, the author of the English Patient (Points publishing), Booker Prize winner and source of inspiration for the eponymous film. Or Richard Wagamese, an Ojibwe Amerindian, outstanding journalist and renowned writer whose dazzling pen - he wrote very few novels before succumbing at the age of 62 - was noticed until the Étonnants Voyageurs festival in Saint-Malo thanks to the flair and sensitivity of Caroline Coutau, director of Éditions Zoé, who had translated Les Étoiles s'éteurent à l'aube as early as 2016, and who did it again in 2017 with Jeu blanc. In the first book we meet Franklin Starlight, who will be in Starlight again (in 2019 for the French version), a man who confronts his Indian origins by accompanying his father on his last trip. The second title also questions these inalienable roots that forge destinies, and is the object of the same intense writing which is, moreover, similar to the so-called natural writing trend.
The century really shows a fruitful mix. Thus Joseph Boyden, born in 1966, cultivates his Irish, Scottish but also Indian origins. A former punk and new writer, he conquered the hearts of his readers in 2006 with Le Chemin des âmes (Le Livre de poche), which follows the path of two Cree Amerindians who fought in France in the Canadian army during the First World War, and rekindled his reputation with Les Saisons de la solitude and then Dans le grand cercle du monde (In the Great Circle of the World). Boyden is also the author of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont (éditions Boréal), taking as his subject the illustrious founder of the province of Manitoba. He shares this fascination, in a completely different style, with Montreal-born and adopted Torontoer Chester Brow, an internationally renowned cartoonist who has never hesitated to put himself on stage with his clean lines, sometimes in situations that are a little taboo(Le Playboy in the beautiful Quebec publishing house Les 400 coups, or Vingt-trois prostituées in Cornélius). A contemporary voice that could echo that of Craig Davidson, whose collection Un Goût de rouille et d' os published in Albin Michel's Terres d'Amérique collection in 2006 sounded like a revelation, before inspiring Jacques Audiard to make a feature film in 2011
Finally, mixing is also linguistic, as demonstrated by French-speaking authors - particularly the generation born after 1945 - who, for several decades now, have not hesitated to assert their identity, even if it means using English to access the publication without fearing assimilation. This state of mind is like a political gesture that has had to disregard this vast territory, which does not help to bring people together, and the institutions that have not always encouraged this particularism. Nevertheless, Franco-Ontarian literary life has been able to organize itself, initiating collective projects and revolving around various structures, notably the magazine Virages, founded in 1997 by Marguerite Andersen, which focuses on the art of the short story, or publishing houses such as Prise de parole, created by the precursor Gaston Tremblay in 1973, or L'Interligne ouverte in 1981. We could take it back to the colonial era and include the stories of explorers, or we could look at the 20th century, when writing in French was an act of resistance, without having to diminish its current vitality, in all genres, from ancestral poetry to contemporary theatre, quoting for example Michel Ouellette, Pierre Berton, Jean-Marc Dalpé or Jean-Louis Trudel. A literature to be explored on the spot, the pleasure of a journey within the journey.
