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Indigenous and
Transcultural Narratives
in Québec
Ways of Belonging
Dervila Cooke
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Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec
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Dervila Cooke
Indigenous and
Transcultural
Narratives in Québec
Ways of Belonging
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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.
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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
ix
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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.
xi
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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
1
D. Cooke, Indigenous and Transcultural Narratives in Québec,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45936-8_1
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2
D. COOKE
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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1 WAYS OF BELONGING
3
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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4
D. COOKE
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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5
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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D. COOKE
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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1 WAYS OF BELONGING
7
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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D. COOKE
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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1 WAYS OF BELONGING
9
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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10
D. COOKE
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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WAYS OF BELONGING
11
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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D. COOKE
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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WAYS OF BELONGING
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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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WAYS OF BELONGING
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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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WAYS OF BELONGING
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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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D. COOKE
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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26
D. COOKE
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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WAYS OF BELONGING
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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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28
D. COOKE
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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D. COOKE
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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WAYS OF BELONGING
31
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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D. COOKE
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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WAYS OF BELONGING
33
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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D. COOKE
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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WAYS OF BELONGING
35
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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WAYS OF BELONGING
37
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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WAYS OF BELONGING
39
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.
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