Blood and Belonging (24 page)

All of Quebec's anxiety about its modernization, its incorporation into the North American grain, has focused on preservation of language.
La survivance
is, above everything else, the survival of a language. The core demand of Quebec nationalist politics has been that Quebec become a unilingual nation. Nationalists fetishize language, yet the obsession that all signs, including STOP, should be in French is comprehensible if one is aware that signage is often the only sign that one is in Quebec, and not Minnesota or Vermont.

Nationalism has often been a revolt against modernity, a defense of the backwardness of economically beleaguered or declining classes and regions from the flames of individualism, capitalism, Judaism, and so on. Until the 1960s, Quebec nationalism often spoke in this tone. It does not do so now. This in itself is surprising. Given the speed with which modernization of the society has occurred since then, it might have been expected that Quebec nationalism would become a vocabulary of regret for what modernity has done to the distinctiveness of Quebec society. On the contrary. Nationalists invariably stress that theirs is the cause of modernity, of the reforming, secular state: attacking the power of the Church in education and moral life, advancing women's rights and sexual freedom, seeking to give Quebec a secure place at the very heart of the North American economy. In Quebec, being a nationalist means being a progressive, being modern, being a French North American.

The contrast between English Canadian and Quebecois attitudes to the United States is striking. In English Canada there has been an anguished debate for generations as to whether Canadian culture can preserve its distinctiveness amid the
nightly electronic deluge of up to sixty cable TV stations in most Canadian homes. At Videotron, Quebec's largest cable TV company, they beam all the American soaps into Quebec homes, but they know that the most popular shows—the ones that get up to 80 percent of the Quebec population staying home at night—are the ones written and acted in Quebec. As long as they can see what they want in their own language, Quebecois believe their culture will be secure.

Quebecois think of their language as a kind of invisible shield protecting their cultural integrity from the North American norm. The French language allows Quebecois a degree of cultural self-assurance toward the Americans that English Canadians can only envy. Yet the same Quebecois display none of the same self-assurance in relation to their own non-French-speaking minority. They incessantly fear that their declining birthrate and the rising tide of non-Francophone immigration will dilute the French presence in North America. They seek controls of immigration policy to maximize the selection of French-speaking immigrants. They legislate to restrict the rights of people to send their children to English-language schools. The language police are dispatched to happily bilingual towns in the Eastern Townships to photograph tiny English cardboard signs in corner stores. Storekeepers are prosecuted, much to the irritation of bilingual Anglophones and Francophones alike. There is a pettiness in language politics that belies the cultural self-confidence the Quebecois project about their capacity to survive and flourish.

AT THE TWO CLOWNS CAFÉ

At the Two Clowns Café in old Montreal, on an arctic night, I meet a group of half a dozen nationalist Quebecois to talk
about language. On my part, this encounter is charged with the same expectation I felt, age eight, climbing that cemetery hill. Now, as then, I am going to meet the Other. This is ridiculous, I know. After all, don't we have the same passports? Drink the same beers—Molson, Labatt? Aren't our memories full of the same heroes—Maurice Richard, Jean Béliveau, of the immortal Montréal Canadiens of the 1950s? Yet our political assumptions turn out to be so different that we might as well be living in different countries.

In the group at the Two Clowns is Nicole, exactly my age, an organizer for Quebec's teachers' union, the Centrale d'Education du Québec, or CEQ. Her union is independentist and so is she. Nicole and I discover that we share sports heroes, literary ones, too (Parisian writers), and an affection for the hard bright winter mornings after a snowfall. We also share a memory: the October crisis of 1970. For me, it was the moment when the Canadian government broke the back of radical nationalism in Quebec. The Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, ordered the arrest of more than five hundred Quebecois intellectuals and militants, following the kidnap and murder of a Quebec politician, Pierre Laporte. For Nicole, it was the moment she discovered she could no longer call herself a Canadian. For she was among those arrested, held without trial, and then just as suddenly released. “And why?” she says angrily stubbing out her cigarette. “Not because I was making bombs in my basement. I wasn't. But because I had certain friends.” This was a moment of fissure between us, a moment which mutual goodwill and an affection for the same things could not overcome. For me, Trudeau remains the champion of that ideal of federalism I have wanted to believe in all my life. For Nicole, he is the betrayer, the native son who would stop at nothing to smash the nationalism of his own people.

Besides Nicole, who dominated proceedings with her outspoken convictions and raucous laughter, there were some young post-graduates finishing up their doctorates in law and anthropology, together with a young, soft-spoken blond woman who was the chair of one of the oldest moderate nationalist societies in Quebec, the Société Saint Jean Baptiste, which among other things organizes the great parade through Montreal on Quebec's national day, June 24.

It was a typically Montreal conversation, switching between English and French with astonishing rapidity. Why, I asked, did Quebec have to be unilingual, if all of them were so fluently bilingual? Because, the president of the Saint Jean Baptiste Society said, “there are six million of us, and two hundred and fifty million of you in North America.”

Besides, said a young female anthropology student, “the immigrants arrive here and they all want to learn English, and if they do, we will lose Montreal.”

“Lose Montreal?”

“Yes! Lose Montreal. It will become an English-speaking island in a French nation, and that is intolerable.”

“Intolerable,” they all said.

“You all worry about survival. But you
have
survived, for God's sake. Why are you so worried?”

The woman from the Saint Jean Baptiste Society replied, “Yes, we have survived, but look at the cost. We would have been twelve million by now, but half of us left for the States.”

“You want to stop them?”

“Of course not. But the point is, we are surrounded by a foreign civilization and we must protect ourselves.”

I still couldn't understand it. The language is completely secure. The signage laws ban the public use of English. Quebec, alone among Canadian provinces, enjoys substantial
jurisdiction over immigration and has secured the right to recruit French-speaking immigrants. The English public-school board is not allowed to accept pupils of French-speaking parentage (although private English schools are full of children of Quebecois who want their children to grow up bilingual).

“There,” says one. “What other society allows a publicly funded school system in a language other than the majority?”

“Fine,” I replied. “I'm not saying Quebecois are intolerant. You're not. I'm asking why do you feel so insecure? Why do you believe your language needs a state of your own to protect it?”

“We are not insecure,” Nicole says, with exasperation. “We just want to be at home, with ourselves.”

“Yes, frankly we are tired of being a minority in Canada. We want to be a majority in our own place.”

“Whoa,” I cry. “That sounds ominous. What about the tyranny of the majority?”

“That's not tyranny, that's just democracy,” says one bespectacled law student.

“Suppose you're right,” I say. “Suppose you need a state to protect your language. Are you sure it's viable?”

“Of course. We are Quebec Inc.!”

“But what if you're wrong?
You
won't pay the price—you all have qualifications. You know who will pay? The pulp workers in Trois-Rivières. They're the ones who'll pay for a nationalist experiment that goes wrong.”

“What a vicious statement!” Nicole exclaims, in mock fury. “Apologize. Apologize.” She is laughing, but also half-serious.

“Answer the question.”

“I work for a union, dear. Don't tell me about the workers. Don't divide us, either. They are as much for independence as we are.”

And so it goes, as the beer empties accumulate at our table, and the bar gets noisier and noisier. Some of the group say nothing, as if holding something back, letting the pressure inside them build. In a hush between songs from the bar band, a young woman anthropology student says to me, very quietly, “Look, we just want a place where they treat us like adults. We just want to be treated like grownups, not like children.” She is close to tears, and it dawns on me, in the silence that follows, that in her imagining of this community that we are supposed to share, she sees it as a family, where I, and my English kind, are the parents who never listen, and her Quebec is the young woman desperate to take her place in the world as an adult.

What can you say to such a deep myth? It is a feeling, and notoriously feelings cannot be argued with. But they may be as productive of mischief as my childhood belief that there were Frenchies at the top of the cemetery cliff who would steal our bicycles if they could.

It is late at the Two Clowns and time to go. As I draw my winter coat around me in the frigid arctic air outside, one of the young men who had said nothing all evening comes up and whispers quietly, “It's strange how loud we talk, isn't it? As if we Quebecois were still trying to convince ourselves of something.”

TWO CONVERSATIONS

Lise Bissonnette is my age, pert and businesslike, a newspaper editor, a columnist, a complicated and subtle supporter of sovereignty for Quebec. I talk to her in the new offices of her paper,
Le Devoir,
founded by the great nationalist hero of Edwardian Quebec, Henri Bourassa.

No, she said, she didn't want to be called a nationalist. “The narrow sense of a nation, you know, the ethnic meaning of the word ‘nation'”—she made a gesture of distaste—“it's foreign to me.” It is curious how few people anywhere, when seen to be nationalists from the outside, think of themselves as nationalists from the inside. The word, she says, suggests closing in on yourself, and for her, culture in Quebec should be open to the world.

I ask her whether being a nationalist, in the Quebec context, necessarily means a commitment to the sovereignty of an independent Quebec state. Through most of its history in Canada, Quebec nationalism has been about getting more from Canada, not about getting out of Canada. So I tell her the old joke—“What Quebec wants is a sovereign Quebec inside a united Canada”—and ask her whether it remains true. “Of course,” she says. “Why not? Everywhere in the world, people want it both ways. There are risks to independence, so Quebecers may not love Canada, but they like it, and they want to keep the links, as a kind of reassurance.” Even when they voted for Trudeau, she says, Quebecers were not necessarily voting for federalism and for Canada. They were voting for one of their own. “They were playing tribal politics.” Trudeau himself would be surprised to hear this. His view of Quebec nationalism was that it is a language game played by the local elite to wrest maximum advantage from Ottawa and to ensure their domination of provincial politics. Ordinary voters, he insisted, see through the game, and when they voted for him, they voted for Canada.

But why, I persist, do you need a state if you already have exclusive jurisdiction in so many fields? Not true, she counters. Federalism in Canada “is getting to be more centralized by the day. The federal government is entering the field of
education and manpower training and we must resist that.” That is not how English-speaking Canada sees it. It has rejected proposals for the further decentralization of the federal system on the grounds that the country itself will not survive further provincial autonomy. Again, what is or is not true is not at issue. The crucial point is that our imagining of the same community barely intersects at all.

Why, I ask her, do Quebecois invest so little emotion in the idea of federalism, in the vision of two peoples living together within a single state? She leans forward on her desk and is briskly dismissive. “First of all, English Canadians have been saying that for a very short time. You didn't hear much about that in the sixties, when people were still fighting against the simple idea that French could be an official language in this country. In my view, the dream of the binational state is a Toronto cultural establishment way of seeing the country, and it is not shared by the majority of the people.”

But, I persist, in a world being torn apart by ethnic nationalism, isn't there something to be said for a federalism that keeps ethnic groups living together in peace? She won't budge. That's an English Canadian idea, she says, politely but firmly. Canada has failed. It says it is a bilingual, bicultural state. But go to Halifax or Vancouver and you'll see it's not true. The only place that approaches the ideal is Montreal. Quebec, she seems to be saying, has turned out to be better at practicing the multi-ethnic, multicultural ideal than Canada itself.

She's not sure she'll ever see a Quebec with its own foreign embassies and its own seat at the United Nations. But she does believe that all the momentum of Quebec's history is leading it away from Canada.

A
LAIN DUBUC
is chief editorialist for
La Presse,
Montreal's largest French-language daily. He describes himself as a “non-separatist nationalist,” someone who believes, in other words, that his nation is Quebec but that his state remains Canada. Mind you, he says, “I don't really care about Canada. I don't have much energy to put into that country. All my energies go toward Quebec.”