In their countries of exile, hidden in various pockets of resistance where they find it difficult to register as much as to belong, French Canadians have invented spaces of their own, which they often baptize “Little Canadas” . In the XIXe century and in the first part of the XXe, these countries in imitation are born at the option of railway projects, taking root in any case never far from these long iron ribbons unrolled in the middle of the landscape by industrial power.
On the outskirts of my very English village there was one of these Little Canadas. Such a popular designation was only inscribed in the mouths of those who brought it to life by repeating it. These workers’ houses were located along railroad tracks built to reach the United States.
In the summer of 1888, a company employed a number of immigrants, mostly Italians, to build one of these rail routes. The site, poorly thought out, got bogged down.
Along the heavy rails, the Italian workers rose up. They had not received their salary. The Italian consul was quickly dispatched to the Eastern Townships to discuss with them, as if it was primarily a language problem! To the authorities, it seemed safer to count on the voice of the army as well. Power often has a more favorable ear to the bullets which whistle from the muzzle of cannons than to the singing accents of the voices of negotiation.
In September, the bosses had taken their legs around their necks, taking the cash register with them. Italian workers, like the others, were crushed, humiliated, then dispersed and forgotten.
The workers, undocumented, were left stranded, penniless, near Malvina. This village, lost kingdom from my grandmother’s childhood, no longer exists. He is now covered with the shroud of oblivion. The forest has resumed its rights.
The trains ended up passing by. The locomotives of progress whistle like bullets knocking down any obstacle they meet in their path.
As far as New England, Little Canadas grow thanks to these iron roads. All over America trains haul a world of cheap workers. Italians, Ukrainians, Canadians, Poles, Irish and other nationals still fatten the great flows of capital.
The languages of these workers may vary, but their conditions remain roughly common. To make their collective misfortunes invisible, they are told repeatedly that they are different from each other. By language, by religion, by nation. The bad living conditions that are made for them are assimilated to a natural law, a construction of the mind to rationalize and legitimize an unfair distribution of the advantages of one over the other.
In the Province of Quebec, the largest of all Little Canadas, such inequities are undoubtedly linked to the language question. In the order of dispossession, the fact of speaking French was for a long time a sure indicator of the place one occupied in the distribution of roles in America. And it continues to be, albeit to a much lesser extent.
However, defending French in itself is not immediately a guarantee of greater social and economic equality. It’s not enough. Language, a vector of culture, is also an issue of power. The history of French, a language which supplants Latin at the court of His Majesty, illustrates this beyond doubt.
In 1539, the ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts made of French, on this territory with uncertain contours which one names for convenience France, the official language by which the norm of the power is said. Whether in this country or in its colonies, however, French is far from becoming the language of use of all subjects. It will take a long time for this language of power to also be considered as that of everyone. Long after the Revolution of 1789, France continues to be a multilingual country. There are various languages that cross and intersect with the late impetus given to the republican school at the end of the 19th century.e century, will help swallow, but not without resistance.
In French America, the common language is also a construction carried out in the orbit of power. French is valued in the bosom of the imperatives of a religion. The tongue is the guardian of the faith and this one of that one, they say. All that remains is to listen to those who are authorized, by one or the other, to articulate their authority.
It is not enough to all belong to the same linguistic reign for the unjust domination which is perpetuated in a social system, in matters of work and education in particular, to be blurred. As Marco Micone writes in a tonic essay titled We are not born Quebecois, we become it, the vertigo of words and of national mystique prevail, alas, again “over the truth of a society insensitive to the distress of the poor and blind to the dilapidation of some of its institutions”.
Believing, these days, in the enchantment of the social effects that could be engendered by a Charter of the French language imposed without discussion, in the usual authoritarian manner of the CAQ, takes a shortcut that leads to the dead end of this America which imagines that it can continue to advance indefinitely on its same tracks.
In the lair of my house, I’ve been listening on repeat for days My delirium, Myriam Gendron’s most recent album. She sings in English and French, in her own languages, in a twilight voice. His complaints split me in two.
Myriam Gendron has already said that she does not want to be known too much. It’s a bad start, I’m telling you! In any case, I hold her to be one of the most astonishing voices to come out of the depths of all the Little Canadas that we carry within us, in the midst of our collective solitude.