Names For The College Annual Fest

Americanity

* I repeat here the text delivered at the Roundtable "American Writing" organized by Andree A. Michaud, 24 February 2009.

I was born September 11, 2001, back welded to a futon orange, feet on the ground to keep from fleeing. I woke before the images appear on-screen aircraft interlocking towers. Until this morning I can not rid myself, I had had before the world and the political attitude of the pampered child who believes the world is going on outside, away from her. I was not so young, however, which means I had no excuse. But I never really felt involved, affected by what I saw on the news. The collapse of the World Trade Center had good happen to hundreds of miles from home, I could no longer shrug and say that this does not affect me. The American continent was shrinking, while the cooled coffee into the cup that I had forgotten in my hand.

I never thought my writing in terms of Americanness. Maybe because I have never, or so little then, thought the literature under the auspices of a national body, but according to the authors within me or with me for a while. I do know that I was more in common with Russian literature than the French. And until I am able to read American novels in English, I knew that some of this literature, authors like Paul Auster, whose translations by Christine LeBoeuf made me shudder as I recognized that she knew nothing the North American reality. As to what the North American reality could well be, I was not persuaded to offer a response that is yours.

I think what has changed, Sept. 11, initially only not affected my relationship with writing, but my relationship with the world. I saw the same TV images that the Americans. I heard the same stories. I had, in fact, access the same information that the residents of the United States not located directly in the city of New York. And what I saw opened my eyes, making me doubt things taken for granted for so long: security, everyday buildings. In collapsing towers, revealed to me how the view of the protected western that I was insecure. I could not, in fact, act as if this was happening for example in the Middle East could affect me.

By changing the look I was asking about the world, it is inevitable that the events of September 2001 also change my writing. I did not put in writing immediately around events, it would take me years to get there. But I started thinking about my relationship with writing and literature based either on the language in which I wrote and read the French, but according to membership of a continent, America. Not that I develop in my writing detailed thinking about the question: I am simply conscious of living in America, my relationship with the world, landscape, space, politics itself is a U.S. report.

The question, doubt, anxiety, is becoming more Americans than North America. After all, I spend so much time now to read in English that I find myself starting News in English, and having to make a conscious effort to repeat in French. I do not know where that can take me. I only know that if France continued to exert a certain appeal, I can not deny that my eyes now turn to America. Maybe I'm the result of this cultural bombardment came from our neighbors to the south: television, news, literature, cinema. Or maybe all this is it the result of a simple proximity between the two nations were born almost simultaneously, and having been built on a relatively short period.

I know define myself first as an American, in the sense of belonging mainland, appears to some as an abandonment of the real identity of Quebec. After all, my growing attachment to literature, culture and the English language is it not about to cause my assimilation, this same fight against which Quebec? Yet it seems to me that what Americanness means, for me at least, this is the principle of a meeting: cultures and microcultures Quebec, Canadian, Americans, Native American and Mexican feeding off one another and freeing a commitment to "filial" with Europe. This filial attachment is not bad if it allows us to recognize some of our roots. But he can not prevent us from recognizing that the continent on which we built has its own story, a story we have partly created, partly inherited from its first inhabitants, transformed and adapted in part from what we have brought with us from Europe. And I thought, at least at this moment, be inhabited by a culture and literature U.S., the fact remains that I keep a certain distance before them, the one that gives me my position of Quebec. I therefore different states Americanness and unity, since they have no monopoly on this continent. In sum, it is perhaps less for me to define my relationship with Americanness in exclusive terms, to place America, Quebec, Canada, the United States, France, etc.. In opposition and more see my relationship with the world through the points of encounter between different worlds. I am, after all, the generation that has seen the world shrink over the web. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that I do not feel the need to define myself according one identity, one belonging.

I was born September 11, I said at the beginning. Not that this event has imported more than others in the history of mankind. But it's probably because it is only today that I realized that I was part of that humanity, especially when I realized that this plaque, which I found somewhere on the Atlantic Ocean, was neither too large nor too small it might seem at first sight.