The Death of Miron: Public Poetry and Quebec Separatism

Introduction: Le Québec Aux Québécois

In December of 1996, the death of Québécois poet Gaston Miron was big news in Montreal's newspapers and magazines. Miron, aside from being a celebrated author of passionate verse, was also a dedicated ideologue of separatism, the nationalist movement which hopes to see the largely French-speaking province of Quebec secede from the Canadian union. As the Parti Québécois, the ruling party of the province, was (and continues to be) committed to this separation, Miron was given a full state funeral where all the flags of the province were flown at half mast and where politicians spoke alongside academics about the lasting influence of Miron's words (a rare occasion for a poet on this continent). The death of the nationalist poet, and particularly the government's official mourning of his passing, however, seemed to arouse a different set of feelings in some members of the province's minority groups. Most non-francophone Quebeckers did not know much about "Miron le magnifique" and, upon their abrupt introduction to his work, some wondered why a man so closely allied with what seemed like an ethnically exclusive vision would be honored with a state funeral. Just as many things are in Quebec, the death of Miron was quickly turned into a discussion about the provincial government's endorsements of secession, and its provocations toward minority groups.

The history of ethno-linguistic relations in Quebec is too lengthy and complex to do full justice to in this essay. Nonetheless, a few words on this history is needed in order to help illuminate the source of the Miron controversy. From the time of the British conquest of New France (1760), through the creation of Canada (1867), French-speaking Quebec was a largely rural and intensely religious society whose conservative insularity helped it maintain its language and culture through passing generations of British rule. (Though it should be said that since the Quebec Act of 1774—one of the Declaration of Independence's "intolerable acts"—recognition of the religious and linguistic rights of French Quebeckers has always been a constitutive element of Canada's march to democracy.) However, as Canada flourished and passed from colonial rule, Montreal's economy became dominated by English speakers. This English-speaking economy, paralleling the economies of other North American metropolises, was attractive to many immigrant groups who arrived in the city and who chose to integrate within the dominant linguistic group of the continent. It was this Montreal, with its robust and cosmopolitan sense of melting-pot Englishness, that so deeply offended Gaston Miron and backdropped his lifelong hostility to all forms of bilingualism. (Miron would later claim that he "suffered" from signs that read "cheese / fromage, . . . meat / viande, .. door / porte.")

As French Quebeckers became more urbanized, and as the church dramatically began losing its influence in daily life, provincial politics increasingly became the focus of national aspirations. This collective awakening was ultimately the inspiration for a series of economic and social changes in the 1960s, commonly referred to as la révolution tranquille. But this quiet revolution also brought, for some, a taste for a kind of revenge, and the new era's prophets of an independent Quebec dragged along the same old villains: les autres ("the others") and les anglais (the English). Even the slogan of la révolution tranquille, "maître chez nous" (masters of our own home), writes the modernization of Quebec into an ethnocentric vision of nous (us) seizing an authority that presumably was in the hands of the previous "masters." In this colonial equation, the long gone British ruling classes of the conquest are manifestly adjoined to all the immigrant groups who also spoke the language of "the other." And in the modernized discourse of the newly secular French Quebec, the term"canadienfrançaise" (French Canadian) began to take on old-fashioned connotations and was beginning to be replaced with the activist term "Québécois."

Gaston Miron was ahead of his time in articulating this shift from an idea of French Canada to a vision of a modern nationalist state geographically centered on Quebec. In a 1970 interview with his supportive colleague Jean Royer, Miron read this shift as a matter of a colonial overcoming that also extends to the literary history of Quebec, saying "la poésie 'canadienne-française' s'est terminée vers 1960. C'estmaintenant la poésie québécoise" (French Canadian poetry ended around 1960. Now, it's Québécois poetry). The declaration of a Québécois identity was not meant to classify somebody who lives and writes in Quebec, but was an announcement of a specific ethno-linguistic enclosure; a Québécois is a descendant of the original French settlers of the region, and, furthermore, someone who implicitly shares the political struggle of a once conquered people to maintain their French-speaking culture. In his summary of the themes of French Quebec poetry, Royer writes, "la poésie Québécoiseest passionate parce qu'elle s'écrit dans l'histoire singulière d'un peuple d'expressionfrançaise en pleine Amérique du Nord anglophone" (Québécois poetry is passionate because it's written within the singular history of a people expressing themselves in French in the face of English-speaking North America) (Postface 243). With this definition it is obviously impossible for English Quebec poets, like Leonard Cohen or Irving Layton, to declare themselves as "Québécois" and today many non-francophone citizens of the province continue to feel excluded by this national designation. For Quebec separatists, the phrase le Québec aux Québécois (Quebec for Quebeckers) became, and still is, a familiar rallying cry. And, as novelist Mordecai Richler memorably puts it, "when thousands of flag-waving nationalists march through the street roaring 'Le Québec Aux Québécois' they do not have in mind anybody named Ginsburg. Or MacGregor, come to think of it" (77).

The first election victory of the separatist Parti Québécois in 1976 gave the province a controversial new language law, Bill 101, that banned English from the province's commercial signs and disallowed the teaching of English in public schools to newly arrived immigrants. Though the law was (in part) struck down by the Canadian Supreme Court, was officially censured by the United Nations Human Rights Committee, and was the motivation behind the exodus of thousands of non-francophones from the province, in the years of its application, Bill 101 has become a near-sacred charter in Quebec politics, even inspiring populist singer-songwriter Félix Leclerc to endorse its policings in verse: "La Loi 101 me faisant marcher librement etpartout / dans le Québec, comme si j'avais été chez moi" (Bill 101 allows me to walk freely and throughout / Quebec, as if I were at home). Not just a symbolic gesture concerning the majority language of the province, Bill 101 comes complete with its own enforcement agency: the office de la langue française or "the language cops" as they are referred to by those whose language they are most likely to monitor. Presently the OLF routinely hands out fines for linguistic transgressions and inspects stores and companies to assure the government that English is never used as the first language of business. For example, in 1996 zealous defenders of Quebec's "visage française" (French face) sent the OLF to seize Passover goods from a Montreal grocery store because the imported kosher items were not properly labelled in Quebec's only official language. In 1998 the office was summoned to Chinatown, as the Chinese characters on Chinese restaurants were determined to be in violation of the law.

Throughout the last two decades, the traditional insularity of the Québécois people has not seemed far removed from an exploitable xenophobia, a resource which the province's politicians are rarely loath to dip into. Indeed, when the Parti Québécois government narrowly lost the 1995 referendum vote to take Quebec out of Canada—where the de facto zero support for the PQ's option from the province's minority groups constituted a formidable swing vote—the premier of the province, ordinarily responsible for starting the process of repairing the divisions caused by referenda, instead took to the podium on the night of the vote and fractiously blamed the defeat on "money and the ethnic vote," further predicting a day when "we will have our revenge and we will give us a country for ourselves" (The Gazette, 31 October 1995, A2).

It was in such an atmosphere that Quebec's "ethnic vote" heard of the death of the "magnificent Miron."

Miron: L'homme rapaillé

 
Louise Beaudoin, the provincial minister responsible for Quebec's "language cops," said of Gaston Miron, that "for me he was a legend. The poet and the indépendantiste joined together in him to make the whole man" (The Gazette, 16 December 1996). And the legend of Miron the poet rests in this determined pairing; Miron's poetry and Miron's politics are forever inseparable (so to speak). However, it should be said that Miron's poetry, though undeniably passionate for Quebec, was not a transparent single-minded hymn to Quebec independence. And as much as we can calibrate these things, we can also say that Miron was no less nationalistic than Walt Whitman and no less ethnocentric than Robbie Burns. Like Pablo Neruda, to whom Miron is often compared, Miron is often celebrated for his compassionate voicings of love and loneliness in concert with his political articulations.

According to Miron scholar and translator Marc Plourde, Miron's poetry is one with "extreme emotions of passionate love, anger, enthusiastic hope, bitterness and despair" (108). Miron's anti-imperialist politics were also, one might say, very much part of the late sixties and early seventies, when the cultural villainy of the English-speaking United States was a popular trope among intellectuals throughout the world. But, whatever allure neo-Marxist "globalism" had for Miron, it also came with a determined rejection of the English language he perceived as an agency of cultural liquidation. Miron insisted that without steadfast resistance to English, French Quebec culture would become merely folkloric, like Louisiana Cajuns or Merrimack valley Franco-Americans; "Nous serions, tout au plus, des Cannucks, comme Kérouac" (We will become, all and all, Canucks, like Kerouac) (Le Devoir, 18 April 1970, 15).

Though Miron was prolific, most of his reputation rests on one volume of his collected verse. First published in 1970, L'homme rapaillé (literally "The man of 'recycled straw'" but published in English as Embers and Earth) was greeted as an epochal publication among French Quebec's literary set, one critic going so far as to call the collection "notre premier drapeau québécois et notre premierlivre de poésie" (our first Quebec flag, our first book of poetry) (Lapointe 4). But Miron's rhetoric was not a simple flag-waving around contested historical issues; he insisted upon referring to the actual things of Quebec, to its flora and fauna, to its long winters and to its city streets. He also insisted on using the real diction of French Quebec; poeticizing idiomatic expressions to where they could be appreciated for their unique beauty, even creating lyrical neologisms from everyday words. According to Plourde, Miron is "enriching an impoverished speech" (114) and is revealing the possibilities inherent in unpretentious modes of expression. L'homme rapaillé, then, attempts to arouse a collective sense of pride by celebrating a national language without ignoring the traditional themes of French Quebec poetry and without resorting to a distinctive Montreal slang known as joual. For this effort, critic Etienne Duval paid Miron the supreme compliment of comparing him to Abbé Lionel Groulx, the intellectual father of Quebec nationalism, dubbing L'homme rapaillé as "le chanoine Groulx enpoésie" (the Canon Groulx in poetry).

By putting the real speech patterns of French Quebec (minus its myriad anglicisms, of course) into verse is, for Miron, an explicitly political act. Furthermore, the notes of loneliness and sadness, long characteristic of French Quebec poetry, are now framed by the promise of a future country that will offer a kind of deliverance for the long-weary Québécois people. In Miron's standard-bearing poem, "L'octobre," for example, ardent hopes for a future nation are drawn out of nostalgic melancholy:

 
For Miron, Quebec is still mired in its colonial past and the province's bleak landscape serves as a metaphor for its unrealized destiny as a nation-state. In "Héritage de latristesse" (History of Sadness) Miron again locates the coldness of Quebec in terms of a suggestive expectancy: "il est ce pays seul avec lui-même et neiges et rocs / un paysque jamais ne rejoint le soleil natal" (this country by itself alone with snow and rocks / a country that never meets the birthgiving sun) (85). In order to be truly born, to actualize their true selves, Miron suggests the French Quebecker must strategically proclaim his or her undivided identity as a Québécois and, by implication, "yes" to a future referendum on separation. As Miron writes in his poem "Pour mon repatriement" (For my repatriation), "un jour j'aurai dit oui à ma naissance" (one day I will have said yes to my birth) (87).

In the course of imagining the labor-pains of a French Quebec nation, what Miron felt about the actual English-speakers of Montreal is more difficult to say. Born in the town of Ste. Agathe, a cottage community in the Laurentian mountains about a hundred miles north of the city, Miron's early experiences with English-speaking Quebeckers, however, seem influential to his literary politics:

 
But whatever his early animus, Miron's mature work is absent of the more dramatic caricatures of English Montrealers as the imperious bankers, landlords, and factory bosses that frequently appear in French Quebec's nationalist literature. Though he spoke little English it would, of course, be most unfair to assume that his work proceeded out of some deep personal hostility. Miron's reputation as a warm and generous man is considerable—and for those who are unfamiliar with his poetry I would recommend them to the legion of testimony to this effect. But as Miron himself spoke of turning poetry away from the personal—away from "les débris / de nos miroirs" (the debris / of our mirrors) (100)—to the political, so may a critique of his legacy. If Miron's declaration that "je suis sur la place publique avec les miens / la poésie n'a pas à rougirde moi" (I'm in the public square with my people / poetry need not blush for me) (100) is fairly heeded, dissenters can also brave "the public square" where Miron's work was performed and enshrined.

So, if not the actual people, it was the English language, the language of America, the language of Toronto, the language of parts of Montreal, that was used in Miron's writing as the real signal of the French-speaking Quebecker's alienation from his or her Québécois essence. Being French in a "sea of English," as the political cliché goes, offers the French Quebec poet a potent metaphor for imperilment, and frequently underwrites ethnocentric endorsements of a "post-colonial" revenge. In Miron's metaphorical Englishness, then, the silhouettes of those iconic Anglo-Saxon bankers and landlords are easy to trace. In his poetic essay, "Alienation déliriante" (Delirious Alienation) Miron links the presence of English in Quebec daily life to a sense of suffocating containment:

 
Wandering through the bombardment of signs, the speaker equates heavily anglicized bits of common French Quebec speech ("watch out à mon seat cover" . . . "J'ai skidéright back") with cultural devolution. By the end of the piece, Miron selectively catalogues storefront signs to present a streetscape of eventual English dominance:

 
Here, the "delirious" alienation the poet feels is not just an estrangement from the words of his native French language, but that the sentiments of the other are alien as well—what with their crude insistence on matters of commerce, trafficking in meat, and "la rance odeur de métal" (the smell of dirty money).[1] As it is in some French Quebec literature, the cold language of the banks, the forces that alienate poetic French Quebeckers from their true selves, are defined, by constant insinuation, as English-speaking. And the construction of non-French speech as an irritating source of repression has, over time, fed into the enemy-listing reflexes that located "money and the ethnic vote" as the obvious impediments to the birth of the country of Quebec.

Miron's lyricism on the matter is inexplicit, but is still well understood within the traditional poetic appetites in the province that have, after all, made Michelle Lalonde's vitriolic "Speak White" one of the most popular Québécois poems of its time. Based on an apocryphal legend that English Canadians characteristically tell French Canadians to "speak white," Lalonde's bold conflation of African-American struggle with la révolution tranquille is now text-book history in Quebec.[2] The typecast anglophone in Lalonde's poem is ensnared in his transparently privileged hypocrisies; the ideal articulations of English letters revealingly punctuated by the cruel epithet:

 
The "white" language of the Anglo-American imperialist, the civil rights oppressor, the Vietnam bomber, is thus dressed for French Quebec's search for identity in the secular world. Whatever locutions Lalonde's revolutionary poem finally gives to a universal language of imperialism, the energy of the poem, and its popularity, stems from how it cleverly expresses French Quebec's traditional anglophobic slurs. In this ethno-linguistic discourse, the anglophone is forever typecast as the humorless industrialist, incapable of understanding poetry, his or her very language debased by its association with cosmopolitan mercantilism:

 
And the presence of this kind of "English" consciousness, we are led to believe, is not just Lalonde's annoyance but part of the alienation Gaston Miron and many others believe threatens the identity of the French people in North America.

The accusatory tropes that confer a strange authority on non-French speakers like the bosses and fat cats of Montreal are frequently lost on newcomers to Quebec. In a parody of "Speak White" by Marco Micone called "Speak What?" the entrenchment of French Quebec's middle class is reproached from a similar perspective:

 
In Micone's poem, Miron's text is set up in the same way Lalonde sets up Milton, Blake, et al:—as the literary and cultural underpinning of a social inequality. Just as an American crusader for an officially unilingual United States may talk of "the language of Jefferson," the ideologues of a unilingual Quebec may just as easily talk of "le premierbarde de la nation québécoise" in their warm-ups to suspend the civil liberties of Quebec's minority language groups.[3]In Pauline Harvey's agit-prop piece "MONTRÉAL FRANÇAIS" the city itself is evoked as "Le temple de Gaston Miron" (235) in seeking to authorize a dubious history and an extreme nationalism:

 
Of course, the attempts to make English the official language of the United States have not been engaged to enrich America's literary discourse, but are reactive gestures to the increased presence of hispanophones in American life (America's English-firsters are, as far as I know, relatively unconcerned about the generations of Amish families who have done quite well without the language of Robert Frost). In French Quebec, the focus on the preservation of the "common language" attends foremost on its legal extirpations of English. The most telling gesture from Miron's lines—"la grande Ste. Catherine Street galope et claque / dans les mille et une Nuits desnéons / moi je gis . . . / dépoétisé dans ma langue et mon appartenance" (great Ste. Catherine Street gallops and cracks / in the Thousand and One neon nights / I cringe . . . / my language and my appearance depoeticized) (93)—is his anglicizing of "Ste. Catherine Street." Today the "Fox Shoes" sign that so disturbed Gaston Miron is decreed by law to read "Chausseurs Fox," regardless of the language of the store's patrons. Though the characteristic speech of French Quebeckers is full of English words and phrases, for Miron the poetic mind of the Québécois must be liberated from this language in order to be truly free. For the pur et dur (pure and hard) separatist, English exists as an entrenched "master" code which will attempt to humiliate the French Quebecker away from their sovereign poetic difference.

Miron's historically fixed understanding of Quebec's linguistic dualities are more pressingly spelled out in a didactic piece called "Notes sur le non-poème et le poème" (Notes on the poem and the non-poem). In this work, Miron distinguishes between the real "poème," the pure thing of the sovereign soul, and the "non-poème," the thing articulated beneath layers of "impurities" the colonized Québécois must contend with. The "non-poème" Miron declares is "ma tristesse . . . la souffrance d'être un autre" (my sadness . . . the suffering to be another) (125). Whereas the truly authentic "poème"

 
The pride Miron elicits for the French language is connected to a pride in a monolithic Québécois ethnicity. Though Miron is offering a modernized contemplation of the sources of poetry, his yearnings for oneness attend on the claims of an inviolate common ancestry. Miron's reservoir for authentic poetry is the heroic commonality of the Québécois people, who, as a character in Abbé Lionel Groulx's 1922 novel L'appel de la race declares, are "the most strongly constituted nationality on the whole North American continent. Among the human groups established above the forty-fifth parallel none possesses a more perfect homogeneity than ours" (158). This perception of an immaculate wholeness is then thought, even by Miron more than forty years later, to be threatened by a hetereogeneity that will overwhelm this singular source of identity. In the Québécois poet's struggle through the dislocating uncertainties of the "non-poème" the authentic voice is menaced by the misunderstanding demands of an anglicized "them": "je deviens / illisible aux conditions de l'altérité /—What do you want? disent-ils" (I become / illegible in alterant conditions /—What do you want? they say) (127).

The "non-poème" is not conceived as some future imaginative paralysis but as the current state of the environment the true poet must fight through. And for Miron, Montreal's thriving bilingualism is a constant reminder of a feeling of cultural debasement.

 
In his witness to a pre-Bill 101 Montreal, when the English-speaking community was more dynamically visible and tolerated, Miron saw a colonial conspiracy. Whereas Montreal was once rhapsodically personified by poet A. M. Klein as a place "Where English vocable and roll Ecossic, / Mollified by the parle of French / Bilinguefact your air!" Miron found these polyglot mixtures to be a form of pollution. And Miron's deduction is not just an abstract existential formula about what constitutes an authentic national poetry; his words have profoundly inspired the official unilingualism of the province of Quebec. In a newspaper interview, Miron declared that any form of Canadian institutional bilingualism is

 
In the end, Gaston Miron's work may contain no ad hominem attack on a recognizable English-speaker, but no encounter with the English language is a positive one. Rather, his recognitions of "the other" are forcefully typified by his engagements of their language, strongest in his mind as a demeaning collection of epithets aimed at French Quebeckers:

Reactionary Tribalism?

 
As Miron was eulogized in Quebec's provincial legislature by the Minister of Language Louise Beaudoin as "a prodigious poet who gathered together in his heart and his work all the hopes of Quebec" (Orr 1), William Johnson, then a columnist for The Gazette, audaciously questioned the reputation conferred upon the nationalist poet, particularly the claims that his work represents "all the hopes of Quebec." Johnson, an outspoken and controversial critic of the Parti Québécois and longtime advocate for anglophone rights, titled his column, on the very eve of the state funeral, "Miron's Obsession with Oppression Was Unwarranted."

"Was he a great poet?" Johnson rhetorically asks. "In my judgement Miron's reputation will not long survive the nationalist enthusiasms current in Quebec's intelligentsia." Although Johnson is aware that these enthusiasms have ways of enduring for a long time, he connects Miron's stature in French Quebec's literature with the appeal of separatism. Highly sensitive to the literary tropes of anglophobia, Johnson summarizes that Miron's "theme was that he could not exist as he was in himself because of the colonial oppression at the hands of les autres." Rejecting the sentiments of Miron's grieving fans and rejecting the volumes of praise the deceased poet was receiving throughout the province, Johnson's final take on the poet's legacy hit hard: "Some day, though, this tradition will be seen for the reactionary, unjust and heinous tribalism that it really is."

Johnson's column was quickly denounced in the French press, eventually motivating a group of prominent separatist advocates to write an open letter to The Gazette under the banner "Johnson's column a disgusting attack on Miron on eve of his funeral."

 
A denunciation of Johnson's column from separatist partisans was to be expected, considering Miron's influence in the secessionist movement. After all, Camille Laurin, the architect of the province's controversial language laws once said "when Quebec is born, it will in large part have been thanks to Gaston Miron" (qtd Smart 26). But Johnson's timing was also decried by the more mollifying columnists of his own newspaper. An article by veteran columnist Gretta Chambers was careful not to offend by pointing out that for "Miron, the absence of a country of their own makes Quebeckers vulnerable to an insidious colonization of their spirit, language, values and sovereign mind set" and that Miron had "a nationalism of the spirit that had been awakened by the English look and feel of a pre-Quiet Revolution Montreal." These conclusions are not markedly different in actual content from Johnson's but attempt to offer them with kinder understanding, lest English-speaking Quebeckers demonstrate once again that they are incapable of understanding poetry and other things of the soul. But obviously, one person's "nationalism of the spirit" is not completely removed from another's "reactionary tribalism."

Sharp criticism for Johnson's column also came from some quarters of English-speaking Canada. In a demonstration of solidarity with outraged French Quebec writers, author Paul Quarrington, under the aegis of the Writers' Union of Canada, wrote, "Johnson's column on poet Gaston Miron was a tasteless and unwarranted attack. . . . While flags flew at half-mast throughout Quebec and a state funeral was being prepared to honour a beloved poet, Mr. Johnson's column demonstrated a shocking lack of feeling and respect for a community in mourning. . . . We cannot allow Mr. Johnson's viewpoint to go unanswered, nor can we allow such extreme views to obscure the genuine ties of affection and respect uniting writers who work in different languages." Quarrington's sentimentalizing of the literary communities and of the poet's state funeral is understandable considering his official association, but in his rebuke he offers no substantive defense of Miron beyond his "beloved" stature. Quarrington's commendable search for links between Canada's literary solitudes (French and English Canadian authors work two different marketplaces that are almost completely unaware of each other), still does nothing to address how Johnson's critique is "extreme" beyond its interference with the solemnity of the state funeral.

Quarrington's intervention in the debate, however, did finally bring some Gazette letter-writers to Johnson's defense. Iain Crofts, a reader from Beloeil, offered the opinion that "the outpouring of affection by Quebec's elite on the poet's death was inspired by [Miron's] separatism rather than the technical brilliance of his poetry." Adding, "the average Quebecker is hardly more familiar with Mr. Miron's poetry than the average Ontarian is with Mr. Quarrington's literary achievements. Such is the fate of literature in Western society as a whole." Reminders that Miron's "community" may be limited to the aging class currently ruling the province were not at all common in the debate about the poet's place in Quebec's history. Quebec City affairs columnist Remy Charest, however, remembered Miron as part of the past, as a slightly embarrassing Bob Dylan-like figure from the sixties and seventies who "seemed more out of touch with the turns that Quebec culture had taken since the early 1980s. Singing the praises of 'le pays,' as poets of decades past like to do. . . ."

Of course it is odd that in an era where challenges to the virtues of Columbus, the wisdom of Kipling, and the ever-lasting universal truths of Ernest Hemingway are questioned in newspapers and by university classrooms ad nauseum, in Quebec there is still little public questioning of the more obvious ethnocentric dimensions of Quebec nationalism. When such questions are raised they are often dismissed as "radical" or as part of a concealed desire to bring Quebec back to the unresolved terms of the British conquest. The pernicious form of stereotyping that imagines "the other" as being secretly more privileged is a very difficult prejudice to overcome, particularly as the stability of this stereotype props a romanticized oppression that defines the nation. In other words, who are the Québécois if they are not threatened by les autres? Who are the English-speakers of Quebec if they are not the implicit villains of Miron's "Le damned Canuk"?

 
Nationalist literature, like all literature, if it is to be taken seriously, must withstand the most rigorous forms of public criticism. It is patently undemocratic to suggest that the official stature of an author should force the author's critics to be silent when the celebrated writer in question passes away. A writer's words belong to the public discourse of a free society and should not be made into statues that citizens are asked to solemnly salute in order to prove their fealty to the state. We cannot just take the goverment's or, for that matter, The Gazette's word for it. Miron's reputation rests not with his body but with his words. And Johnson's column, after all, was the only one of the newspaper articles in the small controversy to be careful to quote Miron, to look at the actual words in his poetry. His column takes no delight in the loss of the man, but chooses not to mourn the passing of a literary consciousness that is explained as a precedent to many non-francophone Quebeckers' current sense of aggrievement.

The intense hostility to Johnson's critique is a small part of the greater hostility toward minority dissent in the movement to create an autonomous French Quebec nation. As Miron himself said, "La lutte des langues est une lutte à finir et c'est la luttede libération nationale du peuple Québécois" (The fight over language is a fight to the finish and it is the fight for the liberation of the Québécois) (qtd Bonnenfant) and the perception of such a fight has real consequences for Quebec's linguistic minorities. And the answer to the questions raised about Miron's politics, so far, has been to dismiss such questions as the cruel misunderstandings of the usual suspects. The stereotypical message from Abbé Groulx's Appel de la Race that "Anglo-Saxons subjugate . . . with their money and their customs, they subjugate no one by their literature and their art" (175) survives in Miron's critical reception as well as in the Parti Québécois' legislative history. As Gazette reader Mary Williams puts it, "the implication put forward . . . is about as subtle as a sledge hammer: English Canadians have no poetry in their souls. This is an arbitrary and unfounded notion; it's also an extremely provocative and hurtful one."

Conclusion: Le Mot Juste.

 
Politically, Canada has always been vulnerable to the exploitation of French-English antagonisms. The generosity of the great majority of Quebeckers, whatever language they speak at home, has been severely tested and sadly impugned by the divisive, side-taking demands of separatist referenda. It would be easier to comprehend if designations like "English Canada" and "French Quebec" were demographic totalities, but they are not: there are many English-speakers in Quebec and there are many French-speakers outside the province. Many Quebeckers are also happy to be bilingual and, increasingly, more French speakers in Quebec come from different national backgrounds. The English-speakers of Quebec, it should also be said, are not one historical ethnic group; they are "English" in the way New Yorkers are "English"—a multiethnic collection of people, who, for a variety of reasons, may not be thrilled about the creation of a monoglottal ethnic state based on the pride of the Québécois.

In a 1987 essay called "Le mot juste," Gaston Miron wrote, "désinvestir malangue de la langue de l'autre, redonner aux mots le sens de la tribu (disinvest my language from the language of the other, give back the words their tribal sense) (qtd Pleau). As we can see in bits of his work, Miron was long committed to this form of "disinvestment," to seeing Quebec extricate itself from its corrupting (English) presences. When the Miron controversy continued in The Gazette, with local broadcaster Royal Orr confronting OLF boss Louise Beaudoin (who had just gone public the day before with a complaint that Montreal's cab drivers couldn't speak French to her satisfaction) on this exact passage from "Le mot juste," the minister of language demurred, saying Miron "may be speaking ironically" and quickly reminded the interviewer of the poet's "international reach."

Admittedly, interpreting Miron is a fairly new game for English-speaking Quebeckers, as it is relatively new for his admirers to hear his political rhetoric so sharply criticized through a resistant reading. Jean-Christian Pleau, a French professor in New Zealand, angrily wrote The Gazette that these new interpretations are beside the point, and miss out on the rich allusiveness of this passage from "Le Mot Juste," further asking, "how could this be perceived as threatening? no one has ever died from such a poetic purification of the language . . . and if anyone is to suffer from Miron's endeavour; well, francophones only will be affected, anglophones need not worry." But as most non-francophones in Quebec know, this poetic purification Miron asks for is not at all removed from the so-called "purification" of Montreal's street signs. It is not removed from restrictions the OLF once sought to impose on English internet sites. It is not removed from the fact that separatism has virtually no support from the province's minority groups and counts almost exclusively on the national pride of so-called "pur laine" (pure wool) Québécois. These purifications are felt throughout Quebec's non-francophone communities; Miron's poetry is also in play when Language Minister Beaudoin feels compelled to complain about the linguistic skills of cab drivers. If Gaston Miron's words about "the existentially corrosive effects of bilingualism" (Orr 2) were not so inspiring, he would not have been given a full state funeral by the guardians of the province's language laws.

Given the exacerbation of linguistic tensions in Quebec after the 1995 referendum it is easy to see how the reputation of "Miron le magnifique" became another matter of contention. Miron's own assessment of the "maturation" of Quebec is one which sharpens the grounds for such conflict: "Nous savons maintenant qui noussommes, nous savons qui est l'autre aussi et qui sont tous les autres. Et eux aussi lesavent." (We know now who we are, we know who the other is and who all the others are. They know it too) (qtd Royer, Je suis. . . 26). Indeed, they know it: Quebec's non-francophone minorities, tired of being scapegoated for the failures of separatism, are developing their own articulate criticism of state-sponsored ethnocentrism. Then again, maybe this new defense of pluralism is just another expression of what separatists might see as the indefatigable penny-counting of Quebec's minorites. As Louise Beaudoin says, "It takes an anglophone to read Gaston Miron and make so much out of one word" (Orr 2).

NOTES

1. This translation of "la rance odeur de métal" is by Marc Plourde, who writes, "'la rance odeur de métal' was something [Miron's] teachers, les Frères du Sacré Coeur, often referred to when he was a young student in the 1940s. Here, 'metal' means money. I think that my translation, 'the smell of dirty money,' conveys the anti-materialist (or antimercantilist) feeling of the thing" (110).

2. The "linkage of black and Québécois subjectivities" (Clarke 59) is a common and complex gesture in writing from French Quebec. As such, Lalonde's "Speak White" follows in the footsteps of an incendiary (and popular) 1968 text for Quebec independence by Pierre Vallières titled White Niggers of America. Even as late as 1974, Michelle Lalonde would say "la langue ici est équivalent de la couleur pour lenoire americain. La langue française, c'est notre couleur noire" (Language here is the equivalent of color for the black American. The French language, it's our blackness) (qtd Gauvin 18). This conflation's attempts to "allegorize French-English relations" (Clarke 63) is acutely ironic as Montreal's black community was largely English-speaking, and like many anglophone communities, has not been enriched by separatist initiative and has largely relocated to Toronto. In the linguistic syllogism of white authors Lalonde, Vallières et al, actual black Montrealers can paradoxically "speak white," and as part of that North American majority, their struggles to establish a viable community in the city are overwhelmed by a Manichean poetic that sees the speaking of English as a threat. Though a school text portentously named Le Québec: un pays, une culture (Quebec: One Country, One Culture) assures its readers that a visitor to English-speaking Toronto would routinely be told to " 'speak white' si l'on avait l'audaced'émettre quelques mots en français" (if we had the audacity to say a few words in French) (101), the ignominious phrase exists almost entirely within the boundaries of French Quebec literature. Just recently, distinguished La Presse columnist Lysiane Gagnon wrote, "Je profite de l'occasion pour signaler que contrairement au mythengendré par un poeme de Michelle Lalonde, jamais l'on ne se faisant dire "Speak White" . . . je n'ai jamais entendue, dans une jeunesse entièrement vecue dans lapartie de ouest de Montreal" (I'd like to take the time to remind, contrary to the myth engendered by a poem by Michelle Lalonde, never have I been told to "speak white" . . . I never heard it once, not in my entire youth spent entirely in Montreal's [English-speaking] West End).

3. Interestingly, groups campaigning to establish English as the official language of the United States often refer to the divisive Canada-Quebec squabble as a cautionary tale. In these arguments, it is often posed that Canada's problems stem from a long-lost opportunity to assimilate French-speakers into the Anglo-American mainstream. However, it might be a more illustrative example to Americans if it is understood how Canadian failures to respect its linguistic minorities have influenced these current problems. Since no society can guarantee the dispersal of prejudices, the importance of equitable guarantees remains considerable. It is certainly unlikely that Quebec's Bill 101 could have withstood a First Amendment challenge. But, absent meaningful constitutional protection, Canadian law ultimately has allowed Quebec to abrogate any requirement to respect its citizens' rights to post signs in languages other than French.

REFERENCES

Bonnenfant, Joseph. "Gaston Miron et l'identité politique du Québec." Le Jour. December 7, 1974. 16.

Chambers, Gretta. "The Power of Miron; the Serene Tenacity of Thibeault." The Gazette. December 27, 1996. B3.

Charest, Remy. "Au Quebec: Miron's death highlights gaps between generations." The Gazette. December 29, 1996. C1.

Clarke, George Elliott. "Liberalism and Its Discontents: Reading Black and White in Contemporary Québécois Texts." Journal of Canadian Studies. 31 (3). Autumn 1996. 59-77.

Crofts, Iain. "Ignorance in Toronto." The Gazette. February 22, 1997. B2.

Fischman, Sheila. "At last Gaston Miron is collected in English." The Gazette. March 29, 1980. 106.

Gagnon, Lysiane. "La bataille de Saint Maurice." La Presse. March 20, 1997. B3.

Gauvin, Lise. "De Speak White À Speak What?: À propos de quelques manifestesquébécois." Quebec Studies. Fall-Winter 1990-91. 17-28.

Groulx, Lionel. The Iron Wedge. L'Appel de la Race (1922). Translated by J. S. Wood. Edited by Michel Gaulin. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1986.

Harvey, Pauline. "Montréal Français." Montréal Est Une Ville De Poèmes Vous Savez. Ed. Claude Beausoliel. Montreal: Éditions de l'Hexagone, 1992.

Johnson, William. "Miron's Obsession with Oppression was Unwarranted." The Gazette. December 20, 1996. B3.

Klein, A. M. "Montreal." Canadian Poetry. Volume 1. Ed. Jack David and Robert Lecker. Toronto: General Publishing / ECW Press, 1982. 203-205.

Lalonde, Michelle. "Speak White." La Poésie Québécoise Contemporaine. Ed Jean Royer. Montreal / Paris: L'Hexagone / La Découverte, 1987. 130-33.

Lapointe, Gatien. "Gaston Miron témoignages." Le Journal. Vol., 1 No. 21-22 (April 1970). 4.

Leclerc, Félix. "La Loi 101." L'Action nationale. Vol. 78. No. 7. September 1988. 555-556.

Micone, Marco. "Speak What?" Jeu 50, March 1989. 50-51.

Miron, Gaston. Embers and Earth (Selected Poems). Bilingual edition. Translated by D. G. Jones and Marc Plourde. Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1984.

Miron, Gaston. L'homme rapaillé (Poèmes 1953-1970). Deuxième édition. Montreal: Éditions Typo, 1970.

"Gaston Miron Par Lui Meme." Liberté 233. 39 (5), October 1997. 11-55.

Orr, Royal. "Interview: Louise Beaudoin." The Gazette. May 11, 1997. D1-D2.

Quarrington, Paul. "Column on poet was a tasteless and unwarranted attack." The Gazette, February 7, 1997. B2.

Pleau, Jean-Christian. "Letters: Appalled by Orr's conversation." The Gazette. May 18, 1997. D4.

Plourde, Marc. "On Translating Miron." The Insecurity of Art: Essays on Poetics. Ed. Ken Norris and Peter Van Toorn. Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1982. 108-114.

Richler, Mordecai. Oh Canada! Oh Quebec! Requiem for a Divided Country. New York: Penguin Books, 1992.

Royer, Jean. "Postface: La poésie Québécoise contemporaine." La PoésieQuébécoise Contemporaine. Ed. Jean Royer. Montreal / Paris: L'Hexagone / La Découverte, 1987. 243-50.

Royer, Jean. "Gaston Miron l'homme rappaillé." (Interview) L'Action. 18 April 1970. 21-22.

Royer, Jean. "Je suis souverain de moi-même." Le Devoir. November 9, 1985. 23-26.

Smart, Pat. "An Evening with Gaston Miron: The Culture of Quebec Independence." Canadian Forum. July-August 1994. 25-26.

Tétu de Labsade, Françoise. Le Québec: un pays, une culture. Quebec: Boréal / Seuil, 1990.

Theriault, Jacques. "Gaston Miron: témoigne de l'identité culturelle québécoise." Le Devoir. October 8, 1974. 15.

Williams, Mary. "Attack on column was an attack on a community." The Gazette. January 20, 1997. B2.