AN OPEN BOOK
At the Grande Bibliothèque’s Human Library every Thursday until the end of March, you can ‘borrow’ a participating immigrant for 20 minutes at a time. Talk to them, ask them questions. The goal? To learn how to read them better, Ian McGillis finds.
The high-ceilinged hall of the Grande Bibliothèque, bathed in natural light even on a gloomy day, is a place where you can easily find yourself thinking expansive thoughts. Though not quite “the street,” it is very accessible, a shared public space where people whose paths would seldom cross in the normal course of life mingle and mix: library users from across the socio-economic and ethnic spectrum, and also some of the district’s homeless and semi-indigent, a considerable number of whom pass much of their day in the spacious facility.
A perfect place, all things considered, for Human Library / Bibliothèque vivante.
Conceived and launched in 2000 by a group of idealistic Danes as a way “to build a positive framework for conversations that can challenge stereotypes and prejudices through dialogue,” Human Library (“Menneskebiblioteket” in Danish) has grown in the ensuing 17 years into a global project with branches on five continents. This year’s Montreal events, begun last month, continuing through March and part of a larger winter-long series of library programs on the theme of cultural diversity, are a collaboration between the BAnQ and Concordia University. Once a week for three hours, a different pair of international students lend themselves out as “human books” for 20 minutes at a time.
“The ‘books’ will often talk about where they come from, how it is to be an immigrant or however they define themselves in Montreal, intercultural relationships, racism if they have experienced it,” said Iris Amizlev, BAnQ social mediator and project leader. “But the conversation can go in any direction from there. Some even bring objects and souvenirs from their country. Last week an Algerian woman brought traditional embroidery and some books in Arabic, and a native man brought a ceremonial shirt.”
While primarily a French-language event, participants are free to arrive at whatever combination or mix of languages is most conducive to communication; one ‘book’ is a Bulgarian teacher living in Longueuil who can switch between French, English and her native language.
Reasoning that participation would be in the truest spirit of the endeavour, I went to the Grande Bibliothèque last week as a human-book reader, “borrowing” Solène, a young woman from Bordeaux in France. (Participants do not divulge their full name to keep a certain measure of privacy.) In Montreal to study journalism at Concordia, she graduates next month and hopes to pursue a career writing about science. She wanted to be a human book, she told me, because “it was an opportunity to share things, to talk to people I might not normally talk to, to compare ideas and views across cultures.”
As with any human exchange, let alone one with a person you’ve just met, it takes an effort to get things rolling, although knowing you have a strict time limit does have the effect of encouraging a certain directness. Solène joked that before she came to Quebec she pictured a place where “it is always cold. I thought I might be skating to school every day.” Still not a big fan of our winters, and occasionally ruing how hard it is to find some of her favourite meats and cheeses, she has otherwise found life here quite congenial: “It seemed to me immediately that people were very open and smiling, not judging like, for example, some Parisians do.” Being a French national in Montreal, she has sometimes felt herself subject to a set of associations: “The French all live and gather in the Plateau, they are snobby and proud of themselves and consider themselves superior, that kind of thing. And one day someone asked me, ‘Are all French men bisexual?’ I said, ‘No …’”
Tenacious as such preconceptions may be, the point is that they aren’t true. The maintaining of such assumptions, you become starkly aware, relies on isolation; achieve some actual human engagement and it’s amazing how fast the old notions crumble.
As stressed by Amizlev, the Human Library interchange is not an interview, it’s a conversation. In my case with Solène, that conversation was not just cross-cultural, it was cross-generational; I quickly found the talk venturing into areas I seldom go with my contemporaries. When Solène asked me if I enjoy my work, it struck me that it was a question I hardly ever hear; being called upon to articulate something that’s normally intuitive — yes, I do enjoy my work, but it’s complicated — was edifying. She also asked me if my job is ever stressful, and I reflected aloud that, yes, sometimes it can be, especially as deadlines loom, but it’s good and healthy as stresses go, and more than offset by the feeling that what I’m doing is worthwhile. Here, it dawned on me as I spoke to Solène, was someone who literally represents the future of what I do, and in a world where the role and definition of journalism is shifting in ways that can be bewildering if not downright alarming, the mere fact of talking to someone entering the field with eyes wide open is a tonic.
Twenty minutes might not look like a long time on paper, but once you do it, it you realize just how rare it is to sit and talk with someone — anyone — one-on-one for that long, and how different it feels. The dopamine rushes may not come as frequently as those triggered by a text or a volley of tweets, but the satisfactions are deeper and more enduring.
My conversation with Solène took place on a day when local headlines were dominated by the Concordia bomb scare, in turn a mere month after the Quebec City mosque shooting; even as we spoke, the ongoing mainstreaming of xenophobia by the “America first” regime in the United States was driving asylum seekers to remote border crossings into Canada. The world has a way of reminding you just how valuable — indeed necessary — initiatives like Human Library are.