National Post (National Edition)
Finding hope amidst tales of trauma
PROVINCE'S INTELLECTUALS STILL TRYING TO REWRITE HISTORY TO SUIT THEIR NARRATIVE
In January 2014, Harold Heft, a successful writer, educator and communications executive, learned he had inoperable brain cancer of the kind that killed the Tragically Hip's Gord Downie. He had less than two years to live. In that precious time, working with his beloved wife Suzanne Heft, a social activist and fundraiser, and his close friend Peter O'Brien, journalist, author, entrepreneur and fundraiser, Harold saw his envisioned legacy project — a collection of personal stories by Canadians of diverse background about trauma, loss and other forms of suffering — begin to take shape.
A Perfect Offering: Personal stories of trauma and transformation, is now a published reality. But what timing! The editors couldn't have known about COVID-19 when they planned the book, but surely this is the worst time to bring out a compendium of sad stories?
No, says Suzanne Heft in a phone interview, it's a good time. “We are in a state of collective mourning for our lost norms and certainties.” Telling stories is how we make sense of what Ms. Heft calls our “forced awakenings.” It is the expression of loss that “propels us forward in coming to terms with that loss.” For the writers in this book, telling their stories — some for the first time — has been liberating.
My own take-away from the book tended not toward the suffering endured, but to the will of the narrators to make peace with their fate if necessary, and, where possible, to swim up from the depths and turn their face to the sun again. They were one person “before,” another “after.” They radiate survivor empowerment.
Neena Saloiya has been blind since birth. She lost both parents and her brothers before she was 30. She does not ask for pity — I should say none of these writers is asking for pity — but she often feels she is not seen by others. She writes, “I hate not having braille labels on public washroom doors.” (Of course! Such a small thing.) Because she has to ask, and “The more I have to ask sighted people questions, the more they feel they can comment on my life.” She has several educational degrees, a home-based business, a husband, a loved guide dog, Fargo.
Too often, it isn't the writer's own onrushing death that's at the centre of the story, but a child's. The parents' anguish is incalculable, but in their love-drenched, tenderly written stories of doomed babies and children, they do these tragically short lives great honour.
Other times it is the writers themselves who have struggled with disease, mainly cancer. Some writers chose poetry to express their feelings about illness. In “Awaiting biopsy results,” poet Kenneth Sherman quotes Simone Weil:
“Suffering is time without direction.” In “between destinies,” artist Charles C. Smith writes of his mother's agony in the loss of a previous child while pregnant with him: “you must have felt torn as no other/ between destinies with a small heart at work in your womb.”
You can tell immediately when you are reading an Indigenous writer's story. It has a unique cadence. Jules Arita Koostachin's story of intergenerational resilience, an homage to her Cree mother who survived a “notorious” residential school in Fort Albany, James Bay, slips fluidly between the prosaic, the poetic and the spiritual. Her ancestors inhabit this short memoir, their presence noted with reverence, a sense of the sacred.
Celebrated photojournalist Paul Watson graciously contributed a set of poignant photos of children traumatized by war, earthquakes, cyclones and other forms of ineluctable external violence, accompanied by moving testimonies to the appalling conditions under which the photos were taken. The faces!
The book was brought to my attention by my friend Judith John, whose own story — beautifully rendered — appears here.
I have followed Judith's multiple (benign) brain tumour-related surgeries and debilitating side-effects over the years of their unfolding, and my admiration for her ever-positive response to adversity — “I am the most stubbornly glad person, ever” — is boundless. Judith hates burdening friends with her pain — what, after all, can they do for her? — and writing about it — connecting with the world — opened the vault of her suffering's isolation. As a former hospital executive and caregiver for her husband during his own tense sojourn in Cancerland, not to mention a seasoned communications expert, Judith is uniquely qualified for her “after” role as a globe-trotting ambassador for patients' rights.
In Harold Heft's story, written in extremis, he poses existential questions: “What is a definition of a life welllived under (my) circumstances?” and “In what way am I still the person I always was?” Peter O'Brien's father died when he was two, one of 10 children. His astonishingly resilient mother married a widower with 12 children, and then warmly welcomed an ailing brother and blind aunt with Down syndrome into their home.
Don't read the stories back to back. The range of tribulation — disease, rape, addiction, severe autism, terror attack, grave injury, imprisonment and torture — is wide, but the book is not meant to be a victimhood Olympiad. Every experience is unique and worthy of contemplation without comparison.
In modern societies, the inevitable deaths of the past can often be thwarted by medical advances. Paradoxically, we are far more terribly afraid of death than our ancestors were.
A Perfect Offering invites us to confront, and may even help us to overcome, our deepest fears.
IT WAS LIKE HAVING A TIME MACHINE AND I ENJOYED THESE EXCURSIONS IMMENSELY — CONRAD BLACK
Ajust-released book about Maurice Duplessis (the premier of Quebec from 1936-1939 and again from 1944-1959) unintentionally depicts the very prolonged, narcissistic struggle that Quebecois intellectuals are having about the history and vocation of their people. Pierre B. Berthelot has produced “Duplessis est encore en vie” ("Duplessis is Still Alive"). What is still alive is the struggle on the part of Quebec's intellectuals to reconcile the debt French Canada owes for its survival to forces and institutions that it has renounced and cannot accept as having been indispensable to it for centuries. The take-away is that, finally, the Quebecois intelligentsia offers half a loaf: Duplessis took back direct taxes from Ottawa and established what he called the “autonomy” of the province, retaining the right of Quebec to choose its political options. Until recently, he was demeaned as an Uncle Tom masquerading as a Quebec nationalist. Though this book purports to be a biography of Duplessis, the reader gets only a very condensed summary of his career. Instead, it includes biographical sketches of his two principal biographers (Robert Rumilly and myself), along with the distinguished filmmaker Adrien Arcand, who directed a film partly about Duplessis. Berthelot claims to be assessing the evolution of French-Canadian intellectual opinions of Duplessis, who dominated public life in Quebec for a whole generation, ending with his death in 1959, but we all got Duplessis off our chests 45 years ago.
Rumilly, Arcand and I each get as much biographical attention as Duplessis, for no apparent reason. Arcand's film, “Québec-Duplessis et Apres,” splices news footage of Duplessis with film of the 1970 election campaign between JeanJacques
Bertrand, Robert Bourassa and René Lévesque. Arcand's film was skilfully assembled and presents the familiar separatist theme that not much changed in Quebec between Duplessis to Bourassa, except the decline of the status of the Roman Catholic Church.
Rumilly was born in Martinique in 1897 and lived in French Indochina and then Paris. He was conscripted from the Sorbonne and hurled into the First World War, during which he was wounded in action. He developed a great admiration for Marshal Petain, his commander at Verdun, joined Action Française, an ostensibly Catholic authoritarian group led by Charles Maurras, who was ultimately denounced by consecutive popes as a cynic who was only trying to deploy Catholicism against the communists, and was condemned to life imprisonment after the Liberation in 1944 for excessive collaboration.
On numerous occasions, Berthelot points out similarities between the facts cited by Rumilly and myself, as if there was some theft of sources between us. But he must know that we both gained access to Duplessis' papers, exclusively in each language, and that while Rumilly was engaged to write a hagiography by the custodian of the papers, La Société des Amis de l'Honourable Maurice L. Duplessis, Inc., I was under no such constraints. Rumilly and I made a deal in which he organized interviews for both of us with the old guard of conservative and nationalist Quebec, an astonishing variety of rustic and eccentric characters from 30 and 40 years before, and I did with publishers and editors and the English establishment, and I drove us dozens of times into outlying areas of the province to meet these people. Some similarity of material was inevitable. It was like having a time machine and I enjoyed these excursions immensely.
Rumilly had his biases, but he was a real period piece, with the acerbic wit of a bygone France. I had considerable respect for him, but when I cited him once to Pierre Trudeau as a source for something, the then-prime minister threw his hands in the air and shrieked with derision that Rumilly was just “a pasticheur assembling newspaper clippings” — an unjust verdict, but not without some truth.
Berthelot falsely states that my subsequent disagreement with Rumilly arose from my supposedly indiscreet treatment of Duplessis on physical matters that were revealed by the doctor who attended to him when he died in northern Quebec, and in references to his alcoholism prior to becoming a teetotaller in 1943. In fact, Rumilly was aggrieved because I had to quote a few cases where he was referred to as a Duplessist propagandist, and unlike his whitewash of the subject, I pointed out all of Duplessis' less attractive aspects, including his undoubted role in engineering the departure of Joseph Charbonneau as archbishop of Montreal (relying on documents Rumilly also had seen, as well as the recollections of Charbonneau's successor, Paul-Emile Cardinal Leger).
Berthelot shows his hand by implying that by failing to take over most of Quebec's power companies, Duplessis was truckling to utilities owner and bank chairman Sir Herbert Holt, who responded with loans to Quebec from the Royal Bank and la Banque Provinciale, which he controlled. (This is the usual leftist Quebec simplistic bunk: Quebec was a good borrower and got no special treatment; Holt was an 81-yearold non-executive chairman of the Royal Bank and had nothing to do with la Banque Provinciale.) Right at the end of my section, Bertholet drops the mask and, citing New Brunswick historian Bernard Vigod, said that I have the mind of an “average English Canadian taxpayer of the 1970s” and the attitudes of a “Rhodesian” (Bertholet's very own insight), because I approve of the immense economic progress Quebec made under Duplessis, even though he achieved it by keeping clerical personnel in the schools and hospitals at low salaries and legislating direct improvements to the lot of the working class without indulging the province's labour leaders, attracting investment capital with low taxes and social stability, and using most of the budget to build infrastructure. This, the deceased Vigod concluded for Bertholet, “can be considered a grave insult to French Canada.” I don't think so. I didn't vote for Duplessis in seven consecutive elections over 25 years; almost every working-class constituency in Quebec did. Bertholet, for his own account, adds the soft impeachment that I may have liked Duplessis because he was successful. In fact, as George C. Scott said of Gen. George S. Patton after portraying him in the film “Patton,” “I rather enjoyed the old gentleman.”
What is important is the half the loaf that is still withheld; the historical debt that dare not speak its name. Namely, that French-Canadians owe their cultural survival to the Roman Catholic Church, and owe their achievement of approximate economic equality with English-Canadians to Duplessis and his ability to use the church's underpaid teachers and nurses to reduce his personnel costs and modernize the province; and get the conservatives and nationalists to vote together. No French-Canadian historians have ever articulated that, and that is what rankles with them. The intellectual custodians of the Quebec ethos are still not able to face up to this, but they admit that Duplessis protected their jurisdiction. Duplessis said: “The Quebec nationalists are a 10-pound fish on a five-pound line; you have to let them out slowly and reel them in slowly.” The province's motto is, “I remember” (“Je me souviens”), but they don't, unfortunately; in another 50 years, perhaps.
THE HISTORICAL DEBT THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME.