Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter 26 Third Section; The Poet as Revolutionary by Dave Jaffe

    The Poet as Revolutionary- Third section: The Life and Times of Paul Chamberland by Dave Jaffe


    In 2006 Jan Wong a longtime writer for the 'The Globe and Mail' went to Montreal to cover a mass shooting. Wong was born and  raised in Montreal. In her story on the shooting she mentioned that there could be a link between the mass shootings in Montreal and the language struggles in that city. Montrealers, francophone ones anyway, and others in the rest of Quebec were outraged. They deluged Wong with a barrage of e-mails, trashing her completely. In the ensuing controversy, Wong's life was threatened and she sunk into a great depression. In the end, 'The Globe and Mail' got rid of her.
      All of this is told in Wong's  book 'Out of the Blue'. her story wasn't the only one that showed the tensions that still simmer below the supposed placid surface of to-day's Quebec.
    For there's also Richard Henry Bain. On September 4, 2012, the Parti Quebecois led by Pauline Marois won the Quebec provincial election though the PQ didn't win a majority government. Bain went to a PQ gathering where Marois was appearing and maybe tried to kill her. He shot one person dead  and seriously wounded another stagehand.
     Although there have been other premiers across  Canada whose lives has been threatened, most anglophones premiers don't face the danger that Marois did.
     Last  the same Pauline Marois proposed a new bill that would have severely restricted Quebec government workers from wearing their traditional headgear like yarmulkes and hijabs at work. This raised ethnic tensions again in Quebec. Marois went to the polls again and her government was defeated. So it's still true as francophones used to say in the 1950's, "Quebec, c'est pas un province comme les autres."
     Yet despite all the controversies that erupt sometimes in Quebec, Quebec and the Quebecois have become far better off in the past 50 years.  Quebec's median family income stood at $73,000 a year in 2014. This puts it slightly behind Ontario's and British Columbia's. Shack towns in places like Lafleche on Montreal's south shore have vanished to make way for neat suburban streets and small comfortable houses.
     "I spend winters in Florida," a Quebecois said a few years ago. So do thousands of other Quebecois.
     Quebec has quite a few strong public companies like Hydro-Quebec and a big investment fund. The language of business in Quebec is now French and not English anymore. Its universities have grown into serious places of research and learning. Meanwhile the Roman Catholic church that Paul Chamberland and other Parti Pristes verbally attacked no longer has a strong hold on Quebecois minds. Less than one in five people in Quebec go regularly to church. The province's birth rate has also fallen dramatically. Families of five or six children that were common in Quebec and other places across Canada in the 1940's and after, are rare to-day.
     Meanwhile the scenarios conjured up for Quebec in the 1960's and 1970's didn't come true. Quebec stayed in Canada. And Quebec's population keeps on growing. It stood at close to six million in 1966. It's well over eight million to-day. Gilles Vigneault the great Quebec singer wrote the unofficial Quebec anthem called 'Gens du Pays'. At one time he predicted that the French language would die out in Quebec by the year 2000.
     Nothing like this happened. Over seven million people in Quebec speak French as their first language now. Only five million did in 1966.
     Meanwhile Quebec has become a far more diverse society than it was in 1966. Immigrants and their children from Haiti, North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa live and grow up in Quebec especially in and around Montreal.
      "In the end everything fades save for memory," wrote the Franco-Algerian writer Albert Camus. The old Quebec of 1966 where poor francophones sometimes squared off  against their anglophone managers in vicious industrial disputes  has vanished. Rene Levesque's PQ government rewrote the province's labour laws and outlawed the use of scabs in strikes. This certainly defused tensions in strikes.  Chamberland changed too. He gave up writing poetry in the 1970's and became a mystic, though he still kept writing. Yet he wrote some fine poems in a time of great upheaval and change.

     
   

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter 26 - The Poet as Revolutionary: Third Section - by Dave Jaffe

The Poet As Revolutionary - The Life and Times of Paul Chamberland : Third Section


         These bombers, " confessed one anglophone in Montreal in about 1965. "They're getting me worried. The French are becoming a problem."
       In the next ten years quite a few anglophones would leave Montreal and Quebec. After Rene Levesque's Part Quebecois  sovereigntist government got elected in 1976, the trickle of anglophone people leaving Quebec turned into a flood. About 125,000 anglophones left Quebec in the next ten years. Part Pris writers did not support the FLQ terrorists. But they didn't condemn them either. In the end, the FLQ cells killed three people. Yet for every bomb that went off in Quebec from 1963 to 1970, there were ten bomb threats.
      Things became a lot more tense in Quebec in the late 1960's. Levesque's Parti Quebecois was a sovereigntist democratic party. Levesque abhorred terrorist groups like the FLQ. Still tensions rose quite high in Quebec in the late 1960's.
      In the end the dreams of Paul Chamberland and other Parti Pris writers didn't come true. Yet Quebec is still a place quite different than Canada's other provinces.  "Quebec, c'est ne pas un province comme les autres," francophones in Quebec used to say in the 1950's.  In English this means "Quebec's not a province like the others." This is still true.
     Quebec to-day (2016) is ruled by a right wing Liberal government at whose head is a very conservative premier, namely Phillipe Couillard. 85 per cent of the population, or nearly seven million people speak French as their first language. The main sovereigntist party the Parti Quebecois, sits in opposition in the National Assembly in Quebec City. The right wing but nationalist CAQ or Coalition for the Future of Quebec has a few seats too. So does the left wing sovereigntist party Operation Solidaire.
      Capitalism or free enterprise rules the roost in Quebec as it does in most countries. And in two referendums in the past 40 years, Quebec voted to remain in Canada. Of course in the 1995 referendum on leaving Canada, it was a very close call. If  50,000 voters had voted for the 'yes' side and not the 'no' side Quebec would have become an independent state.
     So on the surface very little has changed except that you don't see many signs in English anymore. Rene Levesque's PQ government imposed a tough language law that gave French a secure place in Quebec. "French is now the language of Quebec," one observer said at the time. "Just as English is the language of Ontario."
     Yet Quebec still remains a province quite different from the others. First off, there's the difference of language. Yet politics can be very volatile in Quebec and sometimes language issues can cause all sorts of problems.
      (To be continued).
    
   
   
     

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health Chapter 26: The Poet as Revolutionary by Dave Jaffe

   The Poet as Revolutionary: The Life and Times of Paul Chamberland: Second Section


        Paul Chamberland was born in Longueil in 1939. Longueil today lies just a short drive from the city of Montreal. Chamberland joined and worked with the magazine called 'Parti Pris' when he was in his 20's. When the Quebecois use the term 'Parti Pris' they mean "A position taken' or "You've already made up your mind.'.
    The writers and editors at the magazine meant exactly that; They'd already made up their minds on a whole host of issues. They called themselves 'Marxists'. They branded themselves as aethiests at a time when the Roman Catholic church still held sway over many francophone or French-Canadian
minds. Parti pristes wanted to set up a new country separate from Canada called 'Quebec'. Here they weren't alone. They also wanted a Marxist revolution in an independent Quebec. This was something new. Though in those days  the U.S.S.R. and Mao's China existed and socialists ruled a large chunk of the world. Finally, the parti pristes wrote in joual, a kind of French that was despised by even some francophones.
      In the 1970's, Malcolm Reid, an anglophone journalist from Ontario translated one of Chamberland's poems called "The Shouting Signpainters". This term refers to the francophones who painted separatist or sovereign signs of walls in Montreal in the early 1960's. All these signs proclaimed the need for a separate Quebec. Reid went on to write a book that came out in the early 1970's called 'The Shouting Signpainters'. It was a detailed look at the magazine 'Parti Pris' and the writers who wrote for it.
      Chamberland's poem stretches out over 10 pages or more.
   
     "I write the circumstances of my life and yours, my wife, my comrades," goes the first line of the poem.
     "I live I exist within a daily death," the poem goes on.
      "I live my death until I gasp for breath day after day.
     I inhabit a land of spittle of grim mornings and of ugly specks where poets kill themselves."

      On one level "The Shouting Signpainters" is a straight political protest against the condition of French Canadians. Yet few political poems have the lyrical feel of Chamberland's poetry. One that did was Aime Cesaire's poem of the 1940's called in English 'Diary of a Return to my Native Land'. cesaire was a black man who was born in Martinique.
            (To be continued).

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health- by Dave Jaffe; Chapter 26: The Poet As Quebec Revolutionary.

The Poet As Quebec Revolutionary: The Life and Times of Paul Chamberland. by Dave Jaffe
 First Section

   Not many Canadian poets wrote poetry Like Paul Chamberland. But then Chamberland was and is a Quebecois, "a French Canadian" as some people used to say, referring to someone who speaks French as a first language and lives in the province of Quebec.
     In 1966, fifty years ago Quebec was in the sixth year of what was called "A Quiet Revolution'. Everything in the province seemed up for grabs, including Quebec's place in Canada. A province that had been repressed for many years under the harsh rule of the late premier Maurice Duplessis, had at last emerged into the sunlight of the liberal 1960's. The Liberal party of Quebec won the 1960 provincial election and tried to sweep away the  cobwebs of Duplessis's rule.
     Under Duplessis's Union Nationale government, and since the 1880's, most big businesses in Quebec were owned by Americans. These firms included mines, pulp and paper mills, forest firms and fishing companies. English speaking Canadians or anglophones as they are called now, managed these American owned companies while French Canadians or francophones toiled away as low paid workers in these places.
     "They were hewers of wood and drawers of water," some people observed about the francophones. This was not completely true. Some francophones belonged, as Marxists used to say to back then, to what was called 'The petty bourgois,'. The men in this group and they were nearly all men, were lawyers, doctors, priests and politicians. Allied to big and small business gruups, was the Roman Catholic church.It ran schools, hospitals and other places for the francophone population.
     The Catholic Church had a very strong and very conservative hold on the minds of most francophones.
     Immigrants to Quebec like Jews, Italians and other English speaking Catholics ran small businesses. And there were rich francophones too,like the family of Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau who lived in the upper class French speaking enclave of Outremont. This municipality was full of mostly French speaking people who were quite affluent.
      In the National Assembly in Quebec, Maurice Duplessis's Union National Party ran the province with a right wing iron hand. Duplessis  was allied to the big business tycoons who owned large swaths of Quebec.
     It was a good deal for some people in the province. Yet then came the Liberal Party's victory in the 1960 provincial election and the new premier of Quebec Jean Lesage opened the gates to change.
 Now new groups sprang up among the francophones of Quebec. And from 1960 to 1995, the major political question in Canada was "What does Quebec want?"

   End of the first section. To be continued.
    

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter 25 : Section One: The Poet As rRsk Taker by Dave Jaffe

      The Poet as Risk Taker; The Life of Susan Musgrave


    Susan Musgrave's life has taken many twists and turns. And at least twice she ended up with two men who were accused of crimes.
      Born in 1915 to a Canadian couple then living in California, Musgrave grew up on Vancouver Island. There, she won a poetry competition in the 1960's in Grade Eight. The subject of her poem? It told a story of how Jackie Kennedy, President John F. Kennedy's widow, visited her husband's grave at night.
     "Poetry stems from deep grief," Musgrave said many years later. "Or from falling in love. They're two sides of the same coin."
     A writer's work, Mugrave added, "has very little to do with her or him." Mugrave's poetry often has a sad confessional side to it. At the age of 14, not long after she won her first prize, Musgrave spent time in a mental institution. There she was visited by the poet Robin Skelton. "You're not mad," Skelton told her. "You're a poet."
     Musgrave has written many books of poetry, as well as non-fiction, children's literature and a cook book.
    Her marriages have put her in the public eye. She first married a lawyer who was defending in court, an accused drug smuggler, Paul Oscar Nelson. He was acquitted and Musgrave then married Nelson. Later she fell in love with Stephen Reid, a bank robber. Reid belonged to the infamous criminal 'Stopwatch' gang. After marrying Musgrave, Reid went back to robbing banks. His and Musgrave's life together was chronicled in the CBC series 'Life and Times'.
      "What is the robbing of banks compared to the founding of a bank?" one leftist asked. Society doesn't see things this way. Reid was caught and went back to prison. He was paroled in 20008. Mugrave now spends her time in Haida Gwai and Sidney on Vancouver Island. She continues to write poetry and prose works.
      "The legless man in the motel room next to me," she wrote in 1997,
      "Listens to country and western music.
       all night an endless song about going down
       on his knees for some faithless woman's love.
       I turn in bed thinking of you the day
       We thought our daughter had gone missing."
     
       Musgrave's life and writing dispute the idea held by many that Canada is a boring place filled with boring people. Her life and times have been filled with excitement.

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health by Dave Jaffe. Chapter 24, Section Two. The Poet as Poor Person

  The Poet as Poor Person; Section Two. The Life of Gwendolyn McEwen.


    "A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence," wrote the 19th century poet and prodigy John Keats. "He has no identity, he is continually informing and filling some other body." This was Gwendolyn McEwen's  life up to her closing days. She rarely had money, lived in small or tiny apartments, took money from her friends and kept on drinking. Yet she also wrote some fine poetry.
     "It is not lost," wrote McEwen about a higher power in her poem 'The Shadow Maker' . "It is moving forward always shrewd and huge as thunder, equally dark.
      "It loves you when you are most alone."
      Despite the many prizes that poets now receive, the vast majority of Canadian writers and many other artists, rarely make much money from their work. "I have a full-time job," a jazz singer told me. "It pays my bills. My singing gigs don't." McEwen lived by her writing, Yet poetry couldn't sustain her money-wise or wipe out her terrible memories of her childhood.
     She remains a great Canadian poet who lived her whole life on very little money. Her life in some ways mirrored the lack of cash that many Canadian creative artists endure who depend on their talent to survive. Yet luckily most of them didn't go through the traumas that McEwen did as a child and as an adolescent.
    Money problems and a traumatic childhood speeded McEwen to a relatively early grave. Her life was i a Canadian tragedy.

    

Writing Poetry Can Endanger Your Health - Chapter 24, Section One: The Poet as Poor Woman by Dave Jaffe

     The Poet as Poor Woman: The Life of Gwendolyn McEwen by Dave Jaffe: Section One


    On the Sunday night, November 29th, 1987, Gwendolyn McEwen went to bed in her small Toronto apartment. She never got up again. By the next morning she was dead. It was the last chapter in this 46 year-old poet's life. McEwen had been a poor person nearly all of her time on earth. Her death in her small apartment merely confirmed it.
   "Poetry addresses the heart, the wound, the dead," writes John Berger. "Everything which has its being within the realm of our intersubjectivities." Gwendolyn McEwen often wrote about the heart
and its wounds. McEwen was born in Canada to a couple from Great Britain. Yet she never really felt at home in Canada.
    Her parents were part of the problem. Her mother, Elsie Mitchell was one of nine children born into a poor family in London. She had many nervous breakdowns and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals in the Toronto area. McEwen's father, Alick McEwen, came from Scotland. He had a strong artistic side and worked at jobs in Canada that sometimes needed scientific knowledge. Yet in his later life, he started drinking, and soon became a full-scale alcoholic.
     McEwen's early life was a nightmare as was that of her elder sister's Carol. Yet she did escape into fantasy and other forms of release from the world. She was only 18 in 1960 when she wrote her first novel called 'Julian the Magician'. Already in 1958 she  had her first poem published in the intellectual monthly 'The Canadian Forum'.
     To write 'Julian', McEwen studied Hebrew, ancient Biblical texts and books on magic. She went to Israel where she found a divided land. Yet she visited there many places that had been part of ancient history. A few years later, she went to Egypt. Yet her days there convinced her to come home quickly. Egypt was too threatening for this small woman.
    McEwen dropped out of high school just before she was on the point of graduating. She never went to university either. Though at one time she enrolled in a university but never took any courses there. While her friend and fellow poet Margaret Atwood passed exams, got university degrees and wrote many famous and best selling novels, McEwen in the 1970's started to descend into alcoholism. Here she was following a path her father had trod.
     She had many lovers and married twice. Some of her men came from southern Europe or the Middle East. She became obsessed with the figure of T.E. Lawrence, the famous 'Lawrence of Arabia' and wrote poems about him. Lawrence too had sometimes led a life of fantasy and had never felt at home in England. He too died young. And one of McEwen's later lovers, Antony even looked like Lawrence.   (To Be Continued).