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).