Suzanne

"Yes, and she participates in the Black Panthers scene and recalls the the artistic community during the Harlem Renaissance in New York. To understand Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, you have to understand those two principles that Monique LaRue talks about in her essay: at one and the same time having an intense feeling of belonging to a certain place and a certain history, but also a feeling of ‘appartenance’, a sense of affinity with other places and other peoples, particularly other peoples in America who have felt oppressed. For many years, the population which at that time called itself ‘French Canadian’ felt like they were being dominated and oppressed by not only the English language-speaking majority in Canada, but also the overwhelming English language-speaking majority in North America. So much so that in the 1960s, during the Quiet Revolution, which saw so many social changes, some radical Quebec intellectuals thought that Quebecers were the “white n*****s of America.” That’s the title of Pierre Vallière’s famous manifesto, Nègres blancs d’Amérique . Now, obviously one can deconstruct that and contest it. But I think it’s that affinity with other oppressed peoples that means in many instances that there is an openness to the other which would otherwise be surprising. In the instance of Suzanne, we’re talking about a woman who participated in one of the most influential avant-gardes of the 20th century in Quebec: this is 1949, the period that is called the ‘La Grande Noirceur’ or ‘great darkness.’ It’s a period of very conservative politics and religious pervasiveness and Catholic teaching in Quebec society. And this group of artists decides that they want to free themselves from all of those constraints. They want spontaneity. They very much feel an affinity with the surrealists in France. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This is a semi-autobiographical novel about the grandmother of Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, who participated in this movement. In Suzanne’s search for freedom and the ideals that this group was all about, she abandons her children and goes elsewhere on various adventures over the course of her life and never reconnects with her family. ‘Suzanne’ is Suzanne Meloche and she’s the woman who flees, who runs away. The mother is, of course, damaged by this, and the granddaughter also inherits this ever-present feeling of absence of the grandmother figure. After Suzanne dies, the granddaughter Anaïs goes in search of who this woman was. It’s really fascinating that born out of this very autobiographical story of abandonment and the suffering that that caused and then the desire to reconnect with one’s roots, we have this exceptional novel that fills in the gaps of a story that can never be fully told or fully understood—and that really does encompass the history of Quebec, and its place in North America more broadly. The other thing I wanted to say about this novel is that it encapsulates the very obvious tendency in Quebec literature of the past few decades to play with the boundaries between autobiography and fiction. So much so that that a whole literary terminology has grown up around this hybrid genre called ‘ autofiction .’ Of these five, at least three of the novels deal with that fluid boundary between autobiography and fiction including Kim Thúy’s Mãn , where there are elements of her own story that inform the trajectory of her fictional protagonist, and also clearly in Suzanne . This is a novel grounded in a real family history. And also Dany Laferrière’s L’Énigme du retour ( The Enigma of the Return ), which is another really powerful boundary-crossing “novel.” It takes the novel form and transforms it into poetry and prose poetry."