“We had to find a language to name silence,” said author Arièle Butaux when receiving a literary prize. And it was while thinking about the evocative power held by people who devote themselves to writing that I remained motionless in my bed.
Between the walls of my room, a diagnosis hovers. He must go through all the protocol steps that precede the announcement of bad news. I don’t know yet if my life is doomed. Now, I know that my silence is not inevitable. I master languages capable of naming injustices.
I encountered silence when I arrived in Quebec a little over 20 years ago, while trying to come to terms, as best I could, with the height of my adolescence, the departure from my country of origin. , the distance from my extended family and the uncertainty of a life in which I would have to learn to shape my identity.
At 14, I didn’t yet know that I would become a writer. I hadn’t finished high school. My new life would take place in French. My mother tongue is Spanish. My father, employed in a company as a skilled worker, spoke neither English nor French. Neither did my mother and my sister. I was the eldest. I accompanied my parents to the official interviews which were to allow us to obtain legal status in Canada. We did not have access to interpreter services. It was at this time that I understood the complexity of silences.
Not all silences have the same consequences. Administrative silences can send us back to our countries. Complicit silences can perpetuate cycles of violence. And so on.
In 2011, I was hired as a Spanish-French interpreter at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. I was 23 years old. I did not receive training. For eight years, I interpreted, without having been able to read them beforehand, the most atrocious and disturbing stories that one could imagine.
Realizing the importance of words made me pursue university studies in literature. I did a master’s degree in creative writing and published my first book in 2018. My story Creatures of chance evokes a reality that we know little about in Quebec, that of single mothers living in a poor country in Latin America in the 90s while trying to survive in a post-dictatorial and patriarchal context. My book is about violence that is impossible to name. That’s why I wrote it in fragments. The empty spaces are filled with silences that few people are able to decipher. I have already been told that my formal choice was lazy. It was a Minister for the Status of Women who told me this during a meeting in a feminist bookstore.
Forced erasure
Before becoming chronically ill, I worked with people new to Quebec. I contributed to their learning of the French language. In their exhausted looks, I detected the self-effacement that was imposed on them. This pressure with which people who arrive in a new country and must quickly learn a new language in order to survive silences their own history.
This observation propelled me to give poetry writing workshops. I met groups of teenagers, some of whom had lived in Quebec for less than two weeks. And every human being I met wrote poems in my workshops. Even if French was for them a language filled with indecipherable echoes.
The reality we carry, the life we traced before we arrived here, is impossible to erase. And it is around these truths that we write.
Do not turn to us to blame the potential disappearance of your language. If we are here, it is because we have stories to share with you. And we translate our stories into all the languages we use. Hoping to one day be able to include them in the grand narrative of your history. History that I wish to consider one day as mine, ours. Since I chose to devote myself to an extremely precarious artistic profession. Or that of writing. In order to keep your language alive while maintaining a healthy distance from speeches that aim to distance us.
*I am not alone. I give poetry workshops to newly arrived people.
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reference: www.lapresse.ca