What an idea to go and meet the poet, writer and professor of literature Pierre Nepveu, I who am not literary, and even less poet! Known for his remarkable biography of Gaston Miron (2011), Nepveu published an essay in 2022 with an intriguing title and completely unique content: Geographies of the nearby country, poet and citizen in a plural Quebec.
I wanted to discuss it with its author, more particularly his thoughts on identity and pluralism. This essay has been the subject of reviews and criticism, but less widely than I would have imagined.
Pierre Nepveu explains to me that it is mainly historians and sociologists who talk about nation, immigration and language, often opposing identity-based nationalism to multiculturalism.. “As for me, I am perhaps too literary and too nuanced in my reflections,” he explains to me. Additionally, the dimension of the poet and poetry in my book may have put people off. »
Indeed, at first glance, the role of poetry in a reflection on the question of identity and living together may seem confusing. The author explains: “The poetic attitude is attention to what is, simply, in front of me. » He adds that everyone gives a personal meaning to what they see and feel, and this applies to meeting the other, the unknown. We must agree to let ourselves be dispossessed and disorientated by encounters that take us out of our comfort zone.
By meeting the other, we become a bit of that other and this is what can make a society rich, according to Nepveu. The former psychology professor that I was would also say: the shock of the other is what constructs our identity, if indeed we allow ourselves to be affected by it.
This more literary recourse to describe a kind of plasticity necessary for our openness of mind, body and emotions quickly directs us towards the area of welcoming “others”, “non-us”. It is an effort that requires constant renewal, a creative destabilization to which the unknown constantly summons us.
Nepveu describes himself above all as a humanist-poet who wishes for a plural world far from the notion of multiculturalism, but just as much from what he describes as identity tension. He is concerned that any otherness appears to some as a threat, an unbearable provocation, or that an identity label is applied to it which only highlights a “difference”, without questioning its content. “I know exactly who I am and I know exactly who you are, that is the very opposite of a poetic vision of the world,” he writes in his essay.
It is not without danger to open oneself to otherness and the imbalance that this can cause. “What is foreign to my own condition and irreducible to my identity can always become close to me, on condition of inhabiting and disturbing my own intimacy, of awakening traces of my own life… and of delving into this interior difference in which I am always in exile from myself, in a lost country,” he writes.
From this perspective, pluralism as a democratic principle necessarily determines an intercultural vision of contemporary Quebec society, capable of both implementing common references and remaining open to diversity and novelty. But it is just as much about a relationship with the world, a way of feeling our collective reality in its abundance of sensitive experiences, places, words, where everyone weaves their destiny.
Pierre Nepveu is a proud citizen of what he calls his “near country”, this Quebec that he loves deeply, as much in its varied geography as in its past of struggles and often misery, but also in the present with different contours. and plural and in its still very uncertain future.
Belong to the territory
Nepveu insists on talking about territory. He reminds us that the territory does not belong to us. It’s quite the opposite: we are the ones who belong to him. And the territory can regain its rights at any time, as climate change has amply proven for several years.
Humans are passing through a territory that was there before them, and which will survive them. A territory cannot be defined solely by the segmentation of who lives there or has the right to live there, but rather by the notion that several humans tread a defined space which accommodates them and whose protection they must collectively ensure. This is what indigenous nations have understood for a long time, he adds.
In The duty, Gérard Bouchard wrote about this essay: “Pierre Nepveu is a remarkable conciliator, an “unknotter” of impasses. He doesn’t like convenient binaries, polarizing thoughts, hostile to nuance. We are in great need of intellectuals like this. »
It is a chance and a privilege to meet this “benevolent human”, this poet who dares to offer us his thoughts on a pluralist Quebec. A Quebec whose diversity is its wealth, like the biological diversity found in nature, he explains, referring to the work of Brother Marie-Victorin.
Pierre Nepveu often mentioned ecology during our meeting and in his reflections. No wonder he likes to describe himself as: “an environmentalist of reality”.
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reference: www.lapresse.ca