Friday November 22, 2024

11:00-12:15 am: Panel 4: A Poetics of the Mineral and the Vegetal

Sylvie Brodziak (Cergy Paris Université / UMR 9022-Héritages): "René Maran, Écrire la brousse : 'Cela n'est point littérature' ou une écopoétique de la brousse"

In a letter to one of his favorite correspondents, the writer and translator Manoël Gahisto, René Maran, then colonial clerk in Oubangui-Chari, describes the bush with enthusiasm and affirms that literature can't tell of its beauty and majesty. However, nature and the bush are at the heart of his several writing novels. The analysis of the apparent contradiction will lead to define the singular ecopoetics of Batouala's author.

Damien Mougeot (Cergy Paris Université / UMR 9022-Héritages): "De la conciliation à la réconciliation: (Ré)écrire l’histoire et la vérité des pensionnats dans un devenir de l’Histoire"

Between 2008 and 2015, Canada and Quebec were in a perpetual state of remembrance: Prime Minister Stephen Harper's statement of apology on 11 June 2008 in Ontario and Canada's Truth and reconciliation Commission (2008-2015) brought to the forefront of public and media attention the ‘wound of colonization’ and, in particular, the legacy of residential schools for Indigenous peoples and the epistemic violence associated with them. In a context where the emergence of truth(s) and practices of healing and (re)conciliation are at the heart of debates about the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous on Turtle Island, some of the novels written by Indigenous authors open a window on a series of issues. The resurgence and survival of Indigenous and Inuit communities after more than a century of residential school system requires not only political and militant action, but also the writing of a truth that draws on the potential of fictional narrative — a truth that also shakes the foundations of the colonial structures that produced the residential schools and that Canadian and Quebec society is struggling to shake off.

Based on an analysis of Michel Jean's fiction, and following the concept of a ‘grammar of stones’ derived from Kenneth White's poetic thought, the paper explores a number of avenues of study in the light of this theoretical approach : how does Michel Jean’s mineral aesthetic of (re)conciliation opens a space to rethink the language of decolonisation? How does the sensitive experience of territory reassert both erotic and temporal sovereignty? Why and how does the emotional upheaval of mineral and natural thought renew the very modalities of testimony and access to the truth(s) about residential schools for Indigenous peoples in Quebec?