We cannot understand the history of Quebec without having read Georges Pisimopeo. What he tells is not found in history books, because he writes precisely the other side of the global and eventful story that we too narrowly call “history”: the fabric of sorrows, despair, of buried crimes and lingering pain.
Piisim Napeu is a series of fragments, scenes of absolute vivacity, visual, sensual, which Pisimopeo brings to light in a few words. The author has the courage of his sadness, and sometimes of his despair. It is in the name of suffering – and to do it justice – that he addresses us and brings back notes from this frontier where “life becomes murky. Without splinters. I don’t want anything anymore. I don’t feel anything. I am nothing. ” The words saved from his journey into the darkness, he gives them as an inheritance because he knows their double, immeasurable power of terror and healing: “I want to touch the facts where they are so that the wound fades away. »
I often thought, while reading Piisim Napeu, of Jean-Paul Daoust’s sentence: “I suffer, but it is all beauty.” With this text, we are in the tension between the horror of the facts recounted and the beauty of the manner. And what overwhelms me, in Georges Pisimopeo, is the power to say, to share, to capture (with a stroke of a yellow pencil) the inexpressible.
Pisimopeo, like the Wendat philosopher Georges E. Sioui, is one of those who write “as if we were looking for a remedy for the ills of this world” (Eatenonha. Autochthonous Roots of Modern Democracy). The author has this gift for stringing sentences together, his incredible poetic intuition is felt everywhere in the emotional unfolding of the paintings – rather sketches, similar to those of Virginia Pésémapéo Bordeleau, on the cover of the book. But something greater than the writing technique vibrates in this text. We then touch the ineffable, the rare and mystical power of literature, and we say to ourselves that “the sacred values which were transmitted to [it] by the Ancients” must have something to do with it. We have the impression of hearing their distant murmur between his sentences.
“The Elders told us: It will take seven generations to heal from our past traumas. I, Georges Pisimopeo, am in the fifth generation. » Piisim Napeu is a life flown over. The text brings back images of everyday life, of childhood on Eeyou Istchee – the Cree territory –, of the city and the racism experienced at the white school in Senneterre, of coming out of the closet after a first marriage , precious children and grandchildren, the transmission of knowledge, lost loved ones, for whom the author still dreams: “I wish that their souls fly over the stars and find happiness in the starry sky. »
The writing is carnal; the body is not just an idea, even if the narrator was forced to detach himself from it to no longer have pain. Here he regains this child’s body, this eternal body which connects him to his family, to the knowledge of the forest, to the animals and the stars which are so dear to him. Some fragments tell of a relationship with a furtive lover, from whom the narrator approaches and moves away in the same movement. In the childhood scenes, through the transmission with his mother Planshish, the trap on the territory, the communication with beings, we encounter the strange, so particular nostalgia of broken people. Piisim Napeu speaks of this paradoxical reality: wanting to relive everything that, in the most painful past, still ignored suffering. “Old memories make me smile, and these memories are what I have left, the most precious possession. »
Past traumas, those of racism, of residential schools, the memory of the survivors of this enterprise of dehumanization that was colonization, are the exact reverse of a triumphant national history poorly masking its enterprise of domination. Piisim Napeu is a text about colonialism, but which captures colonialism through its vivid emotions. Guilt, self-shame, rage, depression, love for the world and love of the world for oneself paint an interior portrait of the ravages of dispossession and occupation. The violence experienced by the narrator, by his loved ones, by his brothers and sisters, is named in a direct manner, neither discreet nor shattering; overwhelming in its accuracy, clarity and truth torn from the mist.
The text culminates in a healthy, invigorating anger, “a cry [addressed] to the conquerors of our American lands”: “Never forget that you live and tread on Indian land and never claim that this land belongs to you. It belongs to Chishemanitu for the good of all humanity. » The text then takes our breath away, and we rage with it. He takes his breath away again when he finds an unexpected space of compassion for the executioners, including his brother’s murderer. “I learned to maneuver with those who wished me harm. »
Piisim Napeu, a 115-page booklet, contains all this, and an infinity of wonderful things, condensed to form a rough diamond, a rare stone, an offering of gratitude towards the strength of the world, towards its guides, towards the constellations, the animals nourishers, the loved one and the knowledge of the ancestors. With him, “we laugh, we cry, we forgive and we say miikwehch to life.”
