#gaspe

Words made famous (or as famous as any Acadian words get) by interdisciplinary artist and former lieutenant governor of New Brunswick, Herménégilde Chiasson, as those opening Bleu from his seminal 1974 poetry collection Mourir à Scoudouc. In that year the young Chiasson was primarily a poet, and an emerging voice in a loose literary movement we now call the Second Acadian Renaissance: comprised mostly of poets and playwrights from the counties of Gloucester and Kent in New Brunswick who had been educated at the Université de Moncton that coalesced in the mid-1970s and lasted roughly through the mid-1980s.

When Chiasson set those words to page he was elegizing the Old Acadie of his youth that had been (and continues to be) eroded by Anglo-Canadian hegemony. Today those words find a new resonance. Last night, Antonine Maillet passed away in her sleep at the age of 95.

If ever there were a human embodiment of Acadie- of the defiant Acadian spirit- to match Beausoleil himself, it was Antonine Maillet.

Acadian consciousness and cultural identity following the deportations began to coalesce in the 1850s. A large part of this identity formed around an epic poem written by a man who was neither himself Acadian nor a man with any particular depth of knowledge on our history and culture. The poem, as we all know, was Longfellow's classic Evangeline: a Tale of Acadie, and its success in all European-settled corners of this continent had the knock-on effect of inspiring a wave of actual Acadian expression and economic growth that would become known as the First Acadian Renaissance, typified literarily by history and journalism of the Five Men of Letters.

The first renaissance was significant of course, but this significance was primarily limited to more practical concerns and those great works were of a mostly educational nature. Acadie remained silent, rumbling. Acadian poets like Ronald Després and Raymond Guy LeBlanc were published on occasion throughout the 1950s and 60s but Acadian literature was far from a going concern even among Acadians ourselves. Everything changed in 1971 with the publishing of La Sagouine.

Maillet's one-woman play singlehandedly created or codified almost every trope of Acadian literature going forward: the personification of Acadie, the focus on intimate familial stories and pastoral settings, the defiant use of dialect as opposed to "proper" French or English. The previous definitive Acadian work was a melodramatic epic spanning a continent and an ocean waxing of the great lost and regained connection of two young lovers written in English by a man who wasn't even one of us. La Sagouine is a series of intimate vignettes featuring only a single character rambling in Chiac about her mundane life as a cleaning lady. And it's fucking brilliant in its original Chiac or in the English translation by Wayne Grady.

Though Raymond Guy LeBlanc was certainly important to the beginning of the Acadian literary renaissance, Maillet was undoubtably the spark that lit the powder keg. Put simply: there is not only Acadian literature before and after, there is French North American literature before and after Antonine Maillet.

It's common for me to form deep emotional connections with art- music and books especially- but it's seldom that a work truly changes my life. That short list of life changing works includes Maillet's Pélagie-la-Charrette, which I first read in 2022. In many ways a response to Evangeline, Pélagie tells of the return to Old Acadie rather than departure. It juxtaposes the bloodlines commonly understood to define our ethnicity against a much tighter bond of misfits- a found family. The novel is about my family in a very literal way as it deals with New Brunswick Cormiers (Maillet herself was a distant cousin of mine, as is every Cormier on this continent if you go back far enough), but more importantly it resonates with my experience of family in that so-queer way. Maillet of course did not come out until 2022, but the themes in her stories speak for themselves.

Pélagie and the later Bouctouche writer, Gérald Leblanc's Moncton Mantra inspired a journey of ethnic pride and self-discovery informed by those bits of culture my family kept with us in our folk Catholicism and free from "Grandma was an Indian!" family myth. To me, being Acadian means relationality, resistance, solidarity with the oppressed, and the reclamation of our cultural heritage. Of course, as a diasporoid from Midcoast Maine it's only natural my vision would be so romantic; after all my own Cormier grandparents were deeply traumatized and by many accounts odious human beings. And yet I still wear the name that only literally means "one who lives among sorb trees" as a badge of honor. I am damn proud to be what I am: a queer Acadian writer. And I am damn thankful to stand on the shoulders of the giant Antonine Maillet was and will doubtlessly continue to be.

What a view!