Oldal 178 [178]
OCR
DERVILA COOKE school experience." Part of his work is to encourage young people, including immigrants, to vote in Québécois elections. The fourth is Daniel RussoGarrido, a rapper with Latin American heritage. All speak perfect French in a Québécois accent and all have mixed with the majority population through politics, music or educational governance. The first three in particular seem very far from the attitude of the adolescent students in the film, many of whom do not empathize with accepted Québec concerns, whether about nationalism, male-female egalitarianism, or even participation in politics. Farouk feels solidarity with nationalist Québec and actually campaigns for the sovereignist Parti Québécois (PQ). Akos works for the French-language Montreal School board, and recalls his sadness at an incident when a group of Québécois folkdancers giving a display were booed in his multi-ethnic school, the Ecole Saint-Luc in the multicultural district of Notre-Dame-de-Graces. Ruba, who is culturally Palestinian but born in Lebanon, has overcome the gendered vulnerability of her Middle Eastern upbringing (mainly in the United Arab Emirates, it appears) and has embraced the freedom that is available to women in Québec, becoming a politician for the Québec solidaire party. The latter three figures are poster children for the néo-Québécois ideal: politically engaged in the province’s future, secular, French-speaking, and open to mixing with other ethnicities. The society they identify with is envisaged as a modern, secular state that is ethnically inclusive, egalitarian to males and females, and experienced mainly through French in the public domain. It is the legacy of 1960’s Québec’s “Révolution tranquille”, its Quiet Revolution which famously heralded the political and cultural blossoming of the majority Francophone group and helped to make Québec’s self-image more tolerant, equal, feminist and secular. Of the four, Daniel (the rapper who says he can sometimes pass for a relatively dark-skinned Québécois but at another point says he looks Latino) seems the most mobile in terms of identity. He is the least involved in the Québécois body politic of the four main figures. He also seems the least interested in safeguarding Francophone culture, as is evident in a newspaper article from the time of the film’s release.!? The images in his music videos root him strongly in a present Latin American culture, while his Spanishlanguage lyrics speak of how his ancestors travelled from city to city and country to country in search of work or a better life, and perhaps to escape persecution. What we hear of his songs and words encourages reflection on a sense of shared humanity, and on the vulnerabilities of uprooted individuals Akos Verboczy, Rhapsodie québécoise. Itinéraire d’un enfant de la loi 101, Montreal, Boréal, 2017. 12° Clairandreé Cauchy, La Loi 101 à l’heure des bilans, Le Devoir, 18 September 2008, https://www.ledevoir.com/non-classe/206194/la-loi-101-a-l-heure-des-bilans (accessed 15 December 2019). * 176°
