PIERRE NEPVEU

Literature professor, poet, novelist and essayist, Pierre Nepveu received us in the backyard of his house in Saint-Basile le Grand, in southwestern Quebec. As a kid, he grew up in the Mile-end neighbourhood in Montreal, but would spend his vacations at a farm his family owned in Sainte-Scholastique, a village located in what we know today as Mirabel QC. He witnessed the process of expropriation of land farms, as part of the development of the Mirabel airport by the Trudeau administration in the 1960’s. When speaking about emptiness, silence is for him, an inseparable feature which makes part of his own creative process; it represents a “positive vision,” in the sense that “there is no creativity without emptiness, absence and silence.” As part of his experience with Mirabel, he wrote in 2002 Lignes aériennes, a book of poems that deals with the feelings and emotions people expropriated have towards the erasure of their villages. Furthermore, this book is a reflection of the consequences of a progress which, in his own words, “did not take into account ordinary people.” His reflections about emptiness surrounding urban environments have led him to work around the idea of espace tragique, (tragic space) where modernity has dehumanized space, turning it into a place where deep connections with the land, and a sense of belonging and ownership to it, are no longer possible. His artistic work is a strong political critique of the effects of progress, questioning the processes through which we invent the places we inhabit and the importance of memory when thinking about the future.

Maintenant j’avance sur un terrain miné,

l’espace m’a tout enlevé et je reprends

là où chaque pierre pourrait exploser

sous ma semelle et les fleurs s’embraser

derrière mon corps au souffle court,

je n’ai pourtant connu en ce monde

ni flammes de dragons ni fureur de guerre,

le ciel fut toujours calme en ces contrées

sur les fermes et les vieilles écoles,

et l’institutrice de la côte des anges

a depuis longtemps fait ses valises

où sous les jupons froissés et les blouses

dormaient quelques cahiers remplis d’étoiles,

pourquoi donc y a-t-il tout à coup

cette violence dans les feuillages,

cet air d’incendie le long du bois

en face duquel une clôture électrifiée

trace la limite des terres arables

tandis que plus loin les outardes égarées

se posent en douceur sur la piste vide ?

« Dernière visite à Mirabel », Lignes aériennes