We must always listen to Quebecers, especially when they talk about France. Certainly, Olivier Kemeid is atypical, as he impresses with his imposing historical culture of the Old Continent, heritage of his father, a Syrian-Lebanese Maronite who passed through Egypt and emigrated to Canada in 1952.
Co-general director and artistic director of the Théâtre de Quat’Sous de Montréal until 2023, Olivier Kemeid is renowned for his plays The Aeneid (2007), Me, in the red ruins of the century (2012), etc., and his novels (Tangvald2017), drawing bold parallels between past mythologies and contemporary ills, and digging into father-son relationships.
Rebelote today with a novel as spiritual as it is enriching, The Old World behind us (Arthaud). The frame ? One hundred postcards sent by his father, Gil, to his “blonde” Carole (a purebred Rochefort), met during the 1967 Montreal Expo. We are in 1968, the architecture student decided, at the age of 22, to travel to the Levant by scooter from France. It is this quest for identity, this astonishing journey, that we follow via Gil’s missives and the learned pen of his son.
From youth hostel to youth hostel
May 17, 1968, Gil Kemeid arrived in Dieppe, where nearly a thousand Canadians perished on August 19, 1942 (D-Day draft). “The French are among the stupidest people on Earth. Everything is blocked”, writes Gil, exasperated at not being able to continue his path but above all moved to see his hero, General de Gaulle, mocked, who, with his “Long live the Free Quebec”, propelled the Quebec independence movement onto the international scene. “Liberating France and Quebec twenty-four years apart is enough to make them a god in my father’s eyes,” notes Olivier.
A funny man, this father, a web of contradictions, perpetual nomad and benevolent anarchist attached to old buildings, to liberalism, to freedom and to immigration. Once he acquired his Vespa, in Marseille, and the revolt ran out of steam (brilliantly recounted here in the menu), the tanned Levantine can fly from youth hostel to youth hostel. Welcome to the dictatorships: Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary… it’s crazy how many authoritarian regimes Europe has, of which our erudite novelist outlines the broad outlines.
Gil’s odyssey ends in Türkiye, due to lack of a visa for Beirut. “That’s it, it’s there, it linked the capitals of the three empires, London, Paris, Istanbul, under the yokes of which all its homelands were enslaved, Egypt, Lebanon and Quebec,” underlines the author. And we applaud our writer from across the Atlantic, a worthy representative of this Francophonie that we celebrate on October 4 and 5 in Villers-Cotterêts during the 19th Francophonie Summit.
And which we also celebrate in Paris, as part of the Festival de la francophonie (from October 2 to 6) which is held at the Gaîté Lyrique (Paris 3). For “Remake the world”, title of the event, Marguerite Abouet (Ivory Coast), Djaïli Amadou Amal (Cameroon), Eric Chacour (Quebec), Kev Lambert (Canada), Barbara Cassin (France), Zineb Mekouar (France/Morocco), are notably invited. Marcelino Truong (France/Vietnam). While a large French-speaking ephemeral bookstore will be set up in the Gaîté Lyrique forum space with nearly 5,000 books.
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