Defiance in Their Eyes: True Stories from the Margins

Jill Didur teaches English at York University.

Tracking the motivation behind individual acts of violence is the
thematic link in Charney’s six biographical sketches. Unfortunately,
in her attempt to explore the logic behind these violent acts, Charney
alternates unproductively between the desire to help the reader
understand the experience of hegemony from a marginal perspective and
the need to justify the violence in the terms of the dominant
perspective.

For example, in “The Unbroken Revolutionary,” Charney’s account
of Paul Rose’s experience growing up in a working-class francophone
community provides a rich background for interpreting his decision in
the late 1960s to join the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ), and
his role in the kidnapping and murder of Pierre Laporte. However, she
portrays the FLQ members as slightly naive individuals caught up in the
revolutionary spirit of the times, and fails to problematize the issue
of “terrorism.” She provides only passing references to the
state-sanctioned use of violence against nonviolent protests (e.g., the
Canadian government’s questionable decision to invoke the War Measures
Act in October 1970) and avoids engaging with the long history of
hegemonic interests’ silencing of dissent in Quebec in general.

The collection includes portraits of two other FLQ members (Pierre
Valliиres and Jean Castonguay), a profile on the life of Montreal Mafia
king Paolo Violi, an account of filmmaker Claude Jutra’s struggle with
Alzheimer’s disease, and an overview of the ongoing conflict between
residents of the Kahnawake Reserve and the Quebec and federal
governments. Like the Rose story, each of these portraits offers a
unique and readable perspective on the experience of marginality in
Quebec society, but, disappointingly, all of them shy away from
interrogating the circumstances that contribute to the sense of
alienation that leads to the violence they chronicle.