Je Me Souviens

Nanette Morton teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

This one-woman play is a personal response to Jacques Parizeau’s
dismissal of the “ethnics”—the outsiders who do not belong in the
“pur laine” vision of a separate Quebec. Born in Montreal, Gale
comes of age in sovereignty’s heyday, in a home country that
consistently assigned her alien status. In the classroom, she is was
assailed by the stereotypes of “Bunga of the Jungle,” while in the
streets she is followed by chants of “niggerblack.” “It is the
English slur that is the slur of choice. Even with French kids, who find
that ‘negresse noire’ does not have the right rhythmic impact.” In
the French-language portions of her monologue, the folk song “Mon
pays” becomes transformed into a blinding field of whiteness.

While the young Lorena understands her sovereigntist lover’s
resistance to the language of the oppressor, she is eventually alienated
by his refusal to acknowledge her difference. “I don’t see no color.
Just Loren”, he says, to which she replies, “How can he love what he
can’t see? What he won’t see?” Gale loves Montreal, however, with
a defiant and complex love: in the snowfield she discovers herself, a
lone, black figure who stands proudly, with her chin uplifted. Gale
writes that, after performing Je me souviens for three years, she
realizes the play is about more than Parizeau and his ilk; it is also
“my crazy attempt to hold on to some of the people, places and things
that I love and have lost—my sense of home. It is my way of saying I
love you.”