In the Library of a New Landscape
In the Library of a New Landscape
Deborah A.M. Phillips
It was in the year that I was transplanted from one Canadian coast to another—from Vancouver's evergreen west coast city where street vendors sold fresh cut flowers year-round, to the northern town of Jonquière Québec—when the deep connection between landscape and identity made an indelible impression on me.
“You’re moving, but why Québec?” our friends asked.
“A new adventure,” we responded.
We elevated the excitement of our invitation to pastor a church two hours north of Québec City, the same way a salesperson can sell you something you don't need just through sheer enthusiasm. French? My husband spoke the language, and I had some catching up to do. Winter? If only Adam Gopnik's book had come out earlier, or I read Poet Gilles Vigneault, "My country is not a country, it is winter," I might have been more convincing about the romance of white.
The Saguenay, also known as “the Kingdom”, is a land possessed of geographical distinctiveness and a history that has deepened its sense of cultural uniqueness. I'm captivated by the natural wonders in this wild and dramatic setting. Impressed as I was with the landscape, my first encounter with the region’s bitter cold brought me face to face with the realities of confinement and isolation. I never understood the hibernation phenomenon, especially how it could fool you into thinking it was permanent.
One howling afternoon, attempting to get my dog Abby to her favorite spot in the backyard, I sank into the deep snow up to my knees as if the frozen earth itself was trying to engulf me. In the chilling wind, surrounded by fields of white, c’était bien evident, a crocus would not spring up in February.
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Throughout my first winter, I took refuge in the library, “a passport to the universe”, as someone once said, located in the forgotten English side of town—Arvida. In the art of escape, I started with Maria Chapdelaine, a novel penned by Louis Hémon, a writer from elsewhere— Brittany, France. He spent several months in a village called Péribonka, the setting for his story, which happened to be a mere 60-minute drive from where I lived.
Some find in the stories of Maria Chapdelaine a broad portrait of a peasant class dominated by the clergy, trying to protect their flocks from the perversion of Anglo-protestant industrialization at the turn of the century. Maybe it was my own state of isolation at the time, but I was more focused on the macro-lens of one woman's life. Maria, the daughter, struggles to abandon the solitude of the barren north for the bright lights of an American city. While I had left the kinder climate of Vancouver, along with its city lights, life on the West coast seemed to skip through the stages of time; I was realizing that things need specific times and seasons to grow and take root. Maria's life flowed with these seasons. She knew the hidden secrets of the soil. Her family owned their land; they cultivated it and lived from the produce. Maria was planted, and I was jealous.
As I acquainted myself with the new lands, I discovered that traceable ancestries exist everywhere in Québec. One year, while picking apples on Ile d’Orléans, a few island dwellers shared stories about tracing their histories on the island back ten generations.
Maria cannot imagine life without the sounds of the French language or the land she has cared for, so she walks away from a marriage proposal. What her narrative gave me during my time in Jonquière was a way to look at my own life as I worked through the same issues: identity, language, landscape, and how faith in the process leads to joy in the unexpected.
I began to write in the library in Arvida, signing up for one of those correspondence writing courses. My first mentor wrote, “you'll take to poetry like a duck to water.” I wasn't writing poetry yet. I wish I could remember her name. She wrote for Agriculture Magazines and lived in Saskatchewan, I think. It didn't matter; she read my work, correcting all my illusions about things I thought were interesting. Eventually, I was published.
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One bleak winter afternoon, Homemaker’s, a “subversive little digest-size magazine” as journalist Sally Armstrong describes it, arrived in the mailbox. It was a gift served up with scrumptious recipes on one page and a blueprint to alter the status quo on the next. This was my first introduction to the life of Armstrong, the journalist. I read her story about the Balkan War, focusing on Sarajevo and the gang-raping of the wives, sisters, daughters, and mothers of Bosnians and Croats. The details of the horrific act were more than any woman could endure and live to talk about. An estimated twenty thousand to forty thousand women shared the same fate. I wanted to write to Sally Armstrong and ask her if I could tag along the next time she traveled anywhere. I never wrote the letter, but I knew I would work towards establishing groups where I could provide a venue for discussion, conferences, and support educational opportunities for women. I didn't realize it at the time, but Sally made a similar decision after the trip to Sarajevo, going on to describe the path in her latest book Power Shift:
"It was a journalism assignment that made me decide to devote the rest of my career to the lives of women and girls, the obstacles they face, the sometimes horrifying consequences they suffer simply for being female, and the courageous steps they are taking to alter the status quo. It took a women's magazine featuring recipes, fashion, beauty, and décor to expose a war crime.”
After learning French proficiently, I was asked to take on the role of Director of Women's Ministries for my denomination. As I traveled the regions, speaking, teaching, and working with women from various backgrounds, writing for women's magazines, the contrast between inner-city life to rural Québec dissipated. One summer, after speaking at a conference attended by women from different paths—English, French, Indigenous, and American—I drove to a small church located on the south shore of Lac St. Jean. The minister initially from France did not believe a woman's place was meant for the pulpit. But this morning, he asked me to share a brief message before serving communion. After the service in a small bistro, we held a roundtable discussion on our differences. The pastor from France, the Indigenous youth worker, the Québeçoise congregation, and me, the English woman, sat together in this rarified atmosphere where joy and a glimpse of the divine broke into our conversation.
It was more than a glimpse of the presence of God, I realized driving along the serene countryside towards Québec City. Paying attention to the small scene around the table in the northern church was only one portrait of a series of multiple scenes where those defining moments of holy ground were uncovered. The small scenes across the province Québec were the feature on my gallery of terrains for now. I had not understood God’s role in the way a place, language and culture had reshaped the inner landscape of my life. Like oceanic and continental tectonic plates when they shift, merge, or diverge to bring forth new landforms. The movement between the places I have lived or visited if studied close enough reveal how the boundaries of my spiritual life have enlarged. The longing to be rooted in place has faded into the background. But the eternal search to discover new landscapes continues.
Ten years later, at an editorial meeting in Montreal for a new magazine, I was shocked by several comments around the table as I inquired about my writing.
“I need someone to translate one of my articles for the first issue,” I said.
“Why?” our senior editor wanted to know.
“My written French is not good enough. I’m from Vancouver, remember?”
“We thought you were from Montreal. You speak like a Montréalaise.”
I belong here, I told myself, driving home after the meeting. I love the language and the landscape. And then I remembered, at this stage of my life, I had moved 26 times.
Deborah A.M. Phillips
Writer & Author
Deborah has an M.F.A and is the author of Argonauta. She can be found at www.deborahamphillips.com
Photography by Fre Perez