Pierre Falardeau's coffin is taken from church after his public funeral.
Photograph by: MARIE-FRANCE COALLIER THE GAZETTE, Freelance
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Pierre Falardeau, the Quebec film-maker who died of lung cancer on Sept. 25, was first and foremost a separatist firebrand. His funeral Saturday in Montreal was attended by former Parti Québécois premiers Jacques Parizeau and Bernard Landry, by Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe and PQ leader Pauline Marois, as well as by Pierre Karl Péladeau, head of the Quebecor empire.
During his life, none of these would have let themselves be photographed with Falardeau at a political meeting. He was too extreme, too unkempt, too crude in his language, too politically incorrect as he poured out his contempt for anyone who did not share his black-and-white commitment to secession at any cost.
His vision was hardly original. It was borrowed from the theoreticians of North African decolonization such as Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi and Jean-Paul Sartre. For them, all that was wrong with the colonized societies was due to their being colonized. This doctrine was applied to Quebec in the 1960s many, notably by poet Gaston Miron who was given a state funeral on his death in 1996.
Miron, whom Falardeau greatly admired and often quoted, expressed the Québécois's colonial alienation as follows:
"For a long time, I did not know my name and who I was, but from others. My name is 'Pea Soup!' My name is 'Pepsi!' My name is 'Marmelade!' "My name is 'Frog.' My name is 'dam Canuck.' My name is 'speak white.' My name is 'dish-washer.' My name is 'cheap.' My name is 'sheep.' "
Falardeau projected this vision in his many films. The first film he worked on in the 1970s was titled Pea Soup. In it, he contrasted the heartless English-speaking capitalist colonizers with the down-trodden French-speaking workers who sometimes sought solace by getting drunk in taverns where they expressed their rage.
Falardeau explained: "For me, Molson is like the English colonizers who pushed opium in China. I hate him, Molson, because he turned generations of Québécois into drunks. We would drown our wretchedness in suds. Despite it all, I was surprised that the guys (the drunks in the taverns) would express their hatred anyway, in spite of their powerlessness. Deep down, perhaps they had to get drunk to dare to let it out."
Hatred of the colonizers was his constant obsession: "Our country was conquered by force and annexed by force. And this ferocious system of colonial and then neo-colonial exploitation endures still. It has endured for 238 years."
Endemic was his view that English-speaking Quebecers were the colonizers, hence the enemy. He produced a film, titled Speak White, based on the poem by that title of philosopher Michelle Lalonde. It presents English speakers all over the world - including in Quebec - as exploiting the people and expressing their contempt by spitting out repeatedly: "Speak white."
In fact, the poem is entirely a fabrication. I never heard an English-speaker say "speak white," though it's commonly evoked by French-speaking authors and journalists. But Falardeau gave the libel greater circulation by turning the poem into a film.
Anger and hate seemed to drive him. The failed 1980 referendum on secession that drove him to make his most popular film, Elvis Gratton, which satirizes a French Canadian federalist who fancies himself as the "King of Kings" and exhibits gross vulgarity and servility. "After the referendum of 1980, this was our answer to those who had refused the liberation of their country. It was a film in the form of spit, of nausea and throwing up. How could one react otherwise to those self-satisfied slaves who speak out against liberty?"
Falardeau's vision was not original. But he stood out by the virulence of his hatred for those he called "the negro kings with white skin who speak bilingual," that is the French-speaking bourgeoisie that collaborated with the anglo colonizers. When Claude Ryan died in 2006, he satirized him in a blog that claimed he had been dead for 40 years. The last words: "Salut, pourriture."
But Falardeau struck a chord that rings deep in the Québécois establishment: The anglophobia that underlies separatism and is expressed in the poem (and film) "Speak White," probably the most recited and anthologized in the entire Quebec corpus, constantly evoked, and never denounced for the racist forgery that it is.
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William Johnson is a Quebec journalist and former president of Alliance Quebec.