Pop 89: A Hard Story is a Good Story
By Madonna Hamel
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
I am looking forward to driving to Eastend on the 23rd to read to you. I am sure many of you are like me in that there is nothing more comforting than getting together to tell and hear stories. Perhaps it’s true what the late essayist Joan Didion wrote: We tell ourselves stories to keep ourselves alive.
The stories we tell ourselves vary widely - and wildly - even among those who share the same moment and space. Lately, we’ve had plenty of evidence of that fact. We live in a culture of extreme polarization, which grows more extreme when fed by the toxic triplets of resentment, anger and fear. A very wise friend once defined the destructive threesome this way: Resentment, she said, is not having gotten my way yesterday. Anger is not getting my way now. And Fear is not getting my way tomorrow.
Perhaps the only place we can “get our way” without harming each other is by telling our own stories. No one can take our stories from us. Yes, you can say you may have been in the room with me. But you didn’t see it as I saw it, nor feel it as I felt it. Given our differences in size, shape, colour, height, abilities, ancestry, beliefs, income, profession, neighbourhood, geographical location, immune system, sleep patterns, hormones, etc, we do indeed inhabit different lives perceive differently.
On Wednesday, the 23rd, I’ll be reading from two books in progress. The first is The Hem of the World, based on Mother’s Apron, a play I wrote in 2018 and inspired by an apron collection. The novel is based on stories “provoked” by those aprons. The main character makes it her vocation to read to people.
The other book, Habits, Orders & Vows, is nonfiction, and I began working on it in the 1990s when I was living in Quebec City. It’s a book about the language we use to defend or avoid allegiances, values, disguises and promises. What are our habits? From whom do we take our orders? What vows do we make and break, honour and hold? The questions were provoked by the gift of a history book, handed to me one beautiful Spring day.
I’ll never forget the moment: I was writing in my journal on the couch when my beau returned home from his day at the market. With a baguette tucked under one arm, and a cigarette dangling from his lips, he fished a book out of a grocery bag.
“Voila,” he said, handing it to me. “Check page 42.”
The book was, is, The History of Women in Quebec. Page 42 contains a paragraph about my ancestor, Marie Morin. (My grandfather, Honore Morin, belongs to the same family tree.) Here’s my translation:
“Marie Morin was born in Quebec in 1649. At 13 years old, she decided to enter the Hospitaller Order of nursing nuns in Montreal. (Ville Marie, as it was known at the time). In 1697 she began to write the history of her community. A Simple and True History, the Annals of Hotel Dieu Hospital of Montreal. Her mother, Helen Desportes, was the first (European) child born in Quebec. Marie Morin was the first nun born in Canada. So, Marie Morin is the first writer and historian born in Canada. And so, Canada’s first writer is a woman.”
I went to the Laval university library to hunt down the book, then painstakingly slogged my way through the 17th century French. It wasn’t until 2010 that I got my hands on an English translation of the book, thanks to a nun scholar I later interviewed who dedicated years “struggling to get across the extent of the nursing nuns precarious, dangerous, and frustrating situation.”
Marie was first and foremost a storyteller. I got the sense she was never without a pen, although it would have been a quill, and she would have had to have made her own ink. She wrote glowing reports of her superiors; she also spied on them and reported on their extreme self-punishments. These were women born in the era of martyrs, when dying for your faith held as much force and emotion as a parent dying for a child.
But these were also nurses, who, except for Marie, were born in France and plopped down in Montreal, the most violent city in North America. They took in anyone who was sick or injured. And there were plenty of injuries when you consider the wars between indigenous tribes, between French and English, between tribes and Europeans, not to mention brawls among soldiers, sailors, traders, coureurs-de-bois and colonists, often dead drunk. The number one “ailment” of patients was “head injury.”
These women had little time evangelize. Instead they prayed unceasingly while feeding, bandaging and applying poultices. They even earned the trust of the Iroquois, who healed under their ministrations. They were first and foremost nurses, I tell myself, to lessen the repugnance (a word of their own) for the behaviours of missionaries bent on converting heathens.
When I moved to Val Marie in 2014, I decided to face my history for the very simple and true reason that it is my history. I can resent the past, but it is part of my heritage. And what better place to write about a bunch of nuns than in the Convent Inn, in the heart of Val Marie, on the edge of the Grasslands National Park.
I can’t tell you how many times I threw the Annals across the room and how many times I walked across the room to pick it up, wanting to both know and reckon with all the stories. My desire is to locate the courageous, the transcendent and the irrepressible spirit of my 17th C ancestors, to discover what made onlookers of the age call them “spiritual amazons.” By locating the goodness, I can witness the perverse and punitive and break with its ancient hold, once and for all.
Every good story is hard to tell because it is full of paradoxes. And like life, it must be a witness to extremes; it must hold steady in the midst of ambiguity and ambivalence. In stories, we find our common humanity; we find a way to tell the truth, plain and simple. And, naturally, full stories entertain and captivate, and anything less is mere marketing.