Je Me Souviens (Maintenant): Altérité, Indianité et Mémoire Collective

Abstract

This article is about the will to remember as a political imperative in Quebec. Francis Leclerc’s Mémoires affectives (2004) explicitly anchors this will to remember in the multicultural and pluriethnic reality of modern Quebec. In the film, the quest for Self occurs principally through a dialogical relationship with “the Other,” the immigrant, who serves to participate in and reflect the stabilization of an identity and a memory from which he or she is nonetheless excluded, like an external witness. Beyond the immigrant, and more fundamentally, through the essentialist and archaistic posturing of the ahistorical, apolitical, and peripheral Indian body, the memory of the Self is woven, taking root in soil that is inhabited by and inhabits an identity of privilege. This critical analysis of the film serves to illustrate some of the discursive and representational strategies employed by recent Quebecois cinema in its attempt to respond to the increasingly complex and ambiguous colonial status of modern Quebec. It is also a response to the nation’s historical link to alterity — its own alterity and that of its “Others.”