Sherry Simon on French-English divide of the 60s

By Barbara Black

Sherry Simon was a cultural scholar at Concordia for many years. Last weekend she came back from Toronto’s York University, where she is the Canada Research Chair in Translation and Cultural History, to give a penetrating analysis of Montreal’s French-English divide in the 1960s. Her talk showed by inference just how much has changed.

Simon was the keynote speaker at a three-day symposium held jointly by Concordia and the Canadian Centre for Architecture under the title Montreal at Street Level. It fits in with the CCA’s current show, The 60s: Montreal Thinks Big.

She focused on three writers, each of whom tried to bridge the two halves of Montreal, which were then rigidly divided by St. Lawrence Blvd. The city had been variously described as having “frontiers of distrust,” of being “conscious of its cleavages, and intent on sharpening them.”

Journalist Malcolm Reid explored the gritty east end of Montreal with delight, learning local joual and hanging out with young Quebec nationalists. His book, The Shouting Signpainters, showed English-speaking Canadians, even English-speaking Montrealers, a side of the city that was quite foreign to them.

Jean Forêt wrote Le mur de Berlin P.Q. as a tragic-comic complaint about how French and English seemed to be inextricably mixed. No matter where he turned, Quebec French was polluted by anglicisms.

F.R. Scott, the poet and constitutional lawyer, was ahead of his time as an English-speaking intellectual because he dared to invite French-speaking intellectuals to visit him in west-end Montreal. Moreover, Simon said, he translated Quebec poets in a highly literal way that was not appreciated at the time, but influenced the next generation of translators.

Some in Simon’s audience asked her where immigrants fitted into the English-French political divide. The answer, she said, was that they didn’t. They were considered by Quebec nationalists to be English, and were therefore invisible as a separate group.

Simon’s lecture started a three-day exploration of the “material, visual and spatial culture of the 1960s” in this city. Prominent in the discussion was Expo 67, the summer-long world’s fair, which had a profound effect on Montreal and the rest of Canada.

The colloquium was organized by Johanne Sloan (Art History) and Rhona Richman Kenneally (Design & Computation Art).