Toula Drimonis: Gone too soon, Caroline Dawson leaves mark on Quebec

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“Mon intégration d’enfant immigrante a passé par la honte de ce que j’étais, le rejet de qui me constituait et une série de petites trahisons envers moi-même et mes parents.”

“My integration as an immigrant child passed through the shame of what I was, the rejection of who I was, and a series of small betrayals of myself and of my parents.”

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In simple, unadorned language, Quebec author Caroline Dawson explained how the process of immigration inevitably and unavoidably requires a betrayal, a transformation, take place. You become someone else, no matter how tightly you may cling to what you once were.

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I borrowed this quote from Dawson’s book, Là où je me terre (loosely translated as “Where I land” but available in English, As the Andes Disappeared) for my own book as an epigraph for a chapter on how immigrants shift loyalties. The sentence perfectly communicates the chasm that often exists between the first generation of immigrants (born elsewhere and emigrating) and the second generation born in a new country.

People who insist immigrants don’t integrate sufficiently or quickly enough fail to notice the transformation. It’s the ultimate and required betrayal to slowly abandon what you were essentially born into — a culture and a language — and make something foreign your new home.

Those following Dawson’s long battle with cancer knew she had entered palliative care a few months ago, but the news last Sunday that she had passed away hit me hard.

The timing was cruel. Breathing your last breath at age 44, on a sunny long weekend, just as another glorious Montreal summer is about to begin, is unfair. She deserved more time with her two young children.

I think what I loved most about Dawson’s writing was her ability to whisper uncomfortable truths about racism and xenophobia where some of us scream. Like many “third culture” kids, Dawson wrote about the difficulties and contradictions of immigration, of both the “the bitterness and gratitude” of being a refugee.

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Lauded by Quebec’s French-language literary scene, Dawson landed here at age seven as a Chilean refugee, escaping Pinochet’s dictatorship. She watched her educated parents work as office janitors while she attended welcome classes. She described how French became her “new home,” slowly replacing Spanish. She later taught sociology at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit and became a celebrated author, always soft-spoken and smiling in interviews. A literary prize has now been announced in her name to reward an immigrant author who, through their work, “contributes to broadening our horizons.”

Dawson’s trajectory was no different than that of so many immigrants and refugees who land here with nothing but hopes and dreams, and are often seen as problems or threats, only to become full-fledged Quebecers in their own way.

To those who insist on categorizing Quebecers by mother tongue, Dawson isn’t a francophone Quebecer. Yet the French language became her own, and she used it to describe what it’s like to be displaced — and then part of something. If not for Pinochet, if not for her parents’ decision to choose Montreal over Toronto, if not for her love of reading, the Dawson we knew would have never been.

Migration is nothing but a series of often-haphazard moves, choices made, the consequences of which we aren’t privy to until much later. An amalgamation of dreams and decisions that result in a life. Sometimes, sadly, a short one.

It pains me that, from what I could tell, no English-language news outlet spoke of the passing of such a luminary figure in Quebec’s literary scene. I read Dawson’s book in French — a language that was neither her mother tongue nor mine, but that connected us.

It’s my humble opinion that one can’t truly understand Quebec without speaking French. But I also believe one can’t truly understand today’s Quebec without reading immigrant authors like Dawson.

Toula Drimonis is a Montreal journalist and the author of We, the Others: Allophones, Immigrants, and Belonging in Canada. She can be reached on X @toulastake

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