LES COPAINS DU SAMEDI AU CAFÉ CANADIEN-FRANÇAIS

 
Beau Dommage

We saw that, in the past in Québec, there was a tension between those speaking the rural dialect and those thinking that the right way to speak was to emulate the pronunciation of France's French.

During the “Ancien Régime” in France, the nobles and the peasant would pronounce certain words in different ways. For example, the king would say: “Le roué, c’est moué” (le roi, c’est moi = the king, it’s me), while peasants would say “moi et toi” (you and me). Think of it as "way" vs "wa". When French settlers came along the St-Lawrence River in the 17th and 18th century, they would adopt the “proper” pronunciation and start saying “moué et toué”. Later, in 1789, the French Revolution made life very dangerous for nobles and understandably even them would pronounce “moi et toi”, like the peasants. But across the Atlantic Ocean, isolated on their farms, barely aware of a distant “French Revolution”, people in what would later become Québec were still saying “moué et toué”.

In 1968, the play “Les Belles-Soeurs” by Michel Tremblay was presented to the public for the first time. It tells the story of a woman who, after winning one million gift stamps, invited her neighbors and family members (15 women, all from the working class) to glue these stamps in books so she can claim her prizes. The play was an instant scandal. Why? Was it because it incorporated devices from ancient Greek tragedies in a working class story? Was it because it was dealing openly with abortion and discrimination against women? None of the above. It was mainly because all the dialogs were written in joual. The French-Canadian elite were firmly opposed to having the dialect of the people used in the public space: “joual is like pooping, you only do it privately”.

Since its foundation in 1936, Radio-Canada always required from its radio and TV hosts to pronounce French like in France. It created a certain disconnection between the public and the broadcaster. But gradually, especially since “Les Belles-Soeurs”, Radio-Canada allowed their hosts to speak “naturally” and today the French-Canadian pronunciation is considered “normal”.

In 1974, a group of very talented musicians launched their first album titled “Beau Bommage”, which is also the name of the band, taken from an old French-Canadian expression meaning “certainly”. The song I want to introduce to you is called “La complainte du phoque en Alaska”. Here are the first few lines:

Cré-moué, cré-moué pas, quèque part en Alaska, Y’a un phoque qui s’ennuie en maudit... (joual)
Crois-moi, ne me crois pas, quelque part en Alaska, il y a un phoque qui s’ennuie en maudit... (français)
[Believe-me or not, somewhere in Alaska, there’s a seal who’s sad as can be... (English)

This is not the first time joual was used in French-Canadian songs, since La Bolduc was doing it in the thirties. Many traditional or funny songs would also use joual. But this time, joual was used as a perfectly normal language capable of expressing a whole range of subtle emotions and it could be as beautiful as any other language. The inferiority complex was healed, finally.

Next week: Céline Dion