Rafaële Germain has tackled the subject of memory for the third time in seven years with Fortresses and Other Refuges, a beautiful collection of three stories that focus on the mechanisms of memory.
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” Yes, I know. We have to stop, move on to another call, ”replies with a smile the one we knew as a columnist at La Presse and a successful author of chick-lit novels in the mid-2000s.
Today Rafaële Germain mainly works as a television editor. And sometimes she writes profound and delicate books about memory and memory, a subject that has long fascinated her but is now shaped by her personal experience.
An Infinite Gift, released in 2016, was already inspired by the illness of his father, journalist Georges-Hébert Germain, who died of brain cancer in 2015. And life’s odds wanted his mother, legendary culture spokeswoman Francine Chaloult, who died of Alzheimer’s disease in June 2022, to have had her first symptoms in the last year of her father’s life. It was therefore normal for all of this to “seep into” his mind.
Of course, if both parents died from diseases that affected memory, the relationship is not the same. It would have been strange to talk about the memory but pretend it didn’t exist.
Raffaele Germain
His mother was already severely affected by the disease when editor Danielle Laurin suggested Rafaële Germain attend III. Collection of Quebec America, which for the authors consists in narrating three memories. The author was even in the process of cleaning out the basement of his parents’ house, which was littered with writings, photos and objects that had accumulated over decades.
“My mother’s memory faded super fast during the pandemic. When his memories disappeared, I came out of the basement. It never ended, it was really excavation! There was already a kind of archiving of memories that took place even before the book came into my life. »
Dust off the memories
Her mother’s childhood, of which she has very accurate pictures that she is told so often, her own childhood, of which her memories are more fleeting, the last year of her mother’s life, “a storm-ravaged fortress,” she writes : From these very personal stories, Rafaële Germain tries to answer many questions that torment her. “But it had to be beyond my experience to be worth putting down on paper. »
Can we inherit the memories of others? Why does one memory imprint us and another not? Are memories just a fiction of reality? These are just a few of the themes that are implicitly treated in this book, very concentrated and sometimes moving, which she wanted to be honest and “feeling” above all – she reveals a lot, for a rare time. .
“I have a natural humility, but with this project I told myself I had to be completely nude at least once. Don’t jump there for half an hour! But go into the decoration. It was honest to go there. »
The past brings us back to the present and Rafaële Germain, who watched her parents gradually lose their memories, wondered who she wanted to take with her in the end. His answer: “Things that are there now. But can we “choose” the memories that are stored within us?
“We can choose to dust things off from time to time. I often get this image from museum curators. I do that sometimes, interior preservation. It is a personal archival work, but afterwards you will carry them, these memories, like this. »
Pay attention to the world
In Fortresses and Other Refuges, Rafaële Germain uses poetic and colorful text, clean and lively. “Ah, writing is such a joy. I would just do that! », says the one who sees herself less as a «creator» than as an observer. “A translator, shall we say. By applying this kind of attention to the world she began to develop in 2019 in For memory, which she co-wrote with Dominique Fortier.
This will sound cheesy, but there is poetry in everything, whether it’s a snowdrift or someone else’s thought. Transcribing a breath of wind, a bird’s flight or a memory is music, it’s a movement of colors.
Raffaele Germain
Incidentally, she believes, the more we “are” in their existence, the better we remember. “That’s what stays, that moment when I was there enough to have some kind of interior photo taken. »
Rafaële Germain hopes that her book “goes discreetly”, that it “floats back and forth”. Also from the band is a witty and endearing portrait of his mother, a larger-than-life character who savored every moment of his life. She, who didn’t particularly like introspection, what would she think?
“I think she would be a little upset. That she probably wouldn’t recognize herself. That she would get upset too, because it’s not smug. But she would also be happy if I wrote the book about my father, she once said: “But we’re not talking about me”! It wasn’t a career plan, I really didn’t want to be the girl who writes books about her parents. But we have arrived. »
Fortresses and other places of refuge
Raffaele Germain
Quebec America
126 pages