Natasha Kanapé Fontaine

Deni Ellis Béchard

La rencontre littéraire et politique de la poète Innu Natasha Kanapé Fontaine et du romancier québéco-américain Deni Ellis Béchard, qui ont décidé d'entamer une conversation sans tabou sur le racisme entre Autochtones et Allochtones. Idle No More, Commission de vérité et réconciliation, enquête nationale sur les femmes autochtones disparues ou assassinées ... Comment cohabiter si notre histoire commune est empreinte de honte, de blessures et de colère? Comment contrer cette méconnaissance de l'autre qui aboutit au mépris? Comment faire réaliser aux Blancs le privilège invisible de la domination historique? Comment guérir les Autochtones des stigmates du génocide culturel? Dans cet échange épistolaire au souffle poétique, Natasha raconte sa découverte des pensionnats autochtones, son obsession pour la crise d'Oka, la vie sur la réserve de Pessamit ; Deni parle du racisme ordinaire de son père, de la ségrégation envers les Afro-Américains, de son identité de Québécois aux États-Unis. 2016.

conversation sur le racisme

Kuei, je te salue

Deni Yvan Bechard

Follows generations of a French-Canadian family cursed by an odd genetic condition brought on by hardship that causes them to be born either giants or runts.

A Novel

Vandal Love

La deuxième fois qu’Andrew voit Hugh, son demi-frère, c’est à l’enterrement de leur père. Si Andrew accorde peu d’intérêt à l’homme auprès duquel il a grandi, Hugh, lui, a développé une fascination pour cet être solitaire, qu’il a à peine connu. Quand il découvre dans le bureau de celui-ci le livre d’un certain Rafael Estrada, Hugh est convaincu qu’il détient la clé de son identité profonde. Avec toute la maestria qu’on lui connaît, Deni Ellis Béchard signe avec Une chanson venue de loin l’un de ses romans les plus poignants, une quête des origines qui mènera le lecteur de l’Île-du-PrinceÉdouard du 19e siècle à l’Irak troublé d’aujourd’hui, en passant par les champs de bataille de la Première Guerre mondiale. Une histoire que traverse le fil ténu d’une mélodie inoubliable, qui hante tous ceux qui l’ont entendue.

Une chanson venue de loin

The award-winning author blends fiction and memoir in this “captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical” novel of neocolonial corruption in the Congo (Foreword Reviews, starred review). Assigned to write an exposé on the elusive conservationist Richmond Hew, a journalist finds himself on a plane to the Congo, a country he thinks he understands. But then he meets Sola, a woman looking for a white orphan girl who believes herself possessed by a skin-stealing demon. And he begins to uncover a tapestry of corruption and racial tensions generations in the making. A harrowing search leads him into an underground network of sinners and saints—from an anthropologist who treats orphans like test subjects to a community of charismatic Congolese preachers and a revered conservationist who vanishes. Then there is the journalist himself, lost in his own misunderstanding of privilege and the myth of whiteness, and plagued by memories of his father. These disparate elements coalesce into a map of Richmond Hew’s enigmatic movements in Deni Ellis Bechard’s “self-aware, self-immolating interrogation of colonialism, whiteness, and fiction” with fascinating echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

White

With his first book, the Commonwealth Prize-winning Vandal Love, Deni Ellis Béchard “reinvented the generational novel with innovative brilliance” (Robert Olen Butler). In his second novel, Into the Sun, he offered “a ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping portrait of the expatriate community in Kabul” (Phil Klay). Most recently, Foreword Reviews described his third novel, White, as “captivating, careening, thrilling, and magical.” In this, his fourth work of fiction, Béchard takes readers from nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island to modern-day Iraq, tracing the story of a North American family that is at once singular and emblematic, and exploring the cultural repercussions of war and violence. Reinventing themselves in often unexpected ways, the characters in this tapestry defy simplification. A pair of half-brothers come together and drift apart, one passive and risk-averse, the other driven by a passionate desire to understand their reclusive father. A student of Mesopotamian archaeology encounters a young Iraqi man and soon finds himself in Kurdistan, researching stolen artifacts along with mysteries in his father’s past. An Irish-Acadian soldier carries his fiddle and folk song across the battlefields of the First World War. An orphan-turned-assassin pursues his target across the deserts of Mexico and Texas, using a novel as evidence for his location. Growing together and then apart, these and others chase their dreams and run from their nightmares, hungry for life and longing for purpose. Animated throughout by a striking beauty and ferocity, A Song from Faraway pieces together “stories we tell about ourselves,” illuminating the human condition and our times.

A Song from Faraway

A literary and political encounter between an Innu poet and Quebecois-American novelist who engage in a taboo-free conversation about racism.

Deni Ellis Béchard

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