Quebec 5.0

by Jean Ovide Bourdeau

This a double exercise.The first is one of tough love addressed to my very own people, French-speaking French-Canadians from the province of Québec in Canada—a community that did not take care of nor provided for me and those like me at that most vulnerable time of the poor people of southwest Montréal. The second satisfies in great part many of the frustrations I experienced from time to time about my people during my lifetime. My way to vent once and for all what I consider still as ethnically self-inflicted harm on the part of the ethnic group from which I emerged. Tough indeed it is, I admit, but a love of my people nonetheless, sadly expressed in English, since my community of the Forties and Fifties did not see to it that I receive a proper French education – except for a very limited one in primary school. I was after all too poor and not Roman Catholic enough (if I ever considered myself religious at all) in that small world of Ste-Cunégonde within the broad St. Henri area of my origin, so well described by Gabrielle Roy.It is also and further an expression of hope for the future, as I peer into what I believe, we, as a community, can contribute to the generations following us as well as for the rest of the world.

437 pages, Paperback

Published October 23, 2018