The Quebec writer has maintained a fusional relationship to the forest since childhood, which she defends through literature. This is evidenced by “bivouac”, third part of a trilogy started in 2021 with “Bozibanée”.
by Gladys Marivat (collaborator of the “world of books”)
With Bivouac, Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba completes a trilogy devoted to the call of nature and the urgency of defending it. She lives this fight intensely, to the point of having bought a forest. What do we do in Paris when we lived eight years in a Quebec forest, including three in a hut, without electricity or telephone? We go out in the street to kiss a tree. The one to whom the Quebec writer made “a big hug” near Montparnasse, shortly before our meeting, was majestic, but not as much as “big pine”.
The four -time centenary tree of the Kamouraska region is the symbol figure of bivouac, the last part of a romantic trilogy started with Boubanée (the word and the rest, 2021) and wild (Stock, 2022). A specimen so beautiful that “it cannot be cut, it would be criminal,” said the author, born in Montreal in 1987. In fiction, the tree is threatened by the petroleum industry; In reality, the pipeline’s work does not exist, but big pine, yes. Since the publication of the novel, many readers write to him to find out where he is.
white cuts
Never, when she left the frenzy of Montreal and her work as a translator, at 26, to go and live as a hermit in the forest, she would not have imagined that this primary impulse would end up nourishing a work in which intertwining literature and political commitment. Like her heroine, Anouk, which we meet from the first volume of the trilogy, the novelist ended up getting out of her cabin to meet a group of environmentalists fighting against an oil pipeline project. “To withdraw from the world because it disturbs us is not effective, she notes. This can have a beneficial effect on yourself, but, if you want to change things, you need the strength of the number.”
At the time, the young woman writes and draws in her diary, while writing petitions for her militant friends. The latter blow her that, thanks to artistic creation, she could expand her audience. “They told me to put my passion for literature and drawing at the service of our cause,” said the author. Thus was born ealed. As for Bivouac, it is the consequence of the shortage of labor in the forestry sector in Kamouraska, on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence.
We lack arm to plant trees. Gabrielle Filteau-Chiba therefore hires, “a little in the idea of spying”, to check if we still practice white cuts in this forest where big pine rises. The whole of the whole of shaved forests blows him to write a novel dedicated to trees. “I had spoken of a life in voluntary simplicity with Anouk, then empathy for animal species with Raphaëlle, but I had not talked much about the plant, she explains, in reference to the Heroine of Estrobanée and that of Sauvagines, who works as a wildlife protection agent. You might think that I am still writing the same book, but I take different angles to talk about the living to protect. We can defend this cause by Other biases than violence: art, love, solidarity. “Especially when this sensitivity develops from childhood …
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