Testimonial of Marie-Hélène Massy Emond, Singer-Songwriter
Marie-Hélène Massy Emond is in a cycle of creation that revolves around the feminine in the resource region. She addresses the themes of mobility, the mourning of dispossession and is interested in them through song, sound recording and the performing arts. She wonders what it means to live in the region: what makes it beautiful, its harshness.
Transcription
That is what… What is nice about living in Abitibi, it is not the fact, not have access to… at the theatre I want to see, or the show I want to see on a Saturday night… What’s interesting about living here, it’s that you can imagine the possibilities… not just imagine, but apply a way of life with the boreal forest! There are so many resources… and when I say resources, I do not mean it in the ‘region resource’ kind of way, but there are so many things… It really is a pantry! And it is not just to go take something, then come back home with it, it is also… you know to gather and to go in the woods… aside blueberries and raspberries, that you get along the way… here you need to go on a good day, which means there are different types of weather… and so on. You need to be careful…. Mushrooms for example, that is something that I am just learning… I’m an enthusiast for this, but it is also really interesting: you can’t work on your garden whenever! It all comes back to timing and cycles. By cycles, we mean winter… Well, I need to be able to address how I live in the winter! And you know that is still one of my biggest challenges I have, living here… I am still not living winter as someone who lives for approximately 8 out of 12 months in the cold! And I think I’m not the only person in Abitibi to experience the winter not quite the right way, but for me, it is one of my biggest challenges, something that I work on every day, I worked on it before and I want to keep working on it, because it doesn’t make sense! One of my friends was telling me that we need on average 2 more hours a day to accomplish the same things here! It means, you get out of the house, you de-ice your car, you go on the road, you risk your life… you come back, you warm up the house… all of that, it makes for crazy lives… from here. But since they are the requirements, I think it is part of the roughness of our land… we have a hard time accepting we need to live winter differently.
You buy into what the industry is telling you, as long as you think it is not bad to live like people who live in the ‘south’ here… By doing that… All I am doing is, changing the narrative that says you have access to everything, you don’t have to worry about the fact that you live up north… Get a bigger car, get a bigger block heater, it’s going to be alright, your car has to be newer… All of it makes me sick, and also… the fun of living here, it comes from the outdoors, it comes from nature, from this environment! That is how I see it at the moment. It is also why… I get my energy from that, because I am not the only one who wants to take care of this place!