Jean Ovide Bourdeau

Quebec 5.0 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 life: 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.