The Enchanted Figtree

Translator’s Preface
“Migrant Writing” à la québécoise: Marco Micone’s The Enchanted Figtree in Retrospect¹

Marco Micone’s Le figuier enchanté [The Enchanted Figtree] (1992) was published three years before the province of Québec mobilized a second referendum after the first failed attempt in 1980 to redefine the province’s relation to the rest of Canada both as “sovereign” as well as “associated.” The anxiety in 1995 over losing their Francophone linguistic and cultural identity within the Anglophone North American context led just under half of the population to select the option of political autonomy (souveraineté) along with economic affiliation (association) with Canada. As a result of the ~49.4/50.6% split vote, Québec did not change its political status.

Micone’s hybrid text, Le figuier enchanté, sheds light on the experiences of Italian immigrants from the 1950s through the changes of the Révolution Tranquille² up into the 1980s.³ His refusal to be forced to ←1 | 2→choose one of the binary options of belonging fully either to the immigrant community or to the Québecois nationalist bloc provides the readers nuanced insight into the complexity of immigration in Québec’s recent past.⁴ Micone’s narrative, which combines multiple genres, including some autobiographical “snapshots” and a short theatrical exchange, remains ←2 | 3→relevant for understanding how the debate about immigration is playing out in early twenty-first-century Québec. His most recent editorial in the Montréal-based Le Devoir draws attention, for instance, to the parallels experienced by Muslim Néo-Québécois today and the new Italian Quebecers of the mid-twentieth century. In his article, Micone reminds his readers that the linguistic psychodrama of the 1980s turned the electorate against a candidate (Giuseppe Sciortino) because of his Italian background despite his push for sovereignty for the province of Québec. Micone notes that the inability to move beyond binary thinking – where immigrants were perceived to be inexorably opposed as a block to Québec’s push for political and cultural autonomy – might in fact have lost the “sovereignty camp” the 45,000 votes that could have led to the province’s political independence in 1995. He draws the ironic conclusion: “Le nationalisme mesquin et revanchard est parfois suicidaire” [“Petty and vindictive nationalism is sometimes suicidal,” “Le Québec: hier les Italophones, aujourd’hui les musulmans” (2019), (my translation)].⁵

Micone continues to take on his role of cultural critic, as is evident in his most recent collection of essays, whose title is inspired by Simone de Beauvoir: On ne naît pas Québécois, on le devient [One is not born a Quebecer, one becomes one] (2021). In his essay bearing the same title, he challenges and demystifies the urban legends about the impossibility of integrating immigrants. He counters that myth by noting that there are two kinds of immigrants: integrated immigrants and those in the process of becoming integrated through their use of French as the official public language and their hard work (loc 528). Indeed, he remarks drily:

Une question, cependant, taraude ces nouveaux citoyens, qui voient autour d’eux une marée de chômeurs, d’assistés sociaux et de petits salariés francophones. Faut-il les considérer comme étant intégrés du seul fait qu’ils parlent français? Ne sont-ils pas des exclus? On ne naît donc pas Québécois, mais on peut naître exclu et donner parfois l’exclusion en héritage.

←3 | 4→[One question, however, does haunt these new citizens who see around them a groundswell of French-speaking, unemployed welfare recipients and lower-paid individuals. Is one to consider them integrated solely because they speak the French language? Are they not excluded? One may [in fact] not be born Québécois [to become one], but one can be born excluded and pass that [social] exclusion on as one’s legacy (loc 544).]