#Acadian novelist

[inc-immigrationnewscanada]

Farewell, Antonine Maillet: Inspiring Legacy Lights Up Canada in 2025

The literary world mourns the loss of one of Canada’s most cherished voices, Antonine Maillet, who passed away peacefully on Monday, February 17, 2025, at the age of 95. A celebrated Acadian novelist and playwright, Maillet’s death marks the end of an era for Canadian literature and the Francophone community. Her works, deeply rooted in the rich tapestry of Acadian culture, have not only…

[atlanticcanada]

Universite de Moncton to study call for new name shedding ties with British officer

Officials with the Universite de Moncton say they will study a request to change the school's name after a petition asked that it shed its connection with an 18th century British military officer involved in the imprisonment and deportation of Acadians.

The university president said in a statement released Friday that the school will examine the call for a name change during the next board of governors meeting in April.

Denis Prud'homme said the analysis of the request is a sign the university is responsive to its community and "committed to societal transformation."

The petition started last week has gathered more than 1,000 signatures, including such prominent Acadians as novelist Antonine Maillet, singer-songwriter Edith Butler, musician Zachary Richard and filmmaker Renee Blanchar.

Activist Jean-Marie Nadeau has said the Acadian community does not want the school to be associated with Robert Monckton, who played an active role in the deportation of Acadians from the Maritimes after Great Britain won the Seven Years' War.

The university draws its name from the city of Moncton, N.B. -- named after Monckton -- which has a large Acadian population.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 10, 2023.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship

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[atlanticcanada]

Movement rekindled to rename N.B. university connected to 'torturer' of Acadians

A movement has been rekindled in New Brunswick to shed a francophone university's connection to Robert Monckton, a British military figure who played an active role in the imprisonment and deportation of thousands of Acadians.

More than 1,000 people from Canada's Acadian community -- including dignitaries, academics and artists -- have signed a petition to rename Universite de Moncton, the country's largest French-language university outside Quebec.

"We have mobilized and are creating an irreversible movement," Acadian activist Jean-Marie Nadeau said in an interview Tuesday. "There has never been such a large and popular mobilization (on this issue) like the one we have."

The university was founded in 1966 and took the name of the City of Moncton, the location of one of its three campuses and the second-largest city in the province, after Saint John.

Moncton is also home to many of Canada's Acadians, whose ancestors were forcibly deported from the Maritimes after Great Britain won the Seven Years' War. Between 1755 and 1763 approximately 10,000 Acadians were expelled from their land by the British.

Nadeau said the debate to rename the university has resurfaced at least once a decade since the 1970s. The latest revival came after he wrote an essay on Feb. 7 in local newspaper Le Moniteur Acadien calling for the change. About one week ago, Nadeau and Jean-Bernard Robichaud -- rector of the university from 1990 to 2000 -- started a petition on social media to change the name of the school.

Acadian signatories include current and former politicians, chancellors, and lawyers, as well as novelist Antonine Maillet, singer-songwriter Edith Butler, musician Zachary Richard and filmmaker Renee Blanchar.

"We are doing this movement because we are tired of dragging the name of Monckton like a ball and chain attached to our university," Nadeau said. "Monckton was one of our main torturers and executioners-in-chief, responsible for the logistics of the deportation in 1755."

In the letter attached to the petition, Nadeau and Robichaud ask why the people in charge of the university continue to refuse to change the name.

"Is the name of our university consistent with its identity? For the signatories of this letter, the answer is an unequivocal no. You have the power to change this name to reflect the Acadian reality," the letter says.

Representatives for Universite de Moncton did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

The mayor of Caraquet, N.B., Bernard Theriault, also signed the petition. He said that as a French-speaking Acadian who graduated from Universite de Moncton, it's time for change.

"The Acadian community is strong enough today to take on this change," Theriault said, adding that the community had never clearly expressed its desire as strongly as it is doing now.

Nadeau said he was inspired by recent events across the country over the last few years, during which monuments to controversial historical figures were torn down and street names linked to them were changed.

He mentioned the Nova Scotia communities that removed from their property the name of former governor Edward Cornwallis, who issued a "scalping proclamation" in 1749 that offered a bounty to anyone who killed Mi'kmaq men, women or children.

Nadeau also cited the former Ryerson University -- now Toronto Metropolitan University -- which used to be named after Egerton Ryerson, who helped create the country's residential school system.

"So, we are also part of this new movement, and the time is right," Nadeau said. "The Acadian people stand tall and are proud, and by changing its name, l'Universite de Moncton will be one of the most beautiful symbols of this rediscovered pride and dignity."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 8, 2023.

This story was produced with the financial assistance of the Meta and Canadian Press News Fellowship.

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[atlanticcanada]

Women rewrite the East Coast gothic to evoke contemporary horrors

Growing up in Halifax, Amy Jones didn't recognize the pastoral paradise of "Anne of Green Gables," or the fiddles and folklore of Maritime historical fiction. But when she read Christy Ann Conlin's "Heave," Jones says it was the first time she saw the gothic beauty and brutality of the Nova Scotia she lived in represented on the page.

The novel opened Jones' eyes to the prospect that readers would be interested in her experience of the East Coast as a place steeped in history but striving to be part of the modern world; where fortunes shift with the violent tides and the fog is thick with sinister possibilities.

Moreover, she realized the region could be rendered in a book by a young Nova Scotian woman.

"A lot of those gothic tropes were originally conceived in the brains of men, so they're always being filtered through that gaze," said Jones, author of @"Every Little Piece of Me."

"It's really interesting to be able to flip those in some way."

In recent years, Atlantic literature has been dominated by a cohort of female writers who are challenging perceptions of the region and its traditional portrayals in @fiction, said Alexander MacLeod, an author and professor of English and Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.

"All those people grew up reading one version of their landscape narrated from one point of view, and then they were very determined and motivated to see it in a different way," said MacLeod, listing Ann-Marie MacDonald and Lisa Moore among the leaders of the literary movement.

"I think it gives them all kinds of territory to explore and remake that world."

While gothic literature may conjure images of medieval castles and supernatural intrusions, MacLeod said the tradition has deep roots in Atlantic Canada.

Writers like his late father Alistair MacLeod, Ernest Buckler and Alden Nowlan have drawn from gothic motifs to evoke the preternatural forces, both man-made and environmental, that belie the coastal quietude on Canada's eastern edge.

Cape Breton-bred novelist Lynn Coady, who won the Scotiabank Giller Prize for 2013's "Hellgoing," said she was raised on such lyrical tales that pit mostly male protagonists against an unforgiving climate, cyclical poverty and cultural stagnation.

"That working-class aspect excited people, because they were coming out of an era when you thought of writing as this elevated art form that only gentrified people were able to perform," said Coady.

"We're in a similar situation where now the women are allowed to tell their stories, and that feels really exciting."

Since her 2002 debut "Heave," Conlin has been considered a master of the modern North Atlantic gothic -- although "modern" seems to be a slippery notion within the genre.

"Change is really slow here, and so the modern world really butts up against a much older, more persistent world that's really captured by the geography and the landscape," said Conlin, who lives in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley.

In a sense, Atlantic Canada is haunted by the stories of its past that shape the present day.

There's the centuries-old Mi'kmaq tradition of storytelling, and settlers' accounts of colonial violence. There are the stories that were stowed away on ships by immigrants seeking a new life, and those carried off during the expulsion of the Acadians in the 18th century. There are stories of periodic disaster: the Halifax Explosion, the sinking of the Titanic and the crash of Swissair Flight 111.

Then there are the ongoing tragedies of economic and environmental ruin left in the wake of industrialization, the fables of lighthouses and lobster traps that are exported to tourists and the old-fashioned traditions that entrench a patriarchal power structure.

"There's this dark subculture and world of what it's like to try to live here and how often doors are closed, and how hard that life is," said Conlin, who grapples with these themes in her recent short-story collection "Watermark."

"I think women and anyone who is marginalized feel those especially.

"We're looking at how people overcome that ... And that's new. There's not a nobility in just suffering."

Newfoundland writer Megan Gail Coles makes this mission clear with a warning that prefaces "Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club."

"This might hurt a little," she writes. "Be brave."

Coles populates her Giller-nominated debut novel with characters possessed by "ghosts" of their past selves and their ancestors.

These spectres manifest in the forms of sexual, physical and psychological violence, substance abuse, intergenerational trauma and the social isolation of island life.

As a woman of a working-class, mixed background from the rural community of Savage Cove on Newfoundland's Great Northern Peninsula, Coles said many of these horrors hit close to home.

"Classicism has been ever-present in my life, and racism has been present in my life and misogyny has been present in my life. These are the things that have actually informed who I am as a person," she said.

"I think perhaps we are more intimate with the darker sides of our cultures, because the burden lays at our feet."

Coles said these struggles reach far beyond the shores of Newfoundland, resonating with readers who feel marginalized or displaced by modern society.

Still, Coles said she has to work hard to overcome the bucolic fantasies about the East Coast that have such purchase outside the region.

"This is not an art form intended to entertain," she said. "In fact, this is my form of resistance."

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 12, 2019.

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