About the Author
Guy Rex Rodgers arrived in Quebec as a young adult to study at the National Theatre School, and was immediately enamoured with, and often baffled by, Quebec’s history, culture and politics. Rodgers has been a writer, translator, filmmaker and community activist: founder of the English Language Arts Network (ELAN), co-founder of the Quebec Writers’ Federation (QWF) and the Quebec Drama Federation (QDF). In 2015, he was appointed a companion in l’Ordre des arts et des lettres du Québec. In 2020, Rodgers began filming a documentary about waves of immigration, and how immigrants successfully adapted to Quebec since it adopted the first language laws half a century earlier. His three-year tour of Quebec, as the government imposed harsh new language laws, is the story of What We Choose To Forget.
What We Choose To Forget is available in print form. It can also be downloaded as a PDF that contains hundreds of media hyperlinks for additional information at www.whatwechoose.ca
A CONVERSATION WITH
GUY REX RODGERS
AUTHOR OF WHAT WE CHOOSE TO FORGET
A QUEBEC STORY OF UNSHARED MEMORIES
You are a writer, filmmaker and community activist. Do you ever feel those different activities are at odds with each other?
The factors that unite them are curiosity and necessity. I came to Montreal to study writing at the National Theatre School after living the first 12 years of my life in Vancouver and then 13 years in Australia, so I knew almost nothing about Quebec when I arrived. I immediately identified quite strongly with francophone culture, and people were friendly because I was a foreigner who wanted to learn French. At a personal level, I felt welcome in Quebec, but I soon learned that Quebec’s hereditary ‘enemies’ were English-speakers and my ancestors spoke English. I could see I was no going to be a full member of the francophone community but I was not part of the historic Anglo community. Like a lot of immigrants I asked myself, ‘Where do I fit in here?”
I graduated from the National Theatre School and that was my first community, so I became the founding executive director of the Quebec Drama Federation. Writer friends asked me to help create a community association for them and I became founding president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation. Both organizations promoted dialogue with francophone artists. I was the first Anglo elected to the board of le Conseil Québécois du Théâtre and I was also appointed to the founding board of le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
My wife is francophone. From the very beginning of my life in Quebec, I have spent part of my time among English speakers and part among francophones. I have been fascinated by how they interact – or not – and why. That is why I made films about waves of immigrants. Quebec politics are often maddeningly binary: are you anglophone or francophone, separatist or federalist? The reality of most people’s lives is much more complex and interesting. I have tried to portray that in the documentary films I have made.
How did being a filmmaker and a community activist lead to writing this book?
I was still executive director of ELAN (English Language Arts Network) when Le Secrétariat aux relations avec les Québécois d’expression anglaise funded a community project about identity and belonging among English speakers in Quebec. I created six short documentaries based on waves of immigration. Those short films resonated so strongly that MAtv provided funding to expand them into six half-hour episodes, which became the TV series Waves of Change. CBC asked me to make a one-hour special about Anglos and allophones in Quebec, and the National Film Board provided assistance to create a feature length documentary that became What We Choose To Remember.
We started the project on the 50th anniversary of the FLQ crisis and it looked back at half a century of dramatic change in Quebec. I wanted to celebrate the role that Anglos and allophones played in adapting to the spirit of Bill 101. In the 1960s, Quebec had a lot to be angry about. Fifty years later there was a lot to be proud of, and English speakers played a significant role in the transformation, although that is not always recognized or appreciated.
Then I was invited to show my film all around Quebec, and every screening was followed by a conversation with the audience. They wanted to talk about their local communities and how they had changed over the years, mostly for the better. They also wanted to talk about Bill 96, which felt like an attack without justification. Half-way through the tour I realized that ‘what these people are saying is really important.’ That led to the idea of writing a book about what I saw and heard during the tour.
Bill 96 is mentioned briefly at the end of your film, but it becomes a major character in the book.
Yes. When we filmed the interviews, Bill 96 was just a proposition. Nobody knew where it was going to go. My film premiered at the Hudson Film Festival in May 2022. Bill 96 was adopted in June and it was designed to implement additional measures in June 2023 and June 2024. During those three years, I toured my film to 55 communities around Quebec.
What We Choose to Remember celebrated half a century of progress. Bill 96 was designed to fix half a century of failure. According to the CAQ government, the French language was declining, at least for mother-tongue francophones, and François Legault compared Quebec to Louisiana as a French society on the verge of extinction. Suddenly there were too many Anglos in Quebec and too much English everywhere. People who came to the screenings were initially puzzled, then they felt targeted and angry.
What would you like readers to take away from this book?
Two things.
First, I had the privilege of being invited to communities with deep, fascinating histories. I’d visited some of them before, but as a tourist you barely see a trace of the Anglo presence. The people who came to my screenings shared their stories, which present a remarkably multi-dimensional portrait for any reader who wants to understand Quebec in all its myth-defying complexity.
Second, it was pure happenstance that I toured Quebec during the three years that Bill 96 was making Anglos and immigrants feel unwelcome in Quebec. And it was pure happenstance that my film celebrated the previous half-century of Bill 101 as a success story, while the CAQ government was portraying Bill 101 as a total failure. The book documents these conflicts from the personal perspectives of hundreds of Quebecers: anglophones, allophones and francophones.
Your film was titled What We Choose to Remember. The book is called What We Choose To Forget. What is the difference between choosing to remember and choosing to forget?
One definition of reality is to agree upon a shared experience. Remembering includes other people and their experiences. It is a collective process. Forgetting is about erasure and cancellation. It is unilateral and can be brutal when exercised as a form of ethnic nationalism.
