To Céline Dion
Dear Céline,
Since we met last year at La Citadelle in Quebec, one of the two official residences of the governor general, I’ve had something on my mind that I’d like to voice now. Let me put my thoughts in context by stating first that I am floored by what you have accomplished – for yourself, your family, your province, your country, your fellow performers and artists around the world, and your almost unfathomable number of loyal fans.
Your confidence in and devotion to your art from the day you were born was well founded in that your natural talent is almost extra-human. Your voice dances, stomps, drifts, drives, flits, and soars across five octaves, at once graceful and almost frighteningly powerful with the ability, as Chuck Taylor once put it, “to render emotion that shakes the soul.”
Your voice has left people speechless since your youngest days. (Some, I’ve heard, have even mortgaged their houses to hear more of it.) More than 200 million have bought your albums, and one can hardly imagine how many times those records and CDS have been loaned to others. Quite frankly, you are one of the best-known voices in musical history. It was no idle boast when your self-titled album declared on its cover, “Remember the name, because you’ll never forget the voice.” We haven’t.
You are an international phenomenon and an artist who has never forgotten her roots – back in Charlemagne and within the vibrant and proud French Canadian culture from which you spring. I recall your publicly refusing to accept a Félix award in 1991 as English Artist of the Year – reminding all of us that no matter which language you perform in, you will always be a French artist. That remarkable declaration has proved to be a simple fact, given your subsequent recording in what must be a dozen other languages – Latin, Mandarin, and Japanese among them.
Any doubts as to your identity were removed forever with D’Eux, an album known in the United States simply as “the French album.” The twentieth album of your career, it was already your seventeenth in French. So perfectly in tune with your culture as a Québécoise and francophone, it’s no wonder that D’Eux became the all-time best-selling album in France…ever.
Céline, your pride of heritage is part of the reason I’m writing. During the many happy years our family lived in Montreal, I saw that kind of pride alive and strong in every quarter of French Canadian culture. Nothing new of course. French culture in Canada has been vibrant since the first visits in the earliest days of contact with our Aboriginal hosts in this land. Mark Lescarbot was writing plays for performance here for audiences of both French and Mi’kmaq more than three hundred years before Michel Tremblay and Robert LePage (his worthy successors) were even born.
Playwrights, poets, and raconteurs have been spinning yarns in French Canada from the beginning. There are more folktales in French Canadian culture than in any other in the Americas (other than those of the Aboriginal peoples) combined, in part because the inventive artists of New France borrowed tales from French, English, Celtic, and native traditions and wove them into a distinct new canon – a sort of folkloric dubstep mix-tape with a habitant flair. And within everything, there was a twinkle of humour. When we were living in Quebec, Juste Pour Rire in Montreal and Grand Rire down in Quebec were becoming huge hits. This comedic tradition with its accent on gentle teasing is also rooted deeply in local culture. I know from my reading that as early as 1565, pranksters made fun of their friends by surreptitiously pinning fish on the backs of their unsuspecting friends’ jackets. And that’s just the first recorded instance; those guys were probably pinning seafood on each other on the way over from France. Ah, les poissons d’Avril.
Look at what’s happened to film in Quebec since the 1960s, when young creatives could sharpen their skills through ambitious National Film Board programs designed to promote regional filmmaking. Mon Oncle Antoine – now over forty years old – is still thought by many critics to be the best and most influential Canadian film ever to hit the screen. Of late, the incredible talents of the likes of Denis Villeneuve (Incendies), Philippe Falardeau (Monsieur Lazhar), and Kim Nguyen (War Witch) have earned Oscar nominations – just a few of the vast number of honours heaped on the products of French Canadian cinema.
As I have a deep fondness for literature (my grandchildren call me Grampa Book), I’ll end by declaring my bottomless enthusiasm for French Canadian literature. Not surprising to me, the first novel written in Quebec (Philippe Aubert de Gaspé’s Le chercheur de trésors) was commonly known as L’influence d’un livre. Since then, the influence of French Canadian books on Canadian art, theatre, cinema, music, politics, and culture in general has been immense. Names like Gabrielle Roy, Marie-Claire Blais, Anne Hébert, Roch Carrier, Mavis Gallant, Émile Nelligan – while just a tiny handful – stand with their Quebec colleagues as among the best writers the world has produced. Even in translation, their work has a power, depth, and reach that, like all great fiction, takes a bewitching hold on the reader. Let’s call it charm. (I can still see in my mind’s eye every house on Rue Deschambault.)
And so, Céline, as a charmer yourself, I know you will understand my conviction that French Canadian culture as expressed through its arts is one of the great features of Canadian intellectual, aesthetic, and social life. What a dull group we would be without it.
Thank you for having given your entire career to the noble purpose of sharing the culture that you so proudly affirmed back in 1991. No, you are not an English artist. You are a French artist. And without question, you are a great Canadian artist and an artist of the world. So too is your culture not English culture but French, and certainly Canadian, and clearly one of the great cultures of the world.
Thank you for helping me understand that, Céline.
David
Céline Dion is one of the most prolific and successful musical talents of her age and the female artist credited with more record sales and performance income than any of her peers. Mr. Johnston met Céline in 2014 in Quebec when she was honoured yet again with the Order of Canada, this time with elevation to the rank of companion for “a lifetime of outstanding achievement and merit of the highest degree, especially in service to Canada or to humanity at large.”