Madeleine Gagnon

One of Canada's greatest literary figures reflects on life at the centre of Quebec literary arts. Re-examining the influences of her early life in a large, rural Catholic family, Madeleine Gagnon not only explores her rejection of unexamined values as part of her intellectual development but also her refusal to be categorized by her gender. Karl Marx replaced Paul Claudel in Gagnon's intellectual pantheon. Psychoanalysis gave rise to the desire to write, and her first works poured out in a torrent. She describes the friendships that played such a large part in her life and the feminist battles of the time with all their hopes and disappointments. At the same time she casts a sharp eye on contemporary Quebec society, tracing the emergence of a distinct Canadian literature. This is an account of a life well lived, told with candour, wisdom, and an inextinguishable sense of wonder.

Is an artist born, or rather, created by experience? From the moment in childhood when he is forced to take drastic action to defend his adoptive mother from a violent assault -- the only maternal figure that he has ever known -- it is evident that the life of Joseph Sully-Jacques is to be no ordinary life, and one marked by sorrow and adversity. Unable to cope with or even recognize the residual effects of his trauma in adolescence, Joseph retreats into an increasingly abstract world, one in which he must confront what he calls his "visions." And when he hears of the death of his natural mother, this brings to the surface memories he had hoped were buried deep within him, and precipitates the form of various crises to come, particularly as he discovers and makes use of the artistic abilities revealed to his family during his psychiatric evaluation. After many more hardships, the young man does find meaning to the absurdities of life, ironically in the asylum, where he meets a virtuoso pianist whose condition prevents her from continuing to exercise her talents. They heal together through their mutual love, which will soon subsist upon nothing but memory and absence.During mournful years of raising his son alone, in his extensive adversaria, Joseph sets out to reconcile the contradictory themes in his life, including abandonment, madness, love, and death. In spare, lucid prose, and in a style reminiscent of Andre Gide, Madeleine Gagnon invites the reader to experience the creation and development of an artist "in his own words" -- Joseph's gelid journal entries that are to become emphatic poetic laments -- in a novel that chronicles the extreme destitution of Quebec in the years before World War Two and in abstract developing forms of artistic expression after years of uncertainty and loss.

Sabaheta is a literature student at the University of Sarajevo when war breaks out in Bosnia-Herzegovina. After her brother is taken from the family by armed thugs and her mother descends into madness, she goes into the forest with her father to join the guerrillas, where she dresses like a boy and fights side-by-side with the men. When her father is killed in combat, Sabaheta gives him a makeshift funeral and vows one day to leave her homeland and seek a country where she can pursue her studies and live in peace. Although she is not an observant Muslim, she decides once again to wear the traditional headscarf, and changes her name to Bosnia, making her way alone to Sarajevo to reunite with her friends. After many months, having burned every available piece of furniture to keep warm, they are forced to burn their books, their most precious possessions. Chapter by chapter, they consign each book to memory before setting it alight, and then recite it by heart in front of the fire. The war continues to take its deadly toll on those close to her, and Bosnia finally decides to leave her genocidal homeland. She makes a new life in Canada, where she finds a measure of happiness.My Name Is Bosnia is Madeleine Gagnon's celebration of the power of the imagination to heal and remake our lives.

In 1999, poet and novelist Madeleine Gagnon undertook to document the experience of women in the many war zones at the end of a "century of ashes" through their own eyes and in their own words. Her record of those encounters boldly confronts the harshest realities of and asks the most difficult questions about not only the horrors of war, but also the quest for justice, the experience of love and compassion, the inextinguishable hope for the future, and the will to live--the humanity that endures against all odds. Travelling to Macedonia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka, Gagnon talked with women of all ages and social classes: those who fought side-by-side with men in wars of independence; who suffered terrible abuse in war; who lost their men, their homes, their children, their entire families; women working to heal the survivors, and those involved in different peace movements. She explores why women themselves have not found a way to put an end to war, why they continue, from generation to generation, to raise sons who make war and oppress women, what stake women themselves might have in war.And she dares to look within herself for the answers to these questions and for the roots of all conflict, war, and destruction. Elle magazine of France described this book as "sublime ...a long, strange poem that recalls the work of such giants of literary journalism as V.S. Naipaul and Ryszard Kapuscinski."