Acadian poet Raymond Guy LeBlanc writes at St. Andrews by-the-Sea in this undated photo. Mr. LeBlanc died on Oct. 28 at the age of 76.Courtesy of the Family
Running into the Acadian poet Raymond Guy LeBlanc on streets of Moncton was like hearing an opera singer give an interview on the radio, the fellow poet Serge Patrice Thibodeau said. You couldn’t quite believe it was the same person, the same prima donna’s voice that had vibrated on stage.
In his daily life, Mr. LeBlanc “gave the impression of someone very fragile, very vulnerable.” In a world of bombastic, self-promoting writers, he was the opposite: gentle, quiet, self-effacing.
“But the second he got before a microphone,” Mr. Thibodeau said, “there was an electricity.” He trembled with emotion as he read bold nationalist poems, his breath as controlled as that of a jazz trumpeter. Sometimes he snapped along in rhythm, beatnik-style, or got the audience whooping like a honky-tonk performer. “I think after a reading he must have been exhausted.”
In this way, Mr. LeBlanc, who died on Oct. 28, aged 76, incarnated the remarkably successful Acadian struggle for recognition that he took part in over the course of a 50-year artistic career. By authoring the first collection of Acadian poetry published by an Acadian press, 1972′s Cri de terre, he helped give voice to a long-silent people and cement a cultural renaissance in the French-speaking Maritime community.
Acadians have a tendency to be soft-spoken and even timid, Mr. Thibodeau said, but, “When it comes time to speak, we speak loud. … Raymond Guy LeBlanc was the same way.”
Mr. LeBlanc sits alongside a sculpture of Northrop Frye in front of the Moncton Public Library in this undated photo.Courtesy of the Family
Mr. LeBlanc was born on Jan. 24, 1945, in the francophone community of Saint-Anselme in southeastern New Brunswick. When he was young, his parents moved the family to the nearby city of Moncton to be closer to schools and hospitals and open “the doors of the future” to his four children, Mr. LeBlanc later wrote in a poem.
Moncton – named after the British army officer who oversaw the Acadian deportation in the 1750s – was still governed by an anglophone elite often contemptuous of French. Before working as a nurse, Mr. LeBlanc’s father took a job at Eaton’s, where he was told he would be fired if he spoke his native language.
The family struggled financially, moving often and taking in boarders to keep the heat on, Mr. LeBlanc later recounted. If their means were modest, the home was still full of music and art. His father performed in an amateur theatre troupe and Raymond Guy played piano, drawing a keyboard on a piece of cardboard to practise between lessons.
In an era when French-language education in New Brunswick was still controlled by the Catholic Church, Mr. LeBlanc was educated at a series of schools with a “medieval” intellectual climate, he once complained. But if the clergy expected a “sheep”-like obedience from their flock, they also played an important role in preserving francophone culture. It was at the Collège l’Assomption, in Moncton, that he discovered serious poetry, he once said in an interview with the scholar and critic Robert Viau: first French Romantics such as Victor Hugo, then the pioneering Acadian writer Ronald Després.
At the time, authors such as Mr. Després often had to publish in Quebec or France; there were no major publishing houses in the region. The most prominent expression of local identity was arguably the 19th-century epic poem Evangeline, a fictional story about two lovers separated during the Deportation written by the New Englander Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had never set foot in Acadia.
In the 1950s, when illiteracy was common, the closest many Acadian adults would have come to literature was the New Testament or the phone book, Mr. Thibodeau said. A “politics of silence” reigned in his youth, Mr. LeBlanc once told an interviewer – “silence everywhere; an internal silence, too.”
It was into this world that a modern Acadian renaissance erupted in the 1960s. Oppressed peoples around the world were asserting themselves in anti-colonial struggles or the battle for civil rights; neighbouring Quebec’s Quiet Revolution was ending the hegemony of the anglophone business elite and the Catholic establishment.
Mr. LeBlanc, pictured in 2017, enjoyed attending poetry readings and hosting writing workshops.Courtesy of the Family
Against this backdrop, New Brunswick voters chose Louis Robichaud to be premier, the first Acadian elected to the position, and created the secular, francophone University of Moncton where a young Mr. LeBlanc studied philosophy. During the worldwide student unrest of 1968, undergraduates there protested against higher tuition and for better treatment by the local government. (A group of them famously left a pig’s head outside the house of mayor Leonard Jones.)
That year, Mr. LeBlanc was pursuing graduate studies in Aix-en-Provence on one of the first France-Acadie scholarships, created to encourage student exchanges between the francophone societies. Overseas, he was exposed to international social-justice movements and lapped them up. (“Tonight in Aix-en-Provence I order an espresso/ To monitor Latin America,” he wrote in a poem titled Awakening.)
Still in his early 20s, he began converting this stew of influences into poetry. He wrote love poems and nature poems but his overriding theme was the difficult necessity of Acadian self-expression, for a once-exiled people struggling to define themselves in a world dominated by the “cathedrals of fear” erected by their own leaders and the “luminous propaganda” of English-language popular culture. To the inhabitants of “my imagined country without borders,” with their “illusions” and “stifled dreams,” he insisted that “we did not want/ This disdainful silence.”
The first edition of Cri de terre, published by the newly created Éditions d’Acadie, sold an estimated 3,500 copies, a huge number for a work of Canadian poetry. The book acted as a “cri de coeur” for a people who had “remained in silence for so long,” said Rose Després, a poet and friend.
The 1970s produced a flowering of proudly modern and francophone Acadian poetry by a corps of artists such as Herménégilde Chiasson (who later became lieutenant-governor of New Brunswick) and Guy Arsenault.
Within that milieu, Mr. LeBlanc was a beloved and kindly presence. If other poets were gossiping, Ms. Després said, Mr. LeBlanc went to get a coffee. He saved his fire for the activist work that increasingly occupied him. He attended so many demonstrations, he told an interviewer – for the unemployed, for fishery workers, for students – that the RCMP once showed up at his door.
Marriage and fatherhood in middle-age, along with a shift in philosophical emphasis from Marx to Buddhism, had a mellowing effect. The two daily packs of Peter Jacksons that had stained his fingers went by the wayside. In later life, said his wife, Lise Robichaud, he became more interested in meditating on nature than on politics.
There were later collections of poetry – Chants d’amour et d’espoir (1988), Empreintes (2011), among others – and if none matched the power of Cri de terre, Mr. LeBlanc never stopped writing. He would no more leave the house without a notebook than without his shoes, Ms. Robichaud said.
Until the end, he enjoyed attending poetry readings and hosting writing workshops, watching a younger generation of Acadian writers take its place. They had all read Cri de terre, of course.
“He always had that little, twinkling smile,” Ms. Després said. “I think it was saying, ‘It wasn’t for nothing; we succeeded.’ ”
He leaves his wife, Ms. Robichaud; son, Olivier; brother, Yvon; sister, Simonne; and several nieces and nephews.
Eric Andrew-Gee