A review of 'Red Squared Montreal' by Norman Nawrocki
Norman Nawrocki’s Red Squared Montreal, “a fictional chronicle” of the seven-month 2012 Quebec student strike, is a love letter to a particular political moment. The novel celebrates the energy of street protest above all, and in doing so occasionally nails the Printemps Érable’s charm. The descriptions of the joy among leaderless strangers marching together are worthy salutes to experiences few others have chronicled. Montreal has never seen anything quite like the 2012 student strike, and Nawrocki captures images of the months of protest that will bring back intense memories for those who participated. Unfortunately, the novel struggles to capture the strike’s civic and emotional complexity, offering instead hyperbole and bathos and little sense of what it genuinely accomplished.
Nawrocki – a Montreal anarchist-arts stalwart since the 1980s – makes the novel’s primary narrator, Huberto, a UQAM student. His artist-activist girlfriend Pascale, also a student, occasionally gets narrative space. A third sometimes-narrator, Jean, is homeless and drops his G’s to get this point across: “Yah, I started walkin’ with the students in some of the demos. I just wanted to support ’em, ya know.” Why a homeless person has such affection for a protest movement unrelated to poverty or housing is unclear. None of the characters are especially resonant: their personalities are understood through their association with the strike.
Unlike most students in 2012, Huberto and Pascale don’t own cell phones and don’t use or discuss social media (with which information about demonstrations was communicated on the fly). Like people of Nawrocki’s generation, they judge the merits of political actions based on how much coverage they receive in physical newspapers.
Huberto and Pascale believe the most hackneyed of protests (like drawing horns and moustaches on electoral posters) are revolutionary, and fondly chant shopworn slogans anarchists have shouted for decades. This lands awkwardly in a story set in 2012, neglecting the collection of hilarious chants improvised and taken up by students during the night marches. (For many, the sound of those protests was the sarcastic, dejected cheer, “Charest, woo-hoo.”) As such, the novel ignores one of the strike’s most engaging aspects, one that delighted participants and kept their morale up even as it communicated the collective humour of the movement.
The purity of the cause and the sense that this is a historic fight for good keeps Nawrocki’s characters going. They absurdly compare the tuition increase that strikers oppose to rape. Various international representatives are dropped into the text to affirm that SPVM crackdowns on students (which were vicious, but killed no one) are as bad as police in Guatemala, Peru, or Chile under Pinochet. A “Cossack” exclaims, “It’s even worse than in Russia!” Nobody suggests these comparisons are self-servingly false.
Bafflingly, Nawrocki presents incorrect facts. The novel identifies the first day of anti-protest Law 78 as May 22, when it was May 18, which few who protested that ugly, violent weekend could forget. The SPVM’s pepper-spraying of Bar le Saint-Bock took place the next night, but the novel sets it in April. At one perplexing moment, a march turns from Berri onto Pine.
Presuming facts don’t matter as much in a fictional chronicle, the most striking aspect of Red Squared Montreal is its incuriosity. Even as Huberto laments how the media “don’t speak to us,” none of the characters shows any interest in those who don’t participate in the strike, or oppose it. Pascale sums this attitude up by exclaiming “Baa! Sheep!” at the idea that a majority of students are voting to end their strike after seven months. Huberto and Pascale’s enemies are dismissed as selfish, ignorant, privileged, or brainwashed, but no one in the novel talks to anyone who doesn’t agree with them. Nobody in this book attempts to change anybody else’s mind. Those who remember 2012 as a year of exhausting, constant debate about the strike – at work, with family, among friends, on social media – will not see those experiences reflected here.
Does no one Huberto loves or respects oppose the strike? Mightn’t Jean ask Huberto how strikers will help unhoused poor people like him? How different would this novel have been set in a world where decent people disagree?
The strikers’ motivations are not closely explored either. While much of its dialogue and narration reads suspiciously like sloganeering about the justice of the cause, the book doesn’t consider what emotions and personal experiences might drive young people to engage for months in a sometimes-violent fight to improve the education system. This lack of concern for the personal struggles beneath the conflict flattens the dramatic scope so completely it leaves Red Squared Montreal with the moral range of an action movie.
The 2012 student strike deserves its own literature, and Red Squared Montreal succeeds at least in capturing the dizzy heights of the protests. As both anarchist and poet, Nawrocki often knows just the right words to capture the elation, camaraderie, and terror of marching in the street and facing off against contemptuous police. However, the lack of curiosity about the people behind the conflict means the novel ultimately fails to communicate the stakes and experiences of the 2012 strike in human terms. mRB
Reporter and writer JB Staniforth was a member of the Translating the Printemps Érable collective. A former CÉGEP teacher, he marched with striking students in roughly 45 demonstrations in 2012.
Comments
Honest review for a not-so
anon (not verified) Mon, 11/20/2023 - 04:56
Honest review for a not-so-honest "anarchist poet" writer. Especially for his lack of sociological analysis... which is perhaps the best that one could expect when looking back at a past social upheaval.
Having lived through this struggle, as an aged outsider, I'd say the chances for such a protest movement to happen again out of 10 is like today's Montreal weather in degrees celsius, i.e. it's a minus. Not only you'd be having a mass protest made of mostly youngsters living in conditions that so many non-students just can't afford, but the telecom means of organizing would too be controlled by tech feudal lords who could just steer the movement in whatever direction the government pays Zuckerbot for. In a way, the student movement could have been crushed by the very underlying socio-economics it avoided to address, when limiting itself to a tiny, over-specific fragment of austerity (the tuition hikes).
It could only be thinkable as a general strike on the conditions of social misery imposed by both this late-stage neoliberalism and techno-enslavement, but to the latter regard there's a critique that could have surfaced years ago but hasn't. Gen Zs aren't seemingly interested in any sort of radical culture, much less critique. The best that can be done is to spread the Beautiful Idea among them, avoiding granny moralism and not expecting anything coming from them. One's gotta think at how to transmit an idea, a desire, a sensibility, an attitude, a conduct of refusal or negation to someone who's guided by a screen. But that's more a question than an answer.
The Maoists or whatever tankies remain must be a few handfuls of dinosaurs, just like their equally pathetic anarcho-left counterparts, both condemned to a mutually-exclusive yet similar eternal demise. It's crazy how apparently the only bastion of anarchist renewal lies in a single college, in the whole province. Colleges of course usually got, like in the US, their Leftist student subgroups, but guess what these people become when they get older (i.e. not anarchists).
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