The brown lady with white teeth
I heard that we are offended by some of the Quebec solidaire posters, that they are tinged with racism and politically incorrect ideas. Yet when they appeared in the setting of the 2018 campaign that was beginning, I smiled with my white yellow teeth. I laughed at this brown woman with curly black hair and immaculate teeth, this whiteness of the future in fact. I also laughed in front of Manon Massé’s poster, her name written as a mustache with the rather easy slogan of "the new face of politics".
The campaign is, to use an outdated word, refreshing. Beautiful colors expressing the reality of young people, sometimes with boldness like Toulouse-Lautrec or aggressiveness of a Bolshevik. Since Québec Solidaire has everything to gain by going off the beaten track, they have the courage of the artist without means, free and happy.
I went right away to see these posters in their immaterial setting. Then I saw them appear on the city’s posts. It reminded me of the shock I experienced when my first book, Le Putain, was on the shelves of bookstores, lost in an ocean of big books. And it also reminds me of that feeling when, on Sunday morning, I open my mailbox to find out if I won the lottery.
There is then a fall, an awakening, a loss or a retreat.
The Québec solidaire posters no longer had the expected impact, mixed with traffic signs, urban noises, placed between the very formatted smile of their other posters (Manon and Gabriel, together, plasticized by Photoshop, it is no better than the curves of Roi-Soleil Couillard).
However, I must admit that the poster of the brown lady with white teeth on a Gaspésie pole must have its effect... even if this kind of smile has already begun to populate Catholic meetings, since today’s celebrants are often "missionaries" who came from Africa to reconvert the white Indians riveted on their Netflix.
One thing remains, Québec solidaire got my vote a little bit thanks to these honest posters, loving well-invented colors and slogans. Is it a more realistic political party than the others? I have my doubts. However, I prefer this approach to the annoying cronyism of other purring promises.
I tell myself that I should do the same with my own life and initiate a project in solidarity with myself. For example, dressing comfortably for work, with Indian clothes (those next to Pakistan) rather than gutting me with Simons shirts.
Emptying oneself of dreams seems so easy, it seems, stunned that we are by the three poisons of ignorance, hatred, and greed. To condemn a poster which, moreover, is a self-portrait of the artist, is to refuse this marked identity. The difference is only because we haven’t been on each other’s territory. Hate is one because one has not examined one’s own injustices, and greed is a vast hurricane that only causes flooding and bleeding.
I met a client on Friday afternoon. He obviously had the means to afford impeccable teeth. Her teeth fascinated me because she was surrounded by her dark skin, her mulatto North African eyes (I invent or fantasize). Anyway, I had pain in my male ovaries.
He was also young, happy to have in front of him the most beautiful of futures. I wish him that. I wish us better politicians, less technocratic people, just like we are, a people made up of amalgam. Reality can be as colorful as posters from Québec solidaire as long as our honesty is nourished by the courage and we agree to roll up our sleeves. This is how dictators and opium dealers are dethroned. We can never say it enough.
