Defiant Tongues, Lost Voices, and a Bulletproof Diva
Field Notes on What Survives (and What Gets Erased)
SCREENING - Québécoise Girls on the Run
I’ve been practicing my French-Canadian conversation lately— and my practice partner urged me to watch more Quebec television programming, which is being pumped into Netflix at a ferocious rate.
No one outside French Canada seems to know it! Quel dommage!
A lot of the shows are really good. They are NOTHING like Parisian television or American dreams of dainty Emily in Paris.
“Can You Hear Me?” - NETFLIX
Written by Florence Longpré and Pascal Renault-Hébert
“Can You Hear Me?”— which in French is, “M’Etends-tu,” — is about a trio of childhood friends with no money but a lot of wicked heart. They specialize in hard-knocks and doing their best as salopes impénitentes! (Unrepentant bitches).
Young people in Montreal are bilingual. Our heroines code-switch in perfect English whenever they want— and it’s very funny when they do. They use English to mock and tease.
Obviously, you can turn on the subtitles or the English dub — you don’t have to be une petite écolière like me!
Below is an untranslated trailer, but I think your eyes alone will realize it’s must-watch TV.
READING:
Uyghur Cultural Wipeout, Stephen Miller’s Salad Days, & The Price of a Giant Hot Mess
While Montreal thrives on defiant bilingualism, elsewhere, the power to speak in one's mother tongue is under existential threat. The NY Review of Books this month lays bare the Uyghur genocidal and literary wipe-out.
“Uighur Poets on Repression and Exile,” by Joshua L. Freeman
The shocking dimensions of China’s repression in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are now beyond dispute. In early 2017, after spending years perfecting a high-tech surveillance regime in its only Muslim-majority region, the Chinese state began a program of mass internment that has seen the disappearance without trial of at least a million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim citizens into a vast network of internment camps and prisons.
Many camp inmates have been compelled to work in factories, and the fruits of their forced labor have increasingly shown up in the supply chains of multinational corporations like Kraft Heinz and Adidas.
More recently, an extensive campaign of forced sterilization aimed at Uyghur women has come to light, grimly echoing past policies implemented against indigenous peoples and minorities elsewhere in the world, including the United States.
— A couple years ago, I went to the mat to get a legendary Uyghur author, Perhat Turson published in audio. I wanted to make the casting of an Uyghur actor part of the deal, up front. His American publisher thought it would be “too hard” to find an Uyghur actor — Bitch please. There are dozens working outside of China, who would have been deeply moved to audition.
The publisher rep suggested casting a Han Chinese actor to “hurry it up” and I thought, “You can hurry your way to the devil.” Jesus, I don’t know a Han Chinese actor of any conscience who would perform it!
Since then, the author, and his translator, have disappeared. Death or detention? We don’t know. Their intermediary to the US, missing. The deal fell through, to what end?