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Poppies et des coquelicots

In November there is nothing Canadian that can be described as particularly coming alive, nothing but memory, which, for some bizarre reason, materializes itself with poppy pins.

The flourishing in late-fall of these small red objects on suits, blouses and coats, is a recurring social event here. The overall aesthetic and psychological greyness of the month in Canada’s Central region - the defiantly colder winds, the black mold progressively covering the vibrancy of fallen leaves, the days' withering light and the lack of social rituals around food, consumption and family - can legitimately explain this collective embracing of these fragile plastic pins. 

And yet, coming from a country where November 11th is a 'jour férié civil,' like the la Prise de la Bastille or Christmas, meaning everything shuts down entirely, there's something strangely awkward about remembering the slaughter of millions for centimeters of mud in the Flanders, with one dollar pins. Perhaps poppies are like the oath to the Queen, daydreaming about (Prince) Williams or Boxing day, rituals inherited from the commonwealth that I will never quite adhere to, or rather understand, hence fully enjoy. 

The poppy versus the bank holiday situation, however, points to two, as poignant, ways with which a society, a collective group of individuals, make sense and tame their pasts and the traumas that these imply. On the one hand there's this material red and black felted object, a souvenir that clutters the clothes people wear in public spaces for three good weeks. While loaded with military and nationalistic values, the red dots resonate as things with which to remember and to 'commemorate' those dead for the contemporary present and consequently become a mean to acknowledge and create a collective sense of unity today.

Then there is the apparently invisible, and yet just as ritualized and obligatory day off. A whole private twenty-four hours to do anything but the routine. If it is officially a time to reflect about meta-matters of finitude and sacrifice, it isn't lacking it's material manifestations either, of which examples are, the flowering in every town and village of the memorial monuments, the presidential speech, televised national ceremony and paper coverage (that, as long as I can remember, always deals with how many French ‘poilus’ are still alive- a question that no longer has a numerical answer since the 'der des der,' Lazare Ponticelli, died last March). 

If, in one case there is an obligatory 'bowing to poppy fascism' and on the other, what Adam Gopnik describes as "the French attitude toward any crisis," to pretend that it isn't happening, the rituals associated to the remembrance days here and there, prove that the nonchalant dignity of the French and the exposed pride of the Canadian are different ways to be remembered to remember, to remember to remember, simply to remember or more importantly to pretend we can never forget. In the end, if both are actualized through diverging performances, both are animated by the shared and essential fear of forgetfulness, so intrinsically human. 

The month of November is alive because, ironically, we are never more animated than when we remember.