Thus Speaks the CN Tower Hédi Bouraoui
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Thus Speaks the CN Tower Speaks the CN Tower Thus Prix Littéraire de l’Afrique Méditerranéenne/Maghreb 2000 De l’Association des Écrivains de Langue française Prix du Salon du Livre de Toronto 2000 Finalist for Trillium Award, Ontario, 2000 The Mohawk Pete Deloon gives the finishing touch. Capping the highest tower Hédi in the world, he feels the urge to be the first to take the dizziest leap. His cou- rageous act is rewarded by his definitive dismissal from his job. This Ariadne’s thread connects the plot focusing on a gallery of finely etched characters. Bouraoui The novel is a paean to tolerance, understanding, and Canadian multi- culturalism as a work-in-progress, an ideal unlikely to come to realization anywhere else in the world. Thus “Through these men and women who constructed this ‘highest tower in the world,’ who visited it or simply fantasized about it, we witness often surpris- ing encounters that only chance or immigration or exile make possible…The Speaks message is one of peace and concord among the peoples who in reality create a unified whole.” —Sadok Ben Amor, Alpha 36 (March 2001) The CN “On reading Ainsi parle la Tour CN, Canada appears to be one of the great social, cultural, and political laboratories of the great human meeting towards which, necessarily and inexorably, the whole planet is engaged…This book Tower offers above all an immense lesson of confidence in life and, as occurs often in the fictional universe of Hédi Bouraoui, a mystical lesson where the Moose Spirit breathes.” —Françoise Naudillon, Revista di Studi Canadesi 13 (Bari, Italy, 2000) Translated by “In Ainsi parle la Tour CN, with its Nietzschean title, an explosive novel, Hédi Hédi Bouraoui Elizabeth Bouraoui tells the story of the CN Tower and her adventures…. this polemical work will please those who sympathize with the sufferings of the marginalized, Sabiston as well as those who enjoy caustic humour and unleashed poetry. A beautiful text about a country in a state of becoming.” —Pierre Léon, L’Express, Toronto, 11–18 April 2000 Hédi Bouraoui, F.R.S.C., University Professor Emeritus of French, York Uni- versity, is the author of twenty books of poetry, a dozen novels, and a number of books of literary criticism. Elizabeth Sabiston is a full Professor of English at York University. She has published The Muse Strikes Back: Female Narratology in the Novels of Hédi Bouraoui, and a translation of his novel, Retour à Thyna. Hédi Bouraoui Thus Speaks The CN Tower CMC Editions 2014 Bouraoui, Hédi, 1932 – Ainsi Parle la Tour CN (English Translation) Sabiston, Elizabeth Jean, 1937 – Thus Speaks the CN Tower ISBN 978-2-9809692-7-0 (paperback) ISBN 978-2-9813993-1-1 (PDF) 1. Toronto 2. CN Tower 3. Cultural Mosaic Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Bouraoui, Hédi, 1932- [Ainsi parle la tour CN. English] Thus speaks the CN tower / Hédi Bouraoui ; translation and preface by Elizabeth Sabiston. Translation of Ainsi parle la tour CN. ISBN 9973-757-65-3 (Éd. l'Or du Temps) ISBN 2-921462-23-7 (Éd. L'Interligne) I. Sabiston, Elizabeth Jean, 1937- II. Title: Ainsi parle la tour CN. English. PS8553.O85A7413 2008 C843’.54 C2008-906138-1 Correspondence: CMC Editions Canada-Mediterranean Centre 356 Stong College, York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 Tel: (416) 736-2100 x31004 Fax: (416) 736-5734 [email protected] www.yorku.ca/laps/fr/cmc/ Digitalization : York University Printing Services Cover: Micheline Montgomery 2nd edition Legal Deposit: March 2014 © CMC Éditions, Hédi Bouraoui, Elizabeth Sabiston To Betty Hédi Bouraoui Thus Speaks The CN Tower Translation and Preface by Elizabeth Sabiston CMC Editions 2013 Translator’s Preface Happy Belated Thirtieth Birthday, CN Tower! Hédi Bouraoui’s novel, Ainsi Parle la Tour CN (Vanier, Canada : Éditions l’Interligne, 1999, and Tunis : Éditions l’Or du Temps, 2000), was composed in time for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Tower. It won the 29th Prix Afrique/Méditerranéenne/Maghreb, awarded by A.D.E.L.F., Paris, in 2000, the Prix Christine Dumitriu van Saanen of the Salon du Livre, Toronto, 2000, and was short listed for the Ontario Tril- lium Award. The Canadian version was, appropriately, launched in 1999 at the CN Tower. An Italian translation appeared recently, in 2007, and the following text is the authorized English transla- tion, intended to make the work better known among both the official language groups in Canada, Anglophone and Franco- phone. Following the Tower’s thirtieth birthday in 2006, it is time to revisit her. Hédi Bouraoui had the conceit of giving the Tower a voice. “Tour” in French is gendered female, despite the phallic appear- ance of the Tower, and the CN Tower increasingly takes on a female voice and sympathy with the many people who visit or work in her every day. She takes a particular interest in the people who built her with their own hands: the new immi- grants/contractors and, above all literally, the Amerindians, Mohawks who, with their mysterious gift for heights, “crowned” the Tower. Indeed, the first major character we meet is Pete Deloon (from Delune), the man who caps the summit from a helicopter, and decides, for reasons best known to himself, to leap from the top in a free fall, suspended only on a rope. Soon after, we meet Kelly King, the Beautiful Blonde Human Resources Director, whom Pete’s exploit is designed to impress – fruitlessly! Pete finds himself fired for insubordination, and vii Hédi Bouraoui is forced to walk the streets seeking a series of dead-end jobs. Meanwhile his wife Twylla Blue, left on the reservation with their son Moki, while Pete tries to make a living in the Queen City and support them, decides to follow her husband to Toronto. She finds him having an ill-starred affair with Kelly King, and determines to forge a career for herself. To that end, she accepts an assignment as a free-lance journalist to report on the Menara Tower in Kuala Lumpur. There she meets a fel- low journalist, the Malaysian Zinal, who becomes the love of her life, and who returns to Canada with her. It is Twylla who, on a visit to her native landscape, encounters the totemic Moose- Spirit, emblem of the multicultural Canadian soul, which she brings to the CN Tower. It is in turn symbolically impregnated with the Moose-Spirit. Multicultural players who figure largely in this mosaic-novel include Souleyman Mokoko, the highly educated Sudanese whose culture dates back to the Kingdom of Kush, whose princes became the black Pharaohs of Egypt, but who is reduced, in Can- ada, to piloting the elevator that speeds up the full height of the Tower – and who is also fired, like his friend Pete. Rocco Cac- ciapuoti, the cagey, ambitious government functionary, compares Toronto constantly to his native Italy, including the CN Tower to the Tower of Pisa. Fung Chiu, the Chinese accountant, keeps the books for the Tower, and invests in Chinese restaurants. Then there are the Francophones “de souche” (native-born), the Que- becker Marc Durocher, and the Franco-Ontarian Marcel-Marie Duboucher (who are practically indistinguishable), who put aside their historical differences sufficiently to hatch a plot against the Tower – but we will not spoil the detective story aspect for the reader. Finally, among the principals, there is the half-mad would-be poet Symphorien Lebreton, the native of metropolitan France, who deposits his poems (a failed symphony) in crumpled viii Thus Speaks the CN Tower paper balls around the Tower’s stairwells. His mother, the formi- dable Madame Lebreton, in turn lectures the Tower, urging it to adopt the “correct” French of the stultified Académie Française, as opposed to what she snobbishly considers to be the broken grammar and diction of Canada. Then there are the countless “whack jobs” who compete to set speed records climbing the Tower stairs. The title is a nod to Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, but the Tower “speaks,” in the present tense, and philosophizes about average men and women, not a Superman. The novel is a paean to tolerance, brotherhood/sisterhood, and understanding, and to Canadian, and especially Torontonian multiculturalism, despite all its culture shocks and flaws, as a work-in-progress, an ideal unlikely to come close to realization anywhere else in the world. The novel comes full circle when Moki, the son of Pete and Twylla, himself climbs, like Spider-Man, the outside of the CN Tower, not only evoking, but also redeeming, his father’s con- troversial feat. Moki goes on to bring new life to the reservation, creating on it a garden of language and love, inviting visitors from all over the world. Thus Moki’s language of flowers and the Tower’s rocky speech reflect and echo each other. Bouraoui never loses sight of the factual basis, the real his- tory of Toronto and Ontario (Upper Canada). His imagination plays constantly with the facts. Amerindians did cap the CN Tower in 1976, and Pete’s heroic act evokes the famous Toronto Star picture of the workman perched precariously on a scaffold at a dizzying height above Lake Ontario. Lest we take her for granted, the Tower, famously, had her own way of reminding us of her dominance of the skyline during the record-breaking cold winter of February and March, 2007, when sheets of ice froze on her sides. Ice sheets began falling off ix Hédi Bouraoui the Tower, one as large as a table, with the result that the Tower was responsible for the closing of the Gardiner Expressway, the main east-west road into the city center.