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Articles

Volume 33, Number 2 (2012)

Elephant Wake : élégie pour une culture moribonde, ou fable sur la pluralité des appartenances identitaires?

Submitted
May 24, 2013
Published
2012-06-06

Abstract

In Franco-Canadian dramas of the West, the hegemonic group and the linguistic and cultural minority often clash. It seems that only constant negotiations with the hegemonic group allow for the survival of these already marginalized groups. Elephant Wake, by Joey Tremblay, displays these negotiating qualities that make for the resiliency of the francophone minorities of Western Canada. Although its protagonist’s monologue in halting English could be summarized as an elegy for the purity of his culture, the play as a whole denies the main character’s message in that it becomes, by contrast, an ode to survival through hybridity. Indeed, the narrative presents the French culture as a necessary patchwork which must strategically absorb other cultures to survive or to inevitably shrink. At the end of JC’s narrative emerges a mosaic Francophone culture, one that is revealed to have been all along a repository of cultures and sub-cultures.