Call for Revolt
Santoni, Ronald E.
Call for Revolt White Niggers of America: The Precocious Autobiography of a Quebec 'Terrorist/ by Pierre Val-lieres. Monthly Review Press 288 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by Ronald E. Santoni Two...
...Yet it pleads for a revolution which "will give all power to the workers and students...
...But there is also an education to be gained from it...
...Yet it is the statement of a young man for whom the problems of freedom, justice, and existence are not primarily philosophical, but concrete and practical...
...With Americans allegedly controlling eighty per cent of Quebec's economy, it is they, not Ottawa, who represent the central obstacle to Quebec's economic independence...
...Many French Canadians, as well as other people who perceive themselves as colonized, will doubtless find in Valliere's words a fulfilling, albeit radical, formulation of what they already feel...
...There are over-simplifications, contradictions, biases, and philosophical difficulties in this book, and Valliere's honesty admits to that...
...Department of Immigration on September 28, 1966, while demonstrating peacefully in front of the United Nations...
...Yet it is also a call for revolutionary violence and the understanding that for "colonized" people like the Quebecois "freedom grows out of the barrel of a gun...
...English Canadians, like so many whites during the black-white crisis, will wriggle with realization of the depth of French Canadian rage towards them...
...DeGaulle had not yet made Quebec's liberation the talk of the world...
...It is a call for a thorough transformation of society, for men with "new sensibilities" (Marcuse), for love, happiness, and complete freedom, for a new humanity...
...It is a dialectic between a despair bred by injustice and an unlimited faith in man's ability to build a better world, between deeply humane aspirations and ends and grisly means to those ends...
...For him the United States today is the symbol of exploitation, and "American imperialism" is the "common enemy" of "hewers of wood," "drawers of water," and "cheap workers...
...Taken to the Manhattan House of Detention for Men (better known as the "Tombs"), Vallieres and Gagnon maintained a twenty-nine-day hunger strike...
...So Separatism, he contends, must be viewed as a way of "wresting Quebec from the clutches of American imperialism...
...It is another complex story of the revolutionary dilemma...
...It is a detailed itinerary of a tormenting, lonely journey from the working-class slums of Montreal to the revolutionary "fraternity" of the FLQ...
...Valliere's vision is international, and he perceives the struggle for Quebec's liberation as one important part in the long march of the world's "niggers" towards freedom from their exploiters...
...And it is still more...
...White Niggers of America is both an unusually sensitive, intimate autobiography and an animated, powerful political manifesto...
...Reviewed by Ronald E. Santoni Two prominent members of Quebec's clandestine revolutionary organization, the Front de liberation du Quebec (FLQ), were arrested by agents of the U.S...
...It is a plea for recognition as human beings...
...Charges of sedition were brought against Vallieres for the initial publication of this volume, and under the Public Order Act of last December it is still outlawed in Quebec...
...It is a desperate call to action, to total revolution, to the elimination of capitalism and imperialism...
...It is a declaration that the worker of Quebec is someone's slave, a servant of imperialism, an oppressed sub-man—in short, a "white nigger...
...Jt is an account of the indignities, humiliations, and daily obscenities of poverty—of the "vicious circle of misery" that kills love...
...It is a controversial summary of Quebec's history...
...And one can hope that every reader of this book will become more sensitive to the frustrations, inhumanities, and everyday forms of oppression which can turn an intelligent and compassionate man into a violent revolutionary...
...And it is more...
...It is an angry social critique of the Quebec Establishment...
...Although I deplore violence in all of its forms, I think White Niggers of America is an insightful piece of revolutionary literature which will have a place beside the writings of Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Regis Debray, and Che Guevara...
...Pierre Vallieres and Charles Gagnon had come to the United Nations with the intent of rallying world opinion in support of those engaged in the struggle to "liberate" Quebec...
...Americans will learn of the animosity aroused by their country's "investment" in Quebec and the place this feeling has sometimes assumed in Canada's recent malaise...
...It is a blueprint and program for an "egalitarian social structure...
...It is a crying out in behalf of the exploited, the utterly disheartened, the "niggers" of Quebec, the "wretched of the earth," all "niggers" of the world...
...This book is an impatient, sometimes erratic, philosophical search for the absolute and an agonizing existential attempt to give meaning to a life tempted by exasperating thoughts of self-destruction...
...It is a scathing indictment of capitalism...
...By January 13, 1967, less than three months later and the day on which he and Gagnon were forcibly deported to Montreal, Vallieres had completed this important "political act"—a book entitled Negres blancs d'Amerique, now translated into English as White Niggers of America...
...Immediately following this strike, Vallieres—a self-made journalist who had briefly succeeded Pierre Elliot Trudeau as co-editor of Cite lib re—set out to record his impressions of his "short but brutal experience of life" and to formulate his revolutionary program for a "world waiting to be transformed...
Vol. 35 • July 1971 • No. 7
