‘It’s not just people living on the street’: Novel about homelessness in Montreal finds a new audience

They live on the street, these tiny Inuuk twins, Mary and Tracy, and they are reduced to begging for handouts from passing motorists. But there is still sparkle in their ravaged resilience. They are destitute, but they are not beyond caring for others — a tattered but palpable sense of community is there for all.

For example, Jimmy The Nakota — in his seventies with shoulder-length white hair — whose food truck is always there for the poor and hungry. There’s Geronimo, the Cree from Hudson Bay, who has spent the winter in a tent, prepares pasta on a camp stove, and understands the need for healing. There’s the black-coated Mafia Doc who tends to the afflicted until the night he freezes to death.

And finally there’s the central figure of Michel Jean’s novel, Ninan. He’s Élie Mestenapeo, freshly released from prison after serving 10 years for the murder of his brutal father. Because his crime places him in permanent banishment from his own Innu community, he becomes one of Montreal’s homeless.

“This is a world I already knew before I was writing the book,” says Jean, whose years as a television journalist with Radio-Canada and the Quebec Television Network frequently confronted him with those living on society’s margins. “I often would go there and just sit and watch.” Some of the book’s characters are inspired by people he came to know — “but it’s still a fiction.”

Ninan Michel Jean Anansi

But it is fiction rooted in truth. A brief editor’s note in Susan Ouriou’s new English translation of Jean’s 2001 novel lays down some hard truths about Montreal’s Cabot Square, long a gathering place for a homeless population whose numbers include Cree, Atikamekw, Anishinaabe, Innu, Inuit, Mi’kmaq and Mohawk. And in a sense, such communities represent another world, an unknown country in the larger country of Canada.

“Nobody thinks of them,” says Jean, an Innu from the Mashteuiatsh region of Northern Quebec. “Nobody looks at them. Nobody cares. They live their lives. In many cities across Canada it’s the same situation. Society is failing them.”

Yet threading through his narrative is the faint but sustaining comfort of hope.

The Toronto publishing house of Anansi is now bringing Jean, an award-winning Quebec writer, to a wider English-speaking audience at a time when Indigenous writers are leaving their mark on the Canadian literary landscape.

“Today, amidst an explosion of Indigenous literature published in print, we are all fortunate to have the work of Michel Jean gracing our pages.” comments his Anansi editor, Leslie Ahenda. “Being available in English invites a whole new audience to his work, hungry for his authenticity and candour”

I’m not trying to shame anyone or point fingers at the white man. I’m not into that. I believe that Canadians are a very open society. They understand things without me giving them a lesson.

Jean, who also enjoys solid international sales in countries like Italy and France, feels a responsibility to his own culture, and his subject matter has ranged from the residential school tragedy to the Indigenous protest movement in Sri Lanka, a country he covered as a journalist. He has edited an anthology of science fiction by Indigenous authors, and his own great grandmother’s life was the springboard for his best-selling novel, Kukum, which Anansi published in 2023.

He’ll always remember the wise advice he received from renowned Indigenous poet and elder Joséphine Bacon. “Michel,” she told him, “if we don’t tell our stories, who will do it?” Hence a novel like Ninan, and the title itself is a statement — it’s the Atikamekw name for the territory known to us as Montreal

He stresses that Indigenous writers are astonishingly diverse.

“But we all have stories to tell. In my books I’m not trying to shame anyone or point fingers at the white man. I’m not into that. I believe that Canadians are a very open society. They understand things without me giving them a lesson. With Ninan, it’s just not people living on the street — it’s where they come from. A lot of my novels are based on reality. They explain what happened and why it happened. I then let readers make up their own minds. Other excellent Indigenous writers may do it differently. We’re not all the same. We do not have the same voices or occupy the same platform.”

In his case, he’s definitely not preaching. “I want people to have a good time reading the book, but I do want them to understand the situations described in the book. As a community we have a collective responsibility to effect change, and the first thing needed of us is to understand.”