Background
Michele Lalonde was born on July 28, 1937 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Michele graduated from Universite de Montreal with B.A. in 1959.
Michele Lalonde was born on July 28, 1937 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Michele graduated from Universite de Montreal with B.A. in 1959.
Michele began her literary career while studying for a degree in philosophy at the Universite de Montreal. Her first two books of poetry were published during this time. "Songe de la fiancee detruite" is a poem that Lalonde composed to be read on the radio. In 1958, the work was performed with a musical score of Radio-Canada.
A year later, a collection of Lalonde's poetry entitled Geoles came out. The twenty poems written when Lalonde was between the ages of eighteen and twenty contain dark and nightmarish images that were influenced by Canadian writers such as the modern poet and novelist Anne Herbert, the Quebec poet Alain Grandbois, and Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau. Upon her graduation from the Universite de Montreal in 1959, Lalonde began writing and editing literary and cultural reviews for the magazine Situations. The staff of this magazine was made up of a group of young writers, artists, and thinkers, including the poet Maurice Beaulieu, who was one of the magazine's cofounders. Lalonde then began contributing articles to the journal Liberte. While working there she became even more immersed in a community of Canadian writers and intellectuals, including Jean-Guy Pilon (who had previously produced the radio performance of Lalonde's Songe de la fiancee detruite), Jacques Godbout, and Fernand Ouellette. These were the same people who had formed the Hexagone authors group. Lead by Pilon, the young talent associated with this group published and promoted a new voice for literature in Quebec.
Throughout her life, Lalonde thrived in communities of literary people like these, drawing much inspiration from collaborating with friends and colleagues. Beginning in 1957, she helped to organize what were called the "recontres," gatherings of Canadian writers that became a yearly conference (they later come to be called the Rencontre Quebecoise Internationale des Ecrivains).
Lalonde's college years made her well-equipped for another of her early jobs: writing scripts for a series of programs dedicated to philosophers and intellectuals that aired on Radio-Canada in the mid-1960s. After completing this project, her poetry began to evolve in a new direction. With the poems in Terre des hommes. Роеmе pour deux recitants, published in 1967, Lalonde began to write for a larger, more general audience. She also began to address social and political concerns and to adapt a new form.
Lalonde's social and political commentary became the subject matter for a famed piece that she performed at the "Nuit de poesie" in Montreal in 1970. The poem, "Speak White," took its title from a phrase used in the United States during the Civil Rights Movement. Lalonde uses it in the poem to indicate how Canadian people in her time were trained to follow English models in language and culture.
Lalonde's poetry in the early 1970s reflected that politically turbulent time in Quebec. In the late 1960s, separatist groups in Canada's French-speaking community had been organizing to obtain more power and autonomy for the province of Quebec. But in 1970 the unrest and violence began to escalate. When the British Trade Commissioner was kidnapped in October of that year it spurred what is now known as the October crisis. The federal government invoked the War Measures Act from World War 1, which allowed them to send troops to Montreal and suspend people's civil liberties in this time of crisis. Lalonde, who had experienced this time of crisis as well as the events that had lead up to it, was very politically active and voiced her opinions on the subject in her writing. Her poems titled "Outrage au tribunal" and "la Prise de parole" are examples of this tendency in her work. She participated in a performance called Роетеs et chansons de la resistance ("Poems and Songs of the Resistance"), which championed the people of Quebec whom she saw as political prisoners during this time. During the mid-1970s, she also wrote a series of essays on Quebec nationalism and the controversy over language that were published in the journal Maintenant.
Defense et illustration de la langue quebecoise suivi de prose et poemes, published in France in 1979, is a collection of Lalonde's best poetry and essays from 1965 to 1975. It covers topics ranging from the position of women in Quebec, to the rolls of artists and thinkers in society, to the politics of language.
In the late 1970s, Lalonde tried her had at drama, a genre which she had experimented with once before in 1957. Dernier recour de Baptiste a Catherine is a historical play that was published in 1977. She then continued on with her poetry, publishing a new collection in 1979 titled Portee disparue and another in 1980 called Metaphore pour un nouveau monde.
Since this time, Lalonde has continued to write and collaborate with other creative people. Her work has been published and well received in France and in the United States; and in 1980 she worked on a film about La Nuit de poesie, the performance where she read "Speak White."