Module 6 — The generation you serve: history, memory and the French–English ques

Chapter: Module 6 — The generation you serve: history, memory and the French–English question (6 h)

guitar, chill, lo-fi · 4:15

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Lyrics

[Verse 1]
Nineteen-thirty-eight, born in Chicoutimi cold
Duplessis runs the province, the Church runs the soul
Sixteen kids at the table, the priest at the door
Catholic school, Catholic hospital, Catholic poor
The orphelins de Duplessis — children signed away
Baptized into silence, no record, no say
Rural Québec, the mill, the mine, the mud
English boss on the floor, francophone sweat and blood
*Speak white* — they said it like a verdict, not a slur
Your patient heard that sentence, let it calcify and harden

[Chorus]
La Grande Noirceur to the Révolution tranquille
Hydro-Québec, the referendums, the wound that won't seal
Bill 101, the October Crisis, Saint-Léonard square
You will never take a side — but you must know what is there
Timeline: 1938, '45, Port-au-Prince '50
Every life a layered archive, nothing simple, nothing pretty
Read the generation, not the symptom — understand the scar
History is in the room before you've opened the chart

[Verse 2]
Nineteen-sixty, the Church lets go and the province exhales
Laïcité creeping in through the hospital rails
Your patient was forty and watched the whole altar dissolve
A rupture, not a freedom — not a problem to solve
The textile shop, the union card, the shift to the service floor
Bodies used for decades, then unlocked from the door
Early marriage, infant graves, babies relinquished in shame
Hidden love, swallowed names — the silence with no name

[Bridge]
Now hear the Inuit elder who won't trust the form
Residential school took the language before the storm
Sixties Scoop, the Viens Commission, Joyce's Principle cried
The institution wounded before you even arrived
And the Haitian grandmother — double displaced, double erased
Montréal-Nord in the seventies, Creole and French interlaced
The Lebanese elder, the Maghrebi man, the Vietnamese voice
Carried continents of grief before they made Québec their choice

[Verse 3]
Don't assume the anglophone wants English in the hall
She spent sixty years in Rosemont, French is her Montreal
The allophone in the francophone home, isolated and still
Surrounded by a language that was someone else's will
The 1980 referendum — sixty percent said non
Your patient cried either way when the counting was done
1995, a paper-thin margin, a nation splitting seams
Sovereignty deferred again into the province's dreams

[Chorus]
La Grande Noirceur to the Révolution tranquille
Hydro-Québec, the referendums, the wound that won't seal
Bill 101, the October Crisis, Saint-Léonard square
You will never take a side — but you must know what is there
Timeline: 1938, '45, Port-au-Prince '50
Every life a layered archive, nothing simple, nothing pretty
Read the generation, not the symptom — understand the scar
History is in the room before you've opened the chart

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