Alt history

>> A new exhibit at McGill examines the
radical press of Quebec in the 1970s

ME DECADE MEDIA-PHILES:
Anna Leventhal and Marc Raboy

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Despite the bad hair and big cars, the ’70s, especially in this province, was an exciting time. The October Crisis, the rise of the PQ, the flight of the anglos and their money down the 401, the seemingly inexorable rise of left-wingery—heady days indeed.

Chronicling the turbulence was not only the mainstream press of the day, but a slew of pamphlets, magazines, journals and periodicals across the political spectrum (meaning left to far left to loony left). And witnessing it all firsthand was a young journalist, activist and packrat named Marc Raboy.

Raboy, now the Beaverbrook Chair in Ethics, Media and Communications at McGill, recently donated his collection of 1,000-plus documents to the university’s Rare Books library, and last week presided over the unveiling of an exhibit on a history of Quebec’s radical press. The exhibit, drawn from his donations, contains only a fraction of the total documents, but nevertheless presents an interesting portrait of the bubbling stew of politics of the day.

Among the collected works are old issues of Le Temps Fou and Our Generation, on whose boards Raboy sat, as well as what Raboy calls the “ephemera” of the day—“The leaflets and pamphlets that don’t fit into any easy kind of classification, and that disappear quickly,” he says. “They’re like little snippets that chronicle the movements of an era.”

Raboy was well placed to collect the papers and ephemera found during that turbulent era. As a young reporter for the Montreal Star, he was assigned the education beat—“meaning that I got to cover the student protests of the day.” Later, wearing both a journalist’s and an activist’s hat, he was a front-row participant and observer in the city’s sundry social movements.

Ironically, he says being an anglo activist was easier than being a francophone one. While French papers were being raided and closed by the SQ, magazines like Last Post were publishing excerpts of FLQ leader Pierre Vallières’s White Niggers of America, unmolested. “I guess the authorities weren’t concerned that anglos would buy into this,” says Raboy. “If we were publishing in English, it was like we were in a bubble. We didn’t feel at risk, and there wasn’t the same kind of chilling effect. There were some instances [of arrests and intimidation], but by and large, that kind of repression wasn’t felt as severely.”

The exhibit itself is curated by Anna Leventhal, a master’s student at McGill in art history and communications. Her background in zine research helped her prepare somewhat, but the sheer volume of Raboy’s collection was a surprise, she says.

“He just showed up with 12 banker boxes and said, ‘Go to town!’” she says. Calling herself an “amateur archivist and librarian,” Leventhal says she felt odd “rifling through [Raboy’s] personal effects of the past 30 years…. It was like I was going through somebody’s closet.”

Looking back on his collection, Raboy says he reflects on the time “with some pride. Some of them are amazing, just as a time warp, and some that are more strident are more frozen in time…. Magazines like Le Temps Fou were carriers of a lot of social movements, and it had a lasting impact on the culture. Themes that were once marginalized are now right there in the mainstream.”

Québec Alternatives is open to the public
until March 30, at McGill’s McLennan Library,
4th floor lobby (3459 McTavish). For more info,
see www.media.mcgill.ca