From a politics to a poetics of memory: fracture, return and renewal in Robert Lalonde’s Sept Lacs plus au Nord

This article analyses the language of memory in Lalonde’s Sept Lacs plus au Nord by applying a semiotic reading to the text, combined with an anthropological and sociological perspective and within the theoretical framework of memory studies. It shows how the main themes identified at the deep level of meaning of the text are related to the paradigms of fracture, return and renewal, unfolding a poetics of memory that is in tension with a politics of memory as a signifying absence. The article concludes that the reconciliation of the two opposing poles of Amerindian and non-Amerindian (white) memory (in the context of mixed cultural heritage) that are seen to govern the narrative can only be fully achieved through the individual’s return to the original place of trauma and the reactivation of the sensory and cultural embodied processes of remembrance that lay below the level of consciousness.