15. Are You Willing To Die For The Cause by Chris Oliveros

My wife gave this to me for xmas and I'm glad she did because I wouldn't have known about it and it is an excellent addition to my very limited understanding of the history of the Quiet Revolution.  So far, I only know what I learned in high school, which was quite limited and a good podcast series (that I maddeningly can't remember now but was primarily focused on the criminal angle).  Like those previous sources, this graphic novel comes from the anglophone side.  I don't necessarily want to say "perspective" because Oliveros is probably perfectly bilingual and clearly did a ton of research into primary materials in both languages.  Neverthless, it is a factor.  For instance, all the gushing pull quotes on the back are from anglophone writers, and other than Toula Drimonis, transplanted Mile End hipsters like myself or not even from Montreal at all (Seth).  I would love to hear what the francophone historical and bande-dessinee community thought about this book.  I couldn't find a single review of it in french online (maybe my search failed) and I don't think it was published in french.

It's tricky for me to asses the historical validity of this book, mainly because my own knowledge of the history is so limited.  Oliveros' approach, though, also confounds this problem.  He creates a fictional wrapping of the discovery in the archives of CBC television (not Radio-Canada) a documentary about the October Crisis, including previously unpublished interviews with the major players.  Oliveros then uses real quotes and strings them together as if they were interviews for this documentary.  It's a clever technique to give the history a flow and encapsulate a lot of info in a shorter way, since it is in graphic form.  However, it also opens up room for biases and tendencies that may not be apparent to the uninformed reader.

One such tendency that I felt I noticed was that it depicted the early members of the FLQ as being super amateurish and disorganized.  I don't dispute this, as it is basically true.  However, because there is no social context given, the relative poverty of the French-Canadians in Quebec and Montreal at the time, the racism and discrimination in which they lived, you don't get a sense of the anger and despair that was building up that would lead people to such desperate measures.  So yes, they were unrealistic and criminally thoughtless and violent in their approach, but their situation was desperate.  This is why they are exonerated and even considered heroic by many of that generation of Quebecers who lived through the Quiet Revolution.  Anglos who love to bitch about the language police still are not open to this understanding and I think it would have made this book more effective to have emphasized the oppression at the time.

As the book goes along, though, it does do a better and richer job of giving the reader the sense of inequality of Quebec during le Grand Noirceur.  It is also extremely well researched, as the detailed endnotes reveal (and in some ways, this was my most fruitful reading).  The art and the structure is really well done and makes it very readable and brings life to these names and their words.  Like all D&Q products, it is also beautifully produced, a very nice physical object for your bookshelf or coffee table.  I am very much looking forward to the second book, which focuses on the October Crisis.  So despite my concerns above, I would say this an valuable and entertaining book.  I would just love to have a chat with a francophone expert on this subject and have them share their feelings about this book with me.