The research group GIUV2013-144: HYBRIDA (Cultural hybridisations and migrant's identities) is pleased to announce its consolidated cycle of Writings from Quebec. This first instalment of the year 2023 is very special and is sponsored by the Government of Canada and the Canada Foundation, in collaboration with the Department of French and Italian Philology and the publishing house Tiempo de papel.

In this context, we have the honour and pleasure of welcoming the French-speaking Canadian writer and journalist Rima Elkouri. She is a regular contributor to the prestigious newspaper La Presse, where she writes committed opinion articles on current affairs, with a strong focus on women's rights, migrants' rights and education. Rima Elkouri holds a Master's degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Montreal. As a writer, her book Pas envie d'être arabe (I don't want to be an Arab), published in 2014 by Somme Toute, brings together a hundred of her most relevant texts since 2001, starting with the text that gives the compendium its title. She has contributed to various collective works on feminism and student revolutions. In 2003, she received the Jules-Fournier prize from the Conseil Supérieur de la Langue Française de Québec.

Rima Elkouri will talk about her personal and professional career, focusing on the presentation of her acclaimed novel Manam, published by the prestigious Boréal publishing house in 2019 and published in Spanish in 2021 by Tiempo de papel in a translation by Iballa López Hernández. In it, she explores the problems of silence and secrecy linked to the duty of memory in the face of the weight of family history transmitted in a veiled manner. In this transmission, the role of women will be preponderant. Through the character of Léa, a Canadian schoolteacher, a whole history of concealment and shame is verbalised, silenced by her grandmother Téta, who has just died, yet very much present in the family conscience. It is about the Armenian genocide experienced by the family in which almost the entire population of Manam, where they lived, succumbed under attack by the Turkish army or in their flight to Syria. A journey that for part of Léa's family ends in Canada, dragging behind them the guilt of the survivors. Léa will feel compelled to make the journey in reverse to seek out her Armenian roots in Turkey, not in a spirit of revenge but to hear the testimony and experiences of other people involved in this event that has been silenced by history.