Michèle Kérisit Scholarship
Today and in the future, Michèle’s name will live on. Thanks to generous donations by her husband and former colleagues at the University of Ottawa, students will have the opportunity to benefit from a scholarship in Michèle’s honour.
Recipients
- 2022 - Anonymus
- 2021 - Samantha Umutoni
- 2020 - Vicky Tsanang
- 2019 - Vicky Tsanang
- 2018 - Vicky Tsanang
- 2018 - Irina Cervinski
- 2017 - Amina Hufane
- 2017 - Francisca Kweto
- 2016 - Berthe Kabore
- 2015 - Franisca Kweto
- 2014 - Hodan Farah
- 2013 - Alie Pierre
Elegy by Simon Hanmer
Michèle Kérisit … this name resonates with many of us gathered here today! We knew her as a sister, as a friend, or, as in my case, as a wife, lover, and my best friend. Know that she died at home, peacefully, while she was sleeping—without pain, without anxiety, without distress, her hand in mine.
I didn't come here today to mourn her death, but to celebrate her life. And what a life it was! Michèle was never “ordinary”; she always did things her own way. First, she fell in love with me—she loved me for 36 years: not easy to do when you know me well. Second, she did her master's degree (in Canada) after her doctorate (in France), when the right opportunity arose to do what she had always really wanted to do: an anthropological study. Third, she always wanted to work with others—to help improve their lives: she started as a volunteer with women's groups in France, then worked with immigrant women as a consultant in Canada, and then as part of her collaborative research through multiple partnerships at the University of Ottawa and elsewhere.
Her journey through life took her to the Persian Gulf, where she was head of the French department at Kuwait University for three years, to Lycée Claudel in Ottawa, to setting up her own consulting firm, and eventually to the School of Social Work at the University of Ottawa. Most of the images you have already seen of her in the visiting room show the Michèle you knew here in Canada, and I chose them specifically to remind you of your friend—your colleague. But the images you see here show Michèle as I met her 36 years ago in her native Brittany when we were both 23, and the few years that followed when we traveled together through the south of France, which she loved so much.
I first met her in the most unsanitary bar in her town of Quimper on May 6, 1975. I had just arrived from England to begin a summer of geological study for my doctoral thesis. She was starting hers at the same time as teaching at the secondary school. I don't remember how, but towards the end of that first evening, we found ourselves at the back of the bar arguing about China. I can't remember the point of the debate now, but I know that that evening I thought to myself that I had never met a woman like her before. I fell madly in love with her more or less on the spot, but she insisted that it wasn't possible: that I didn't know her yet. And here we are—36 years later—in June 2011, still together, and I still love her just as much: in short, I was right!
Michèle always loved gardening—you can tell if you've seen her gardens at our house. So I chose to bury her ashes in the botanical garden at Beechwood Cemetery, where we can gather around her in a peaceful and beautiful setting that I am sure she herself would have chosen, a place worthy of bringing peace to the souls of those who visit her. In addition, one of her favorite authors was Marcel Proust, which explains the phrase that will be inscribed on the bronze plaque marking the location of her ashes:
“Let us be grateful to the people who bring us happiness; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom."
Marcel Proust,The pleasures and the days
So Michèle will leave a huge, bottomless hole in my life—a hole I will never be able to fill. I will mourn her, but not here, not today. These last two years have been both the worst and the best of my life. The worst—for reasons that are all too obvious. The best because, faced with the enormity of this cruel affliction that is cancer, you reevaluate all your priorities and keep only one—which allowed me to focus all my attention on her, on us, and on our relationship.
So today, I ask you to join me in celebrating her life and her freedom from her illness.
Michèle, I loved you so much for 36 years—I will always love you.
Elegy by Guillaume Perilhou
Cancer, embolism, pulmonary congestion: it is as sudden and unexpected as an engine stopping in mid-air. (…) There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men are mortal: but for each man, his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an undue violence.
It is with these words that Simone de Beauvoir concludes her account of her mother's final days, Une mort très douce (A Very Gentle Death), reflecting a sentiment we all share, which I could not express any better myself. A feeling of dull but intense pain, of violent and overwhelming rage that arises when death comes, and which the poet Dylan Thomas evoked in 1951: “Do not go gentle into that good night, / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
So that's it, it's over, over, over, you're no longer here, you won't be, and today is the last time I'll be speaking to you, who can't hear me and won't answer me. Everyone here can hear me, only you can't. But, after all, so what? The absent are not always wrong.
Life without you will be sadder now. I learned that you were going to die on a Saturday afternoon in May. It was a beautiful, hot day, and I was walking in the gardens of the Palais Royal in Paris with François. On the phone, my mother told me the news. "I'm going to see her next week, I'm going to get a replacement, I'm going to buy a plane ticket. It's almost the end." I don't know if I really realized it. But when I learned of your death last Thursday at noon, I realized that I would now have to go through life without your guidance.
Michèle, you're certainly the person I most resemble, of all the 20-year-olds I've known. And I've always felt immensely proud to be your nephew. I always will. You didn't have any children, “it's to take better care of you” you told me, when one summer morning, as a little boy in Brittany, I asked you why. I'll always be proud to have been so close to the feminist anthropologist who, one fine day long ago, decided to become Lévi-Strauss; who, when you arrived here as a French teacher, went back to school and wrote a dissertation on Indian customs you'd observed on reserves. You were also a woman of the left who gave me a taste for commitment. A taste for words, too.
I remember my Bac de Français, how much you helped me, as an attentive aunt; remember the rehearsals organized around the dining room table, back home in France! We studied Rousseau, Voltaire, Cohen, Chateaubriand... On exam day, I came across an extract from Les Mots, by Sartre: Les fauteuils du Luxembourg. My favorite. In it, he portrayed himself as a misanthropic little boy, unable to play with the other children in the garden. His grandfather, a former German teacher, had instilled in him a love of books, and he was happier in the library of the man with whom he grew up than in the company of little human beings his own age. My aunt, a former French teacher, also passed on to me her love of books, just as she passed on to me her love of writing. Michèle, you revealed to me the incredible power of literature, which prolongs the life of the departed and prevents the living from disappearing.
Yes, life without you will be sad now, but I'll always be happy when I think of you, when sadness passes, like happiness, like life, like the memories we forget so as to suffer less, or that we mix up with those of others or with our own lies.
I have so many memories of you. Your perfume, or rather your perfumes, your voice, your smile, that big white pickup you rented the second time I came here to see you, at your place, and in which we went on an adventure deep in Ontario, because you loved it, adventure - and it's probably this taste for it that led you to go and live in Kuwait for three years, after you'd had enough of teaching in Normandy and when no one in Quimper could even place Kuwait on a world map. .. You confided in me that an emir's son had tried to seduce you there, and you still remembered your amazement at the incalculable number of Arab thoroughbreds that populated his stable. That's one of the very few things you told me about Kuwait.
I remember my childhood, too, the immense joy my parents, my brother and I had in seeing you every summer in August, and the sadness at the end when you left. “I've only ever known my sister like this, with her departures,” my mother once told me. All we had to do was wait for Christmas, because you'd come for a few days at Christmas too.
Do you remember our visit to your friend Andrée's house one fine afternoon in July? It was a happy feeling: there I was, in the home of this kind friend, in Quebec from one day to the next, drinking orange juice and strolling through her magnificent garden, tickled by the current of the river. How lucky, I thought, how lucky to have an aunt like you! Such a loving, funny, intelligent aunt from America, too - perhaps especially. And how could I forget you and Andrée laughing out loud in front of our house, when you couldn't get into our pick-up truck because it was so high... Once behind the wheel, you were still laughing, and hadn't spared a few flowers in maneuvering the machine.
As I write this, it's hot and the sun is beating down on me. And this sun, too, reminds me of you. You loved it deeply, as you loved the Mediterranean rhythm of life and climate.
“This sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, my body tasting of salt and the immense scenery where tenderness and glory meet in yellow and blue” writes Camus when he thinks of the South, in Noces à Typasa. You once wanted to go and live in the South of France; you won't be able to, and that makes me sad. But... what's the point? I know that at the end of your life you were serene, and no matter how hard I look, I can't think of anything more important.
I wasn't always serene; I blamed myself. We wrote to each other a lot, a lot, but I blamed myself for not having written you enough lately, in recent months, not having called you enough either. The more time I had, the less I wrote - yes, but I wrote you more than I called you, “it suits us better” you assured me one day. You told me I was a good writer, and that I'd definitely succeed in life. A year ago, I proudly announced that Gisèle Halimi, the disrespectful lawyer, had sent me the book she had written with Beauvoir, Djamila Boupacha, and that she had signed it for me. This feminist, who symbolizes, among others, the profession of lawyer to which I aspire, had sent me the book she wrote with one of the greatest of them all. For me, this dedication brought me a little closer to you, linking, in a way, my law studies to your feminist commitment...
But “n'importe, nous serons bien aimés” would say Flaubert.
Anyway, far be it from me to make you cry. We've already done enough of that. We all know your love of life. Some would say that they believe in “the forces of the spirit”, and I would agree with them. What makes you think that you won't be with us at all? Of course you'll always be with us, and of course we'll always think of you fondly. In fact, in June 2004, when Nanu - your mother, whom you resembled - died, you thought it was great that I was dressed in red. Not in black. Fuck the black, fuck the false life, fuck the regrets, the pain, the mistakes, fuck the meds, fuck the sadness and hello the joy, let's get on with it, that's what we're here for. We loved her, Nanu.
For my part, I'll always think of you as that second mother to whom I could say anything and to whom I've said almost everything, to whom I've spoken a lot about love, less well than Racine, but about my loves that you've always approved of as naturally as possible, precisely because they are loves. I will always think of you with the greatest pride, the greatest freedom; my mind turned towards you will always be marked with immense tenderness, infinite gratitude. I love you, Michèle.
And I dream that one day strangers will read this text and hear your voice, so warm and serene, and say to themselves: let's not mourn her, she lived magnificently, it's a smile that remains.
Elegy by Caroline Andrew
I first met Michèle in the early 1990s - she was active in Match and had met Linda Cardinal who told her that the University was setting up a School of Social Work and that Michèle should talk to me - thanks Linda.
What a wonderful meeting. The contact was immediate and I still remember very clearly the room - 3rd floor of Tabaret at the end of the corridor - and the pleasure of a conversation that went from all sides all subjects and I knew this was a person I wanted to continue talking to - and we have indeed talked a lot since that first meeting.
Michèle was an intellectual - committed and feminist - and certainly the person I know who best illustrated the idea that the most practical thing is a good idea. She wanted to theorize practice to better understand the parameters and constraints on practice, and then to work with the community(ies) to take better action. She worked on subjects of real social importance - French-speaking immigrant women, ageing women and also questions of methodology, which for Michèle were also of real social importance.
I only understood later when we worked together on a research project on the history of the City's engagement with diversity how involved Michèle had been with the community – and the City - before coming to the University – she had done diversity training for some of them, worked with others. She was known and respected. I learned a lot from working with Michèle and we had so much fun working together. Discussions that would go in all directions and that strained the mind – as Michèle was not only rigorous in her thought but wanted rigour from others. The way she asked questions about my unclear thoughts did lead to better and clearer thoughts. That was the pleasure of working with Michèle.
I was also on thesis committees with Michèle - and she was superb - a combination of demanding, warm and always fascinated by the student's subject. Michèle was interested in many subjects - but at the same time, francophone immigrant women and aging women remained at the center of her intellectual and social concerns. I have to say that in my present pain, one of the things I regret most is not being able to grow old with Michèle - she would have been in France with her life partner, a wonderful human being, Simon, and I would have been here in Ottawa, but we would have had time to see each other. I know that I would have benefited from her theorizations on aging, that we would have had immense pleasure in reflecting together, and that we would have laughed and thought a lot.
I also want to bring words about Michèle from others who worked with her, admired her work and became close friends. Simone Pennec from l'Université de Bretagne Occidentale à Brest who let me know that Michèle's last article, "L'impact des dispositifs de l'Etat sur les solidarités familiales des nouveaux arrivants au Canada" will be published this year in a book edited by Françoise Le Borgne-Uguen and Muriel Rebourg. Simone Pennec also sent me, for this service, the following text which for me is so evocative of Michèle
Michèle
Our first encounter with Michèle was through her voice
A call to consider exchanges
They took place very quickly
She was in her beloved Brittany, in Quimper
The warmth of her voice, right to the end,
Her benevolence towards so many others
These others she seemed to understand so well
Michèle's modesty, a mark of her intelligence
On the lookout for everything, complex and simple
Its openness to the world
Michèle loved life
She loved to share her art of living
Colleagues, now friends, we have shared
Ideas, laughter, dreams for tomorrow
With other colleagues, other friends
Today in sorrow
But rich in history
From the voice of Michèle
Images, places, traces
- Simone Pennec
And I want to close in quoting Michèle – her presentation in Buenos Aires where we had been with Silvia Chejter and the meeting of the Argentinean Association of Canadian Studies – Michèle's conference was a total success – and Michèle was pleased with the presentation – something rare for her as she was extraordinarily tough on herself – it was the presentation that will be published next year and I want to quote her conclusion -
My goal in this presentation was not necessarily to denounce inadequate Canadian refuge and asylum policies. It was to let you hear how the inadequacies and contradictions inherent in these policies caused the voices of women survivors of war and extreme violence to echo the suffering they had endured, like a minor repetition of the sounds of violence and dehumanization. Summoned to tell an inaudible story to suspicious audiences, rescued from the extreme violence of which they were victims or witnesses, condemned for a long time to live on nothing and without the support of those closest to them, the women we meet nevertheless find the strength to understand and take their place as subjects and creators of their lives. This recovery of meaning is only possible if it is seen in the context of the respective histories of their country and of Canada.
Thank you Michèle - for being a magnificent creator of your life.
Elegy by Andrée Côté
I met Michèle as part of an action-research project on the impact of sponsorship on Francophone immigrant women in Ontario. We clicked immediately. Together, we worked for over three years on this sometimes difficult project, as action-research with a group of women can be.
But we had a very strong intellectual complicity. It was one of the most beautiful collaborations of my life. By the time the project was over, we were great friends. Following this research, the Mouvement Ontarien des femmes immigrantes francophones was created. Michèle continued to work on many projects with this collective.
Michèle has devoted her life to the cause of women, her research focusing not only on immigrant and refugee women, women survivors of armed conflict and women in Ontario's Francophonie, but also on older women. She has written on Simone de Beauvoir and the art of knowledge. A seasoned intellectual, she has published numerous articles and books, and given many lectures.
Yet Michèle refused to confine herself to the ivory tower of academia. She didn't hesitate to work in the field with women's groups and collectives. As Professor and Director of the School of Social Work, she trained many of the next generation of Franco-Ontarians, in particular young women of African and North African descent. Her intelligence and unwavering solidarity with women here and elsewhere will be sorely missed by us all.
Michèle was - how difficult it is to speak in the past tense - a beautiful, elegant woman. And not just in terms of her physical appearance, her presence, her beautiful clothes, her flair. She had such intellectual elegance: intelligence, insight, curiosity, tact, humor... What a pleasure it was to have an aperitif with Michèle and discuss the state of the world. She was interested in everything, and you could always be sure that she would surprise you with an original, original analysis of a situation. She also liked to keep abreast of events and ideas, and you could always be sure to find Le Monde, Nouvel Obs, scientific journals, the latest social science essays and the best novels at her place. What a pleasure it was to be in her company.
Michèle always had a smile on her face and an easy laugh. Always ready to listen to her friends, with an open and available heart. A lively, welcoming and generous hostess, it was always a pleasure to visit Michèle and Simon.
Since her diagnosis two years ago, I've also come to know Michèle's courage and strength. I don't know if I could get through the ordeals she endured with such grace. She loved life, she wanted to live, and she lived to the full, present, interested and interesting until the last weeks of this cruel disease, which finally had the last word.
Her great love for Simon carried her through her whole life. And Simon, sometimes a little gruff and fierce, turned out to be a man of infinite tenderness, a model of love. I was always very moved to be the privileged witness of such a beautiful love story. Michèle was taken from us far too quickly, but I know she died in the arms of her lover, and I can't imagine a better way to leave this earth.
Farewell Michèle, I will miss you.