There are words borrowed from others which, sometimes better than your own, reveal what is deeply buried within you. This is the strange experience that singer Elisapie has just had. For his fourth solo album, Inuktitutreleased on September 15, this 46-year-old Inuit songwriter left her pen to cover ten rock and pop standards from the 1970s and 1980s, from Metallica to Fleetwood Mac, including Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.
“Paradoxically, these songs written by white people took me further than my own lyrics,” explains with a huge smile this woman with long brown hair who is taking a break in a trendy café in the heart of Montreal. In a few days, she will fly off for a series of concerts in France, before embarking on a tour in Quebec.
Tears are at the origin of this project. While jogging in 2020, Elisapie Isaac receives a friend’s playlist on her smartphone. Headphones on, she listens Chiquitita, of ABBA, and Time After Time, by Cyndi Lauper. And burst into tears.
“Assimilationist” policy
These songs rocked his childhood, spent in Salluit, a small Arctic village of around five hundred inhabitants in the early 1980s, located in Nunavik, in the Canadian Far North. “It came to look for me there, she says, pushing her fist into the pit of her stomach, I had to dig deep within myself, do some emotional archaeological work, to understand what was triggering such melancholy. » What hits her in the gut is “tanglement” feelings that these refrains heard during his youth provoke. The lightness of childhood superimposed on the dismay that permeated the members of his small community.
Politics “assimilationist”, led by Canada for more than a century, wreaked havoc on indigenous peoples. The elders, forced to settle down after having lived as nomads, indulge in drinking. Children sent to boarding schools far from home to “good little Canadians”, with the promise made to parents that they would become lawyers or doctors – “but I don’t know anyone who became a doctor”says Elisapie –, return to their village, deprived of their identity and cut off from their culture.
The suicide rate in Nunavik remains more than ten times higher than the Quebec average. Each family must live with its own grief and trauma. The singer remembers her aunt whose face was bruised by the beatings, or her cousins forced to take refuge at home when the violence of alcohol invaded their home. But she also tells of the miracle of music, when her uncles, musicians, made the whole family sing to Going to California, by Jimmy Plant, or on Wild Horses, of the Rolling Stones. “They found in rock’n’roll the means to express their fury, this music from elsewhere told them that they had the right to be sad or angry. »
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