Keeble McFarlane
MICHAëLLE Jean was only 11 years old when she first set foot in Canada. Her father, Roger, had fled Haiti in 1967 after suffering persecution and torture. He was a teacher and managed to secure a position with a local college in the rough-and-tumble town of Thetford Mines in eastern Quebec. A year later he sent for his wife Luce and daughter.
Unfortunately, the brutality he suffered had taken a serious toll, and according to his daughter, he became increasingly prone to violence. The marriage eventually came apart, and his wife left for Montreal to make a new life.
They lived in a small apartment in the basement of a house while Luce worked first at a clothing factory and then as a night orderly in a psychiatric hospital. It was quite a comedown for the former residents of a middle-class section of Port-au-Prince where Roger was principal and philosophy teacher at an upscale preparatory school.
They kept their daughter away from school and taught her themselves because if she had enrolled in school she would have had to swear allegiance to François (Papa Doc) Duvalier.
Michaëlle attended the University of Montreal, where she earned degrees in Spanish and Italian as well as in literature. She also studied at three universities in Italy and emerged a fluent speaker of five languages -- French, Creole, English, Spanish and Italian — and reads Portuguese.
While still at university Jean worked with women and children who had suffered domestic violence and also worked with organisations which helped new immigrants in the unsettling experience of settling in the new country. She took part in a landmark study — published in 1987 — which examined abusive relationships in which women suffered sexual violence from their spouses.
But it was in television that Jean made her mark. In the late 1980s she joined the French-language service of the CBC, Canada's national broadcaster, and worked as a reporter, presenter and documentary maker. From time to time she acted as host of the nightly national newscast and came to the attention of the English network, where she presented documentaries on its all-news channel.
By this time she had married a French-born documentary maker and had adopted Marie-Éden, an orphaned girl from Jacmel, Jean's mother's hometown in Haiti. She collaborated with her husband, Jean-Daniel Lafond, in several documentaries including an award-winning production in which she met an uncle who had fled in exile to France and wrote about his dreams for Haiti.
Since Canada became self-governing in 1867, the sovereign in London was represented by a string of British aristocrats until 1952. Prime Minister Louis St Laurent broke the chain by choosing Vincent Massey, a member of a prominent Ontario family and a distinguished diplomat, to be the first Canadian governor-general.
Since then, many ex-politicians have resided in Rideau Hall, a stately house in immaculately kept grounds close by the Ottawa River in the quite agreeable Canadian capital city. But four ex-journalists, all from the CBC, have also filled the post.
Two of them were former Liberal politicians — the first woman in the job, Jeanne Sauvé, who had a 20-year broadcasting career in Quebec before going into politics in 1972. The other was Roméo Leblanc, who was a foreign correspondent for several years before getting into politics. The other two were Ms Jean and her predecessor, Adrienne Clarkson, who was also precedent-shattering.
Clarkson was born in Hong Kong as Adrienne Poi and went to Canada as a young child with her family who barely escaped the brutal Japanese occupation of the territory during the Second World War. She enjoyed a brilliant career as a current affairs interviewer, presenter and reporter on television before going off to Paris as the cultural and trade representative of the Government of Ontario.
In her five years as Canada's vice-regal figurehead, Michaëlle Jean has drawn considerable kudos for her performance. She made trips all over the country and her most rapt admirers were the children with whom she loves to interact. She showed the flag in Africa, Europe and the Americas. In South Africa, President Thabo Mbeki praised her appointment as an example to European countries of how African immigrants should be treated.
Canadian soldiers have been fighting alongside other NATO contingents in Afghanistan since that war began, and despite warnings about the dangers, Jean travelled to Kabul to mark International Women's Day in 2007. On arrival she declared, "The women of Afghanistan may face the most unbearable conditions, but they never stop fighting for survival. Of course, we, the rest of the women around the world, took too long to hear the cries of our Afghan sisters, but I am here to tell them that they are no longer alone."
But Jean also engendered controversy, notably for her decision to go along with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's request to prorogue Parliament in December 2008, just two months after a national election. Two opposition parties had agreed to form a coalition to defeat Harper's Conservatives and the third said it would support them.
Her granting of Harper's request wasn't pro forma, and just this week she explained to a news agency that she wasn't aiming to keep the nation in suspense when she left Harper waiting for two hours. She simply wanted to take the necessary time before arriving at such an important decision and at the same time hoped to engage the country in the process.
Early last year, on a visit to the northern territory of Nunavut, Jean attended a traditional Inuit community festival in which she partook in the gutting of a freshly caught seal and in accordance with aboriginal tradition, ate a piece of its raw heart. This act drew particular attention because it coincided with a recent ban by the European Parliament on the importation of Canadian seal products in protest against the killing of seals.
Now, the lady who left Haiti as a child but has maintained a strong connection to her homeland will, for the next while, be the UN's special envoy for Haiti. Her task is to help fight poverty and illiteracy and raise money from international sources to rebuild the earthquake-shattered country.
Her term ended on Thursday and it seems Ottawa is back to the old ways. Canada's new vice-regal representative is a 69-year-old white lawyer and academic whose most recent post was president of the University of Waterloo in Ontario. David Johnston, with degrees from Harvard, Cambridge and Queen's in Kingston, Ontario, has worked in several universities, written a shelf-ful of books and his big passion is hockey. It looks as if things will be a bit quieter around Rideau Hall for the next five years or so.
October 02, 2010
jamaicaobserver
