The road we follow

Through my work where I was often sent to report, I learned to travel alone – this is likely to continue, because since the pandemic, the Lover, allergic to paperwork, has still not renewed his passport expired somewhere in 2020.

I thus understood that solo travel is a very recent conquest for women, who certainly cannot walk anywhere in the world without having their eyes all the way around their head, even in Montreal.

But there is something exhilarating about it, living this experience intensely for yourself, having just a notebook to talk about your discoveries, walking around without anyone else to dictate a time or destination, observing people. live in an openness and curiosity that we don’t have enough of at home.

Nevertheless, it has sometimes happened to me, in a hollow of solitude, to want the presence of someone by my side, someone perhaps like Catherine Mavrikakis or Will Ferrell, who kept company with their own travel adventures, during my recent stay in Nice, after a detour to Monaco.

Will Ferrell is the comedian who makes me laugh the most in the world, and I was expecting a real laugh while watching the documentary Will & Harper on Netflix. I was rather pleasantly moved by this film where the famous comedian decides to make a road trip in the United States with an old friend he knew in Saturday Night Livescreenwriter and author Andrew Steele.

This is because, during the pandemic when the two friends were not really able to see each other, Andrew began his transition and became Harper Steele, a woman. Steele, who has traveled extensively on American roads in his life, wanted to revisit certain notable places, but this time under his new identity.

It is very touching to see Will Ferrell try to understand as best he can Harper’s journey, who answers all his questions. Even the most stupid ones, for example when he asks her, with his uncle’s humor, if she has become a bad driver since she became a woman!

But humor does not always succeed in defusing certain discomforts in the more hostile corners of America, and Will Ferrell discovers while worrying about his friend that the road is always a little more dangerous for women, trans or not.

This is also what Harper feels in his own flesh, proof that we never transition “for fun”, because if the journey would certainly have been easier for Andrew, it is the whole aspiration for a full life and whole that Harper could not have known.

We have rarely seen such an instructive, never moralizing, documentary on gender identity, probably because it is above all a film about friendship. But it is also a mirror held up to society which is revealed in its way of welcoming, or not, Harper.

Having never learned to drive, the imagination of the road and road trip is more or less anchored in me. I sometimes even find it a little too pervasive in American culture which has inflicted on me a few small independent films on this theme which I found mortally boring. Perhaps I am being a little disingenuous, out of jealousy, because on the rare occasions when I drove alongside friends who were driving, I appreciated this freedom of being able to take side roads. .

This is why I admire Catherine Mavrikakis for having learned to drive in her fifties, which allowed her to write this little book, On the Roads – A Strange Journey from Chicago to Alamogordowhich has just been published by Héliotrope. A short story written at full speed, since it recounts her recent escapade in the United States last summer, but whose reflection is deepened by a lifetime of visiting this country for her who was born in Chicago, and whose work is firmly rooted in North America. Without forgetting his great knowledge of American literature, in particular the writers who were inspired by the myth of the road, such as McCarthy, Kerouac or Steinbeck.

Mavrikakis is delighted from the start that the famous novel The Road by Cormac McCarthy came to sound the death knell for the myth of the road and progress – in this terrible story, we remember, everything is nothing but ashes and despair, and a father tries to save his son from a catastrophe which is never named, taking a road which seems to lead nowhere.

“In literature, after McCarthy, we will no longer be able to cling to the simple idea of ​​the beauty of the journey,” notes Mavrikakis, who recalls that McCarthy “does not hesitate to absorb two monuments of the history of American literature [The Road de Jack London et On the Road de Jack Kerouac] and to be part of a lineage that the writer will divert for his own benefit to make it obsolete or in any case cause him great harm. »

Catherine Mavrikakis, however, wonders if it is true that the journey in literature is coming to an end, and as her mythomaniac father promised her throughout her childhood a road trip which never arrived, she decides to treat herself to it.

“It is quite obvious that women are often excluded from road trip », writes Catherine Mavrikakis. “We just have to think about the film Thelma & Louise to feel how, even if the road is a sign of freedom for women, there are dangers for them when they decide to take it. »

The road has never been equal, many drivers do not want to share it, Mavrikakis makes us understand. With women, but also African-Americans who have long had to follow the advice of the famous Green Bookthis guide that explained where to stay and get supplies for blacks in segregationist America. The road is also full of dangers for migrants who cross borders on foot in the hope of a better life.

Despite everything, in this long journey where she travels from east to west and from north to south, the writer goes to meet this sometimes fantasized America, finding the town of Bay City of her childhood, the state of Michigan where she studied, visiting many independent bookstores, thinking, in front of the work Untitled by Wojnarowicz in a museum in Washington about the disappearance of bison, indigenous people and homosexuals during the AIDS epidemic, meeting people in Memphis upset by the attempted assassination of Donald Trump (another proof of the violence of politics American), analyzing the discourse on social classes in the book Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance, Trump’s running mate in the next elections…

These are two very interesting perspectives on the United States today that Harper Steele and Catherine Mavrikakis offer us, two feminine perspectives too, which change the perspectives on the road to the future that we are all following, a future that is never written in advance.