Michelle Porter: How a Métis Violin Melody Shaped My First Novel
No one was more surprised than I when I started working on a novel and it came out in the form of a crooked Métis violin melody.
I used to think I was born without the music, that this ancestral gift had skipped my generation. And yet, somehow, my grandmother’s and great-grandfather’s music shaped the shape of my first novel, “A Grandmother Begins the Story.”
When I thought about why, I kept coming back to my middle name. A few years ago, at a storytelling workshop, I was asked to talk about my middle name, Elise.
Tell us about your middle name, they said.
At first I thought about its meaning, the meaning you would find in a name dictionary, “God’s Promise,” and variations on that theme. But a name goes back so much further and reaches so much further into the future than what’s in those dictionaries.
Tell us about your middle name, they said, and that changed the way I think about the stories I tell and write and their relationship to music.
My mother gave me the middle name Elise in honor of her aunt, my grandmother’s sister, Olive Elise Goulet, whose skill with the violin and piano made her a rising, shining talent before she died far too young, in 1960 at just 36 year. old. She, in turn, is named after her own grandmother, Elise Genthon, from a family known for their ability to make everyone’s feet dance with their violins.
If my mother gave me that name in the hope that I would start playing the violin or the piano, it didn’t work. I always felt like I had dropped that part, the music. I never learned the violin as a child and when I learned some basic violin with my daughters it wasn’t easy and I left it to make more time for the words that wanted to sing themselves in my pencil, my notebook and beyond my word processor.
And that’s why I felt a little less than. I come from a family of very talented musicians: why couldn’t I stick with the music? I have always understood myself as the descendant of musicians.
I started approaching music by researching family stories and following the history of the band known in Winnipeg in the 1930s, called the Red River Echoes, though also known as Bob Goulet and His Red River Echoes. My great-grandfather and great-grandmother, my grandmother and her sister were all part of the band, and they performed on all kinds of stages and dances, and even had a regular radio show.
One day my aunt texted me and added some songs. These were songs she’d managed to digitize from old records she’d kept in her back closet. So many of our Métis aunts have stored treasures this way, all dusty and patient. The songs she sent me are among the first Métis tunes ever recorded and some are now so fragile that digitizing them to preserve the music for the future risks destroying them.
I didn’t know that then. I pressed play.
That old scratchy record sound. A cooing baby from way back in the thirties. Which of my aunts or uncles is that baby?
The music starts. Piano first. The violin comes in later.
And then I listen to my grandmother and her sister and their father talk to me through the music they make together. I write about this moment in my non-fiction book Approaching Fire, the moment I heard their music, the passion that flowed from that violin and that piano.
Their music brought me home.
I realized that I was a musician, that I pour my music into the stories I tell and the way I arrange words. I also realized that my ancestors were always writers who used music to share their stories. Since listening to those songs, I realize that I approach writing with the same crookedness my ancestors brought to their music.
Crooked describes the Métis violinists’ refusal to adhere to standard meter as understood in European musical traditions. You can hear both First Nation and European influences in the old-fashioned skewed Métis tunes, but the music, like our people, is not part of this or part of that; it took on its own identity and consciousness as in the hands of the first Métis who traveled through the prairies and along the ancient river routes.
A traditional Métis violinist will add or drop a phrase, an extra beat, or even a few beats. In the tradition of live performance, the crookedness could be improvised every time a song was played, so there was an endless creative aspect to it. For many, it was like stealing a song and playing it exactly like the person you learned it from. Instead, you take someone’s song, give it credit, but make it your own by adding something of your own to it.
This novel is like that. I borrowed my mother’s stories and made something new with them. And the structure of the novel refuses to follow the regular beats of a novel, adding beats, phrases, and notes where necessary and dropping them when it makes for a better rhythm. I’ve been told I broke some rules in writing this novel, but I just stayed true to other rules. The traditional Métis violin style enabled me to do this.
“A Grandmother Begins the Story” follows five generations of Métis women and a herd of bison waiting to be transported to the land that will become their home. In this book, traditional Métis music flows between two sisters, one of whom is in the spirit world and the other is in rehab following a terminal cancer diagnosis. In these sections, the music itself becomes a character, and it deals with the sisters’ ability to understand each other and their lives as Métis women in this country called Canada in the mid-20th century.
The voices of each of the characters are instruments in the song: Mamé, Geneviève, Lucie, Allie, Carter, Tucker and all the bison facing disruption and ecological change. Each of the chapters are notes arranged to form irregular sentences. Sometimes I’ve added and omitted notes in a kind of improvisation, like crooked fiddling. Sometimes the notes play long in chapters that are pages and at other times the notes are in the form of a short paragraph before moving on to the next note. Some notes are prose, some borrow from poetry, some borrow from the sound of a buffalo herd on the plains, and some are text exchanges.
Tell us about your middle name, they said.
My youngest daughter’s first name is Elise. She started with the violin, but she is not a musician either. She is a visual artist, who understands her work through beading, painting and working with clay.
I think one day one of my daughters will have a child who will play the violin. Maybe a son. Maybe a daughter. Maybe her first name or her middle name is Elise, after her ancestors.
Or maybe it will be a new name, a new beat improvised and dropped into the music of our ancestors.
And I think one day one of these grandchildren will tell stories with the violin and make people dance.
Perhaps one day in the future they will take the books I have written from a dusty shelf and try to understand what they find in them.
Maybe they don’t feel called to paper or pen like I do. Perhaps they turn all the old stories into music, using the instruments that have amazed me, the violin and the bow.
And who knows what that musical child can do with all that history.
