Olivia Tapiero (1990) is a writer,
translator and musician, born in Montreal. She has authored several books,
including Les murs (2008), Phototaxis (2017/2021), Nothing at All (2021/2026), and Un carré de poussière (2025). Her work has been
awarded the Robert-Cliche Prize and the Spirale Eva-le-Grand Prize, and has
been shortlisted for awards such as the Lambda Literary Awards, the Grand Prix
du livre de Montréal and the Governor General’s Literary Award. The editor-in-chief
of the Quebec creative writing review Moebius, she regularly contributes
to national and international publications. She has translated authors such as
Anne Boyer, Roxane Gay and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Her performance and musical
work, in collaboration with choreographer and composer Charlie Khalil Prince,
has been presented at the Festival TransAmériques in 2025. She lives in
Marseille.
Olivia Tapiero reads [virtually[ in Ottawa alongside Marie-Célie
Agnant and Sanita Fejzić at the Riverbed Reading Series event on Tuesday, March
24, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.
Is this what a black hole looks like from the
inside?
In astrophysics, it is said that when a body enters a
black hole, it undergoes a process called spaghettification: an almost
infinite horizontal stretching and vertical compression. This is due to the
extremely strong tidal forces of black holes. Maybe this book is the reverse
process: something emerging from a black hole, with a very dense shape, in
fragments, following a spiral, mixing temporalities and spacialities. Or maybe
every sentence is a semantic noodle.
In your text, Nothing at All, you bring to it
visercal descriptions of numbness, pain, rape, menstrual blood (much of it
literal viscera). You write, I give birth to myself. I repeat it in order to
exist, to dissolve in a different way. This is the experience of
externalizing the internal (internal to the body, internal to the structures
that guide us), is this writing?
I think that my work generally questions this
delimitation between the internal and the external. Intuitively, I would say
that it is more like an internalization of the “external”: how history,
colonialism, gendered violence, but also nature, the elements, the land, are
felt in the flesh. This can manifest itself as traumatic, fragmented memory,
chronic pain, etc., but also a deep awareness of interconnection.
Sexual violence, like rape, is probably one of the
strongest manifestations of a paradigm of violence penetrating the flesh the
flesh, leaving an imprint on the body-mind. This is why it is often used as a
weapon of war, as a tool of conquest and genocide. To conquer the land, one
repeats different abjections and injuries on the bodies that inhabit that land,
that embody it. We see this very clearly today with Palestine: the way people
are mutilated, raped, amputated, traumatized by the ongoing Zionist aggression.
This is how settler colonial violence writes itself inside indigenous bodies,
as is also the case on Turtle Island, or, not so long ago, in Algeria, in the
Congo, for example, during brutal colonization processes.
If we accept, momentarily, your definition of writing
as externalizing the internal, we have to add that this process follows a long,
sometimes satisfying and sometimes painful, but always profound,
internalization of the external. It is a fermentation of the external in the
internal, made external again, but with something shifting in the language,
transforming it, so that subjection becomes something else, something that is
powerful because it cannot fully be grasped.
However, one could argue that these binaries of
external/internal are themselves colonial, structured by an understanding of
the individual/the body as something separate from the world. Writing for me is
at the border, questioning the border. Much like language itself.
To follow from the above, the text uses cosmic
language (i.e. black holes, creatures from the sea) and speaks to global
experiences of colonization and increased visibility and influence of fascism
and yet, it is very much anchored in the body. Can you speak to how in this
text, one informs the other, the personal and the cosmic/global?
The personal is global, the global is personal. The
political is intimate, and vice-versa. It is just a question of scales, and
scales can always move and shift depending on how you choose to look (and a lot
of artistic endeavor is about this, how we choose to look). I like thinking of
the “personal” as a biopsy, a sample of the general phenomenon. Look at a leaf
through a microscope, it is cosmic. Look at the cosmos from far away, it is
dust. Look at rape, it is political. Look at colonialism, it is personal. Look
at History, made of so many histories, but also so many erasures, and look at
how these erasures show up in different ways. I think that the astrophysical
angle speaks to me because of the way “dark matter” structures space: this void
that is not void, this mysterious space-time that both binds and separates
things. This is how History works, this is how resistance works. Everything is
haunted by what has been erased, I really do believe that. And we must protect
this haunting, because it whispers a subterranean truth that fascism cannot
erase.
For me, and particularly in regards to colonization,
the text does the work of demythologizing. You write, Exociticism compresses
me to make me readable, desirable. It also constructs mythology around the
self – which is a powerful thing, especially as it exists in the text, so
outside of cliché. Do you find power in this building and breaking myths? Again
you write, if I name it I risk its destruction. Is there power in naming
it?
Naming is not always identifying. Writing is not
always naming. I can be a way to not name, but rather to make felt, in order to
protect something. Like Glissant says, the right to opacity. Mythology is
interesting: like literature, and particularly poetry, it often speaks of
something besides itself. This slippage is powerful. Because if something is
just named, without the language making it felt, making it embodied through its
music, its composition, its particularities, then that something can be cut out,
bought, and sold, recuperated, corrupted. This is the challenge artists face:
how to give something without simply communicating it, so that it can be passed
on with truth and integrity.
A couple of years ago I bought a zine by Isabella
Roman that read: I want to think of each other the way I think of the ocean.
A place I visit to feel small. Since then I have built a running list
definition of good small and bad small. I was thinking about this
while reading Nothing at All (a good small experience). If I were
to give you these concepts (good small and bad small), could you
redefine them as understood in Nothing at All? As redefined by
you?
I would reframe this as: the illusion of separation
(what you call bad small) and the truth of interconnectedness (what you call
good small). The illusion of separation, which violence seeks to reinforce, is
always linked to suffering. The truth of interconnectedness is not always
joyous, it comes with grief and responsibility, but it carries a fragile beauty
that is worth defending.
I know you are a translator so hopefully you can pull
back the curtain on what often feels like a mystery to me. Your works (Phototaxis
and Nothing at All, both translated by Kit Schluter) have both been
translated to English, how does the relationship to the text change? How does
it feel from this side, the side of the author? What is gained and what is
lost? And what is the relationship to the translator for you?
I am very lucky to be translated by Kit Schluter, who
is a brilliant translator, writer and visual artist. He really gets the music
and rhythm of my work, and I feel like his translations not only match my
writing, they elevate it. It is a blessing to rediscover some passages after he
translates them - like something both foreign and familiar. Of course, since I
speak English, I can give my input from time to time, but it's important for me
to leave quite a bit of freedom to the person translating - translation is a
creative act, and this creation is founded on a profound understanding of the
source text. As a translator myself, I understand the research and
responsibility, the ethics even, that comes with carrying a text towards
another language. There is
some loss, and some unexpected gains, it's part of the magic and the mystery.
Maybe loss and gain is not the way to think about it : more like a
metamorphosis, a shifting. It's also very interesting to see how the
"same" text can resonate differently in another language, another
context. For example, in Phototaxis, the francophone readership did not
find the book humorous - the dark humour "only translates", as
Kit and I said in a previous
interview. I am looking forward to seeing how this will play out with Nothing
at All. Also, the temporal décalage between source text and translation can
shift the weight of things - Rien du tout names, in 2021, how fascism
arrives "with a red cap on its head", it sits down because we give it
a place. This resonates more heavily in 2026.
This stems from your answer just now and how I see the
works are marketed – memoir, prose, poetry. I will ask to reinforce and follow
from the above comments, is genre something you're conscious of as you're
working? Is that mixing of memoir, poetry, essay, etc. about working around and
with confined genres? Or is it less conscious, and it is how you collect and
make your work?
The marketing of genre is, for me, often an obstacle
to the truth of the text in terms of the preconceptions/expectations it can put
in a reader's mind. I do not consciously think of genre-bending when I write,
of course not. I just write, and it ends up not quite fitting in market
categories. It's just how I've been working, especially since Rien du tout
(for me, Phototaxis was more of a novel carrying its own death,
exploding into something more poetic, but there are already some theatrical
monologues in it). For me, what counts is the truth of the text, of its music,
its intuitions, its internal logic and composition. The question of categories
is business, so none of my business. I do, however, appreciate how texts can
make these categories expand, and maybe one day they will be as obsolete as
nation-states.
How does it feel to have your newest text, Un carré
de poussière, nominated for Le Prix des libraires du Québec, and what did
that recognition mean to you in terms of visibility and connection within the
literary community?
I am very moved to be a finalist for the Prix des
libraires. I wrote an entre-genre work, mixing essay, poetry, and visual
interventions (erasure poetry). To have this work recognized in the poetry
section feels validating, and also gives me hope, knowing that the definition
of poetry is expanding to include strange monsters. Poetry is less and less a «
genre », and it is the quality of poetics, of interrogating language, that is
valued here. My book was also awarded the Prix Spirale Eva-le-Grand,
which recognized essays. To have this work celebrated as a thinking poem is
moving, and encourages me to keep ignoring market categories of genre. I am
also glad that this nomination gives visibility to Les éditions de la rue
Dorion, a small, independent press that does important work, and that aligns
with my ethics and politics.
So, I like to read through the New York Times' By
the Book, but I don't often read American authors so I have little
relationship to the texts or the authors. I always wanted a personal canon of
By the Book, for what I'm reading. So...
Where do you like to read?
I like to read in my bed. Or, generally, lying down.
Sometimes, I’ll put a chair by the kitchen window, and I’ll read there. But I
enjoy feeling boneless when I read, like some invertebrate, gelatinous creature
absorbing it all.
Do you dog-ear your books?
Yes. Top and bottom corner, depending on where the
passage of interest is. The books I read do not get out intact. I’ll underline,
scribble in the margins, dog-ear a lot.
What are you reading now? What is on your
"nightstand"?
I often read many books at the same time. Right now,
I’m reading long-form big boys, because I am recovering from a hit-and-run
which left me pretty wounded (the brain is fine, the rest is a question of
patience and mechanics).
I therefore have a lot of time and stillness in front
of me. So for now the fiction is: War and War by László Krasznahorkai, Hopscotch
by Julio Cortázar. The essays are Imperialism by Hannah Arendt,
and Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti (I feel like it’s very
important, right now, to educate ourselves about the workings of imperial and
state-violence.)
Bennett Malcolmson is a
photographer, zine maker, and occasional writer. His photographic work has been
presented at Amberhill Gallery and in an offsite exhibition with the Art
Gallery of Sudbury. He has also exhibited in group shows, including with La
Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario and Play Smelter, presented by The COVERT Collective.
He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with his partner Chloé and their three cats.
