La Peuplade, 2019
The expression “chauffer le dehors” is
part of an annoyed injunction to close the door whenever the furnace is turned
on: “Ferme la porte, on chauffe pas le dehors!” – “Close the door, we’re not
heating up the outside!” As if something would be lost, energy wasted. It
carries echoes of houses and cabins without central heating, where the stove
was carefully stoked and the stock of firewood carefully managed, where all
this effort might be lost to carelessness.
Marie-Andrée Gill consciously refuses the
injunction and the way of life that comes with it:
si vous me
cherchez, je suis chez nous, if you’re looking for me, I’m at home
ou quelque part
sur Nitassinan, or somewhere on Nitassinan,
toutes mes portes
et mes fenêtres sont ouvertes all
my doors and my windows are open
je chauffe le
dehors. (84) I’m heating up the outside.
Wherever she is, and whatever she is
feeling, the speaker is at home: Nitassinan is ilnu-aimun for “Our territory.”
Her desire is to let warmth exit the house and circulate, but also to let in
something of the outside at all times, as much by entering the outside as by
taking down defenses erected against it. She acts on this desire by finding
ways to feel better – by getting some air – and, at the same time, by
communicating, by writing poetry: “The outside is the only answer that I have /
found to the inside” (“Le dehors est la seule réponse que j’ai / trouvée au
dedans,” 66). The circulation between inside and outside is part of a more
general manner of living and relating to emotions and feelings.
These affirmative lines come rather late
in the book. They help set the meaning of the first two thirds of the book,
which provide images of a failed relationship. Failed not in the activities,
the interests, the actions, the way one treats the other - no one does anything
bad to anyone, the relationship is not depicted as bad. But failed in the
incapacity to meaningfully relate to one another, to create bonds, to meet. In
the good that isn’t said. Chance encounters after the breakup reignite
attraction and bring back the kitchyness, the deep everydayness and
ordinariness of romance that Gill embraces:
La peur, c’est te
croiser au dépanneur et qu’on sache
pas quoi faire de
nos corps. (34)
The worry, is
coming across you at the depanneur and that we
wouldn’t know what
to do with our bodies.
Enjambements like this show the
disappearance of familiarity where it ought to still belong (and translating as
“we would know / not” would be a loss of the familiarity, the everydayness of
language that Gill renders throughout the book).
Attempts at relating take place through
what gives home its certainty, its solidity. The territory is present
throughout the book, extends from the forest to the city, it includes Céline
Dion and arenas:
Quand on
s’embrasse, c’est comme dans les films :
on s’envole
doucement, on monte et on reste pris
au plafond de
l’aréna avec les drapeaux des équipes
gagnantes des
années passées. (53)
When we kiss, it’s
like in the movies:
we take off
softly, we rise and we get stuck
on the ceiling of
the arena with the flags of the teams
who won in past
years.
The hyper-awareness of and play on clichés
include the relationship to the territory and the depiction of Innu in the
popular imagination. Some of these plays pierce through to a spiritual
experience grounded as much in memories as in relationality:
C’est juste
impossible que tu viennes plus It’s just impossible that you’d stop
coming
t’abreuver à mon
esprit ancestral to drink from my ancestral spirit
de crème soda (12) my cream soda spirit
Others are a reappropriation of both
popular culture and cultural clichés - as when the speaker imagines herself in
a state of surrender to her partner’s expert manoeuvering of a snowmobile:
Je me dis que ça
ferait un beau titre de quelque I
tell myself it would make for a nice title for
chose : Il danse avec les ski-doos. (14) something: Dances
with Ski-Doos.
Through a series of plays on cultural references
– figure skating and chef Ricardo, crows and The Thorn Birds – the book’s speaker is consciously getting over a
relationship and relating to herself. Narrative passages throughout explain
little, deepening instead a sense of being lost among the familiar. The book
highlights that what’s missing after a relationship ends is not only the result
of an external loss, but also indicates a return to an internal longing:
Quelque chose en
moi garde sa lampe allumée –
une déchirure, pas
tout à fait une blessure, plutôt
comme quand les
nuages s’ouvrent là au milieu,
dans la craque
entre les poumons – une envie qui peut
pas s’empêcher de
chercher le trouble, provoquer
la rencontre,
essayer n’importe quoi tout à coup que. (17)
Something in me
keeps its lamp turned on –
a tear, not quite
a wound, but more
like when clouds
open there in the middle,
in the crack
between the lungs – a longing that can
not keep itself
from looking for trouble, provoking
the meeting,
trying anything in case that.
Jérôme Melançon
writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. He
is the author of two books of poetry, De
perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques
pas quelque part (2016) with Éditions des Plaines, one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité
(Metispresses, 2018), and has a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup.
