Jérôme Melançon : Une sorte de lumière spéciale, by Maude Veilleux

Une sorte de lumière spéciale, Maude Veilleux
L’Écrou, 2019.

 

  

 

It’s one thing to state that we can’t become someone else without ceasing to be who we were, or that we can’t leave it all behind. To make the idea true and meaningful requires a certainty that words like sincerity and authenticity don’t quite convey. Maude Veilleux relies on personal and collective introspection to recreate a connection between her selves, and these selves and those of the readers. There’s a Maude from Beauce, from working-class poverty, and there’s a Maude who lives within an artistic community in Montreal where there’s a different kind of poverty. This Maude who is writing proletarian poetry and wonders about the actuality of class struggle can’t adhere to her past. She is also kept from adhering to her new milieu because she is seen as too trashy - she or her poetry? - even though for her trash isn’t a poetics or a choice, but a matter of origins, a perceptual reaction of others to what she does still carry of her origins.

Veilleux sticks to a mostly non-metaphorical language that’s already signifying while leading an exploration of linguistic registers, code-switching and code-combining, and representations of daily life which are central to L’Écrou’s aesthetic. This shared project, which outlines something of a poetic movement within Québécois poetry, perhaps gives her the sense that “I am writing the same book as twelve other people” (j’écris le même livre que douze autres personnes, 60). Her reflection on writing finds its place in the writing itself, and Veilleux manages the feat of not producing theory even as she writes about writing and its demands: “I must write the text and write the text around the text and also live the text and live the text around the text” (je dois écrire le texte et écrire le texte autour du texte et aussi vivre le texte et vivre le texte autour du texte, 45). She does not let the reader forget that she is writing - or they are reading. Her vulnerability before the reader’s judgment remains tied to the vulnerability of life, images of brushes with death and suicide, and a desire for “total recognition” (72) that animates both impulses toward writing and death.

This total recognition is the reverse side of total alterity, the impossibility of any genuine understanding of others because of a lack of overlapping experience and knowledge:

I believe in total alterity
I dream of it
I can’t wait until we can take a trip in other people’s heads
a package to be won
I choose britney
or you over there in east broughton who works in a shop
the industrial era is over
so no one talks about your life
no one defends you
no one knows that they bring back the stock from mexico
that they open the bag and that they write
made in canada on it to sell it at a higher price
no one knows that at your work a guy died in his machine
you picked him up
you mopped up behind
total alterity

je crois à l’altérité totale
j’en rêve
j’ai hâte qu’on puisse faire des voyages dans la tête des autres
un forfait à gagner
je choisis britney
ou toi là-bas à east broughton qui travailles dans une shop
l’ère industrielle est finie
so personne ne parle de ta vie
personne ne te défend
personne sait qu’on ramène le stock du mexique
qu’on ouvre le sac et qu’on écrit
made in canada dessus pour le vendre plus cher
personne sait qu’à ta job un gars est mort dans sa machine
tu l’as ramassé
tu as moppé en arrière
altérité totale (46-47)

The poetic achievement of these poems and the tightly bound whole they make up come out of the use of introspection to allow for her situation to serve as a metaphor. A metaphor that isn’t on the page, but instead that needs a reader to activate it, that needs a will to identify, to shed the proprieties that protect us from each other, the borders and walls that protect the privilege of some. Anxiety, depression, and suicide aren’t only their own topics. They are gateways into relationships with the world and with others - gateways back to material, economic life.

Introspection takes place through the repetition of certain motifs in personal life, as a device for bringing moments together. So the cutting of carrots and the fear of her cat’s death show the constancy of the mistrust she feels from others and of her desire for permanence. Much of this introspection is turned toward solitude and brokenness, their reappropriation from the forces of distraction, the search for a course, a posture, a stance:

I feel alone
I always feel alone
I have a splinter in the engine
I have a heart in the engine
I don’t have a car
in a country where one is needed
yesterday I rolled my ankle with my new shoes
I cried
I wasn’t injured
I just started to cry
walking straight
not tipping over
not falling on my side right in the middle of the sidewalk
(the gif of the little girl who collapses on the beach)
I don’t know how to be anymore
I walk lying down
forehead to the ground
I fold on all sides
what strength in not breaking
better to be a reed that freaks out
than a big fucking tree right
here there’s a fracture

 

je me sens seule
je me sens toujours seule
j’ai une écharde dans le moteur
j’ai un coeur dans le moteur
je n’ai pas de char
dans un pays où il en faut un
hier je me suis versée le pied avec mes nouveaux souliers
j’ai pleuré
je n’étais pas blessée
j’ai juste commencé à pleurer
marcher drette
pas basculer
pas tomber sur le côté en plein milieu du trottoir
(le gif de la petite fille qui s’effondre sur la plage)
je ne sais plus comment être
je marche couchée
le front au sol
je plie de tous les bords
quelle force de ne pas casser
vaut mieux être un roseau qui capote
qu’un gros câlisse d’arbre right
ici il y une fracture (40-41)

These lines are only one part of a longer poem, and the length of most poems allows for such juxtapositions and small shifts in themes as the disjuncted narration progresses, and for intensity in images and rhythm. Some poems even seem to contain smaller poems, stanzas that hold on their own, just as the book feels like a single threaded poem.

Veilleux also uses a collective form of introspection, which focuses on the writers’ community, through direct references to names in the poems and footnotes, and on the tragedy of her hometown losing its one industry while having relied all along on close ties built through it. In one of the many explorations of the event, Abba lyrics are turned upside down in an illustration of a shared helplessness. The experience is collective, a part of everyone’s history and situation - and Veilleux takes part in it as the perfect participant-observer, the small-town bartender:

when the shop closed
it started up an abba frenzy at the bar
we listened to fernando forty times a day
every hour every minute seemed to last eternally
funny what’s channelled through pop
the men danced on the tables while telling themselves
that they would never in their life nail down another truss
their last paycheck
fallen into the lost accounts
the shop’s false bankruptcy gnawed at the village
they shrugged and drank their worries
believe me honestly
we only have ten minutes to live
ain’t about to cry over a job
a week later the bar was still full
long faces
the future
and what now?
what?
I was eighteen
no advice
no insight on life
another tall budlight
can you hear the gun fernando
the men, they cry too
and it seems it’s even sadder
because it comes out of a blocked place
 

quand la shop a fermé
ça a starté une frenzy d’abba au bar
on écoutait fernando quarante fois par jour
every hour every minute seemed to last eternally
c’est drôle ce qui se canalise dans la pop
les monsieurs dansaient sur les tables en se disant
qu’ils ne cloueraient plus jamais un trust de leur vie
leur dernier chèque de paye
tombé dans les comptes perdus
la fausse faillite de la shop grugeait le village
ils haussaient les épaules et buvaient leurs inquiétudes
crois-moi sincère
on a juste dix minutes pour vivre
m’as pas pleurer pour une job
une semaine plus tard le bar était encore plein
des faces longues
l’avenir
et puis quoi maintenant?
quoi?
j’avais dix-huit ans
aucun conseil
aucun insight on life
une autre grosse budlight
can you hear the gun, fernando
les monsieurs ça pleure aussi
et on dirait que c’est encore plus triste
parce que ça sort d’une place bouchée (67-68)

The success of Veilleux’s book as proletarian poetry is its organicity: everything is related, introspection leads back to material life, from food and the body to work and violence. After finding its way back several times to the desires to flee and find refuge, the book ends where introspection can only spiral: in the impossibility of fully facing violence, of truly communicating it, of having others recognize it - of finding oneself again, of bridging who violence took away from her and what it made of her. The last few pages of the book fall into the hypnotic repetition of consciousness in the middle of the night: mixed-up letters, spacing between and within thoughts, and exponents, a staccato rhythm. And an awareness of the impossibility to simply say certain things:

when I write violence do you all hurt
and when I write fear
and when I write crying
the word = the word
nothing more

 

quand j’écris violence avez-vous mal
et quand j’écris peur
et quand j’écris pleurer
le mot = le mot
sans plus (85)

 

 

 

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 more recently a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup.