À croire que j’aime les failles, Sylvie Bérard
Prise de parole, 2020
Here we have a book, a whole in spite of its fractures and open-endedness, rather than a collection of individual poems (although they hold their own as well). Its unity of feeling or view emerges when these faults are taken as a starting point: “Follow the folds that beam out. The centre is a view of the mind. Myriads of meetings disseminated, many more also read solely in transparency.” (“Suivre les plis qui rayonnent. Le centre est une vue de l’esprit. Des myriades de rencontres disséminées, beaucoup d’autres aussi lues seulement en transparence,” 72.) And Bérard gives us time and material to adjust our view.
She is deliberate in developing a poetic through her poems, but rarely indicates it outside of a few references, for instance to Jack Halberstam’s The Queer Art of Failure, or through a list of theoretical works in queer theory that inspired her. The very last text is at once a poem, a nonfictional reflection, a poetic manifesto for a queer practice of poetry. It presents a failing and defaulting practice in reaction to the impossibility of pinning down her self. Each poem similarly provides a location for a fruitless pursuit by drawing out moments of her interactions with things that cannot talk back or have their own meaning and with others who remain distant.
A first section presents brief poems, usually arranged in short stanzas, that make use of single semantic fields:
My irises in bloom
In the juice of
pupils
Used up
scrutinizing
Liquid penumbras
I see myself fall
In a humid forest
Hoping to hear
myself
Mes iris éclos
Dans le jus des
prunelles
S’usent à scruter
Les pénombres
liquides
Je me vois tomber
Dans une forêt
humide
En espérant m’entendre
(32)
Like fields, there is more to the poems than what we see, more than the view they give us of a single moment. By lacking connectors, and often explicit connections between lines, they refrain from telling any story or fully describing a scene. What’s left is textures, alternating softness and hardness, dispositions - and especially the feel of distances. Bérard uses the plurivocity of the pronouns d’eux, d’elles, d’iels (a nonbinary pronoun, since French has no singular they) which carries a distance and a belonging, as well as a gift (about them, of them, from them), as she plays with the negative pas d’eux, pas d’elles to mark a closeness with other undisclosed thems.
Likewise she lends equivocity to ils and elles, to leur, creating an atmosphere of mystery by leaving them just as undetermined as eux and elles can be. The subjects disappear behind the pronouns, leaving only the density of space:
My subjects ruled
I keep my
eloquences quiet
The step-by-steps
of my learning
Serving resonance
chambers
Mes sujets régis
Je tais mes
éloquences
Les pas-à-pas de
mes apprentissages
Au service des
caisses de résonnance (24)
A second section is composed of prose poems. Each describes a scene, an action within a landscape, a kind of welcoming of the world that is also an attempt to take part in it more fully. Most have to do with water, almost exhausting the semantic field of the surface and coast - all the way to gutters and sweat. Ships are powerless, objects are in tatters, in strips, brought down to the touch and actions they make possible in spite of their function. In a kind of desolation, the narrator is alone, save for books - Leonard Cohen, Gabrielle Roy, Anne F. Garréta, and a few theorists.
An allusion to a cimetière marin confirmed a feeling that, like Valéry, Bérard seeks to understand solitude and to give full expression to the grand emotions it makes possible. Like him, she renders the depth of what can’t be grasped. In spite of distance, others remain just within reach, if only superficially. Flowers accompany her, like in the poem quoted above. She situates herself “À fleur d’eau” (83), on the surface of water, where the elements coexist, where water blooms into something else. She conveys multi-layered images, allowing water to take over all other environments: “The trucks splash the windows and leave there fleeing fish” (“Les camions éclaboussent les vitres et y laissent des poissons qui filent,” 79). Splashing is a theme: trucks, fountains, carpets splash, one element encroaches on others, denies them their solitude.
A shorter, third section almost concludes the volume. It is difficult to pin down exactly what this section contains: a suite of poems, divided in two? Or a longer poem in two sections? Or two poems, each with undefined sections? Here the faultlines between expressions are unclear. The section, because we know at least that much is delineated, begins with plays on verb tenses and modes without subjects, moves on to undetermined subjects, ends with a summary of Bérard’s attempt to reach others - or more likely here, simply, to reach things, to give them the chance to reach her. Dream and desire appear as two figures of the fault - festive faults, as in the title of the section. Dreams make up the atmosphere of this section, a slip away from daily life, where desire is named explicitly as something to be recognized and understood - like in the rest of the book. It also appears through sexuality, at once performance and a moment of embodiment, another moment of fleeting connection, a mode of closeness and contact that can lead us to better reach out to others and things across distances, making ourselves whole in the process… if only in an atmosphere, a state of being, that remains cut off from other attempts at abolishing distance, separation, and fracture. Like poetry.
If we return to the poem where the line occurs, “À croire que j’aime les failles” (57) might also translate as In believing I love faultlines. And indeed the swelling strength of Bérard’s book takes its origin in this cause, this beginning, this backdrop for what makes us fail and be made to run aground (échouer) - a belief, an emotion, an accident that can only be followed by other accidents, some of which we precipitate ourselves.
