Jérôme Melançon : Éventrer le bois, by Émilie Pedneault

Éventrer le bois, Émilie Pedneault
Les éditions de la maison en feu, 2020

 

 

First there’s a child, her presence in and to the forest, her desire for affection and protection – and within a few pages, the sexual abuse diffuse through these desires, and her desire for death, her self-hatred. Within the first and last sections which might function as two long poems, each page presents what could be an individual poem without a title, each page break forms a caesura. And in one of the strongest pages of the book we get a sense of the transformation that’s brought about and made necessary by violence:

the eyes of the beasts speak for her
like sandpaper on her fresh skin
made raw
remains

she shifts
roped
feet pointed at the sky
and waits

to be given her due
to be ground with one hand

les yeux des bêtes parlent pour elle
comme un papier sablé sur sa peau fraîche
à vif
une dépouille

elle se mue
encordée
les pieds pointés vers le ciel
et attend

qu’on lui donne son reste
qu’on la broie d’une seule main (26)

The word dépouille here is not chosen by chance: it is a dead body, but dépouiller means to shed, dépouillé to be bare – the obverse of emptiness. Likewise se mue might be more literally translated as “she changes,” but could also mean “molts herself,” and la mue can also be the dépouille, the remains of the molt, the molted skin. And son reste is both her due, what she deserves, and what remains to her. Pedneault’s grammar is bare, functioning through juxtaposition and opposition, images that slowly appear and become more precise as we read. From the first section on there’s a haunting, a sense that the child is torn apart to the point of barely being able to appear, to the point of existing outside herself and needing others to remain incarnate. Suffering isn’t the right concept, and Pedneault avoids naming the pain – but not the actions or the parts of the body that are hurt. There isn’t even a search for a sense of wholeness, only puzzlement at the idea. This idea of a body that is missing something will find a response in the conclusion of the book, where bark provides a fragile form of protection, just beyond bare skin or membrane – barely sufficient as a metaphor to evoke a sense of wholeness.

The second and longest section uses a simple tree branch with leaves to separate poems – or perhaps they are buds, or “three-eye clovers / in makeup” (trèfles à trois yeux / maquillés, 29). These poems explore separation from others: from the abuser (or abusers?), from her mother and grandmother who ought to have better warned and protected her, from herself and her desire for approval and closeness – these facts of youth, of being a person. Disgust permeates these poems, above all a disgust at softness that’s associated with a girl’s body – the softness of hands, of catkins, of body hair, of wool blankets, but also menstruations – and a disgust at the body of old men, their skin, their fingers, their genitals.

The poems look into the past to make sense of “youth / eyes half formed / the heart that takes up all the room” (la jeunesse / les yeux à moitié formés / le cœur qui prend toute la place, 41). They linger on relationships – most often to her young self and to the abuser (or abusers), where there’s a dialectic of love and hatred:

I lost the thread
of my skin mended
to yours 

I shelled your bones
sandpapered your aorta
ate up your eyes 

I don’t know what image to knead anymore
I just want to reverse the roles
make a sadist out of me 

to split your past
break you

to enjoy it
[...]

even though I scrub the steel wool
over all my surfaces
always I feel you
breaking down the door into me

 

j’ai perdu le fil
de ma peau raccommodée
à la tienne 

je t’ai écaillé les os
sablé l’aorte
bouffé les yeux 

je sais plus quoi pétrir comme image
je veux juste inverser les rôles
faire de moi une sadique 

pour fendre ton passé
te briser

pour en jouir
[...]

j’ai beau me passer la laine d’acier
de bord en bord
toujours je te sens
forcer la porte en moi (36-37)

I’m leaving aside some of the stronger poems because I don’t think it’s up to me to relate that pain – I’m not at a point where I can do it justice (I’m already avoiding enough as it is here). Pedneault does it admirably well, warding off voyeurism through her use of sympathy toward herself and rawness in relating the trespassing. To illustrate how abuse and violence permeate a life, there are also the relationships mediated by the abuser, including the relationship to animals and the woods, where there is as much beauty as danger. Animals populate metaphors, common expressions and rhymes find their original, nonfigurative meaning. She is a cat, there are dead kittens, and there are “d’autres chats à fouetter” – stuff to do, literally cats to whip; worms also find their way from an abuser’s actions to her attempts at living after the fact; squirrels are killed for taking the insulation out of the roof, and lose all their defenses after having disemboweled her woods.

I had been pulled in by the title – Éventrer le bois, disemboweling the woods, an image of sheer force and impossibility. I had seen a promotional video that reminded me of my own time in, near the woods – simple, beautiful images, and an excerpt read by Pedneault. I wasn’t ready for this book, and given the lack of violence in my history, it’s likely I couldn’t have been. I was surprised by its matter; I didn’t put it down. Perhaps I was hoping for a happy ending; more likely I was trying to find my footing, to figure out where I stood, what I was being made to see, so much Pedneault escapes any voyeuristic gaze. It took me a while to get back to it after reading it, as if it had to do its work on me before I could hold it again. This book feels like it was written as a book, as what must have been a deliberate and lengthy attempt to account for a way out of violence, abuse, hate, toward something like a life.

We see something of life in the last section, a transformation through pregnancy, and always as a glimmer throughout. This life was not given to the woman who speaks in the last section, she had to take it, reclaim it. These last poems are sparse, like the words we can force from ourselves when we leave a place and those who remain behind. And indeed she leaves behind the forest she prefers, abandoning them for the seaside, even though “grains of sand do not soften me / I prefer by far rubbing my back against leafy trees” (les grains de sable ne m’attendrissent pas / je préfère de loin me frotter le dos aux feuillus, 56).

 

 

 

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 (2020).