Heart of Goodness, Carolyne Van Der
Meer
Guernica Editions,
2020
Just as the collection can be read in French or English or both at once (Van Der Meer first wrote the poems in English, the translations are her own), it may also be read through a religious or secular viewpoint.
For Catholic readers, Heart of Goodness makes a spare, accessible and gorgeous primer for ages 12 to 112 on this historical figure’s life. As a secular reader raised in the Catholic Church, having experienced overt cruelty by the Church as a young queer person, and writing this review after the Pope refuses to bless same-sex unions, not to mention as a white settler aware of the hundreds of years of devastating trauma and violence the Church has inflicted on Indigenous communities, I cannot help but read the story of Margeurite Bourgeoys through her connection to that institutional violence. What I found is that there’s ample value and beauty in Van Der Meer’s work even for the secular reader. The poems are deftly written on the balance between these readings.
Van Der Meer paints this history using an intimate first-person narrator. The voice of Marguerite Bourgeoys unfolds in present tense so that we feel drawn into her decisions and emotional space. Telling this story in first-person, present tense verse was an insightful choice—withholding narrative judgment and creating space for the reader to enter.
I look for ways / to fill emptiness / am lost
The first few poems, in which you’ll find these lines, are composed of three- or four-line stanzas. Bourgeoys’ mission first becomes clear to her in France, when she realizes it is her vocation to educate impoverished girls.
pedagogy deeply entrenched / interact with the pupils / who by their numbers need special treatment / an original way to reach them / teach them
The rest of the collection is composed of single-stanza poems, as though Bourgeoys’ intention and determination have altered the structure of her thoughts, as though her mission has given her the words with which to fill her emptiness.
The values that fuel Bourgeoys are community, equality, and hard work. She never married but had a strong friendship with Jeanne Mance, who founded the first hospital in Ville-Marie. Bourgeoys was adamant that it was not God who called to her but the Virgin Mary. In a passionate outcry in which the poet’s voice rings with the subject’s, the narrator exclaims “why have women struggled / with equality parity / deep down men knew / she was the trailblazer / the trail not blazed by a man / could never / have been / blazed / by a man.” These two women were so dedicated to their vocations and so influential that they’re still known as founders of the Montreal institutions we know today—and they earned this legacy status in the 17th and 18th centuries, when it was custom for girls as young as twelve to be married off to adult men, hundreds of years before women were declared ‘persons.’
a school / the beginnings / of a new community / cornerstones / of Ville-Marie society / hospital church / we share values conviction / it is a friendship of equals
If Van Der Meer’s previous poetry collection, Journeywoman, were a waterway, it would be a gushing spring river, lusty tributaries cutting unruly but loving paths into muddy riverbanks. Heart of Goodness would be a new canal, measured, its power increased by that measuring— purposeful, but never brash. In the preface of Journeywoman, Van Der Meer writes: “It is really about the journey a woman makes—not just towards being an apprentice and then a master of all that womanhood offers, but also, the physical journey.” I felt this sensibility keenly in reading Heart of Goodness: the poet’s heightened awareness of the historical context and constraints of Bourgeoys’ work, these physical, undeniable realities that tie intentions to results.
When Bourgeoys welcomes les filles du Roy, girls and women recruited by the French colony to marry the settler men and increase their population, Bourgeoys commits to showing them “all they need / to know / to survive / here / they have no idea / the hardships / that await” and admits “it’s all I can give them / this bit / of education.” I get the sense that Van Der Meer is steering me to the realization that while Bourgeoys was doing all she could, we should be aware of the systemic patriarchal barriers that kept her from building her own vision of women’s equality. Some poems deal quite shockingly with children’s deaths without redemption or explanation, leaving Bourgeoys to continue her work in the raw wake of trauma, guilt, and grief.
of life / robbed / stripped bare / with grief
The French translation of these lines takes on images that the English doesn’t have:
la vie / se dérobe autour de moi / je suis nue / le deuil m’envahit
which translates back to:
life / disrobes around me / I am naked / grief invades me
I find the French here incredibly beautiful, with a layer of meaning I perhaps wouldn’t have perceived with just the English. Bourgeoys feels herself in sudden intercourse with life. Reality reveals itself and lays her bare in this intimate act of—to borrow the biblical term—knowledge that is then seized by this masculine-coded grief invading the naked feminine.
The numbered titles resist labelling, allowing the story in verse to unfold. Still, I can’t help but feel that Van Der Meer is quietly motioning to me that feminism that works within the confines of an oppressive colonial system can never be successful.
Reading this collection impelled me to delve further into Canadian history and Marguerite Bourgeoys’ role in it—into what had been a wisp of a memory of my sixth-grade French settler education. And I discovered that Bourgeoys’ educational vocation led her to be directly implicated, through her founding of a mission with the Sulpician diocesan order, with the Oka land crisis that persists unresolved to this day. Her early schools were precursors to residential schools. That such a woman could find her noble efforts diverted to the corrupt causes of the colonial system serves as an important lesson that any non-decolonial feminism is colonial feminism whether it’s trying to be or not.
Van Der Meer’s brilliance lies in revealing this feminist reality in such a way that I feel like I’ve discovered it myself. And yet it was there along. Heart of Goodness is an important book for Canadian feminism. What better medium than poetry to set us into the heart of one of its most complex women of history?
I’ve already pre-ordered Van Der Meer’s third collection, Sensorial, on the physics and metaphysics of sensory perception, forthcoming September 2021 with Inanna Press.
