Rien
du tout, Olivia Tapiero
Mémoire d’encrier,
2021
Everything is related in Olivia Tapiero’s grand, immense book Rien du tout (Nothing At All). Mummified children, assimilation, Québécois nationalism, urchins, misogyny, colonialism, war, family, the sea, the body. Violence is everywhere: the destruction of marine life for the sake of human comfort; insanity placed within people so they may be taken away; bodies that burn, that are shot, that are tortured; clumsy attempts at penetration; unwilling accommodation and underlying resistance; the Russian front during the first World War; France’s oppression and executions in Algeria, the destruction and murders and rapes that generations carry.
The mouth is a recurring image, but in general orifices stand in for one another, take each other’s place – and not just on the human body. Too much is being forced in; so much needs to be expelled that bodily functions replace one another, that new ones emerge. The speaker is becoming something else within herself that is both parasitic and liberating:
I would like to name the parasite, but I only see my face. Soon the thing will occupy the greatest part of me, it will come out of my skin and leave behind it what I will no longer be.
J’aimerais nommer le parasite, mais je ne vois que mon visage. Bientôt la chose occupera la plus grande partie de moi, elle sortira de ma peau et laissera derrière elle ce que je ne serai plus. (17)
There is no distinction between depression and systems of oppression; between pain in the hips and the pain felt by others across continents; between disappearance and mutation – because they are experienced from the inside throughout the book, through the body, through diasporic collective being. And Tapiero’s writing displays a deep awareness of contradictions, in the attitude of Canadian and Québécois men toward the speaker, in the attitude and longings of the women in her family as they play out the effects of colonialism; in her training through culture and education to become a collaborator of Québec’s own brand of (re)colonialism. And in the disjunction between being born and not being, naître and n’être (63).
I need to feel death to determine the contours, I need to examine the signs of the decomposition of others. Everything reveals itself in its damaging. It doesn’t stop me from grabbing on to things for fear that they might wane between my hands. I accumulate to slow the loss and it ends up destroying everything.
J’ai besoin de sentir la mort pour déterminer les contours, j’ai besoin d’examiner les signes de la décomposition des autres. Tout se révèle en s’abîmant. Ça ne m’empêche pas de m’agripper aux choses par peur qu’elles s’étiolent entre mes mains. J’accumule pour ralentir la perte et ça finit par tout détruire. (79)
The nothingness of the title is carried through a meditation not on emptiness but on appetite, hunger, absorption, creation, and birth. An emptiness perhaps in the sense of a transfer of matter or emotion, a transfer of life. There is the desire to assimilate, to appropriate, to possess, felt within the speaker at time, and for the most part felt as an outside threatening force, which threatens to swallow everything up:
to subjugate : to flatten out to exist : good intentions erase history : protocols are established : administrative sadness : it’s the order of things : what swallows us : all bodies included
assujettir : aplanir pour exister : les bonnes intentions effacent l’histoire : les protocoles sont établis : tristesse administrative : c’est l’ordre des choses : ce qui nous avale : tout corps confondus (97)
Yet through most of the book, the dominating desire is for the possibility that something great might be contained inside what seems to be empty but is instead absence, collapse, engulfment. A decolonial hunger for something other than what fills the bodies of colonized women and destroys them from the inside. Usually it emerges from loss and what has been kept from the speaker – language for instance, the forgetting, the denial, the confiscation of Arabic – often it is menacing, but it also motivates something like hope:
I make friends with what surrounds me. The epiphany is relational. I have felt it in my reading as in the forest, while listening to strangers speak to me to the point of whitening the night or on acid, collapsed by the streaming mountain of roots. To go through the relation dissolves me. It is the only disappearance that remains untouched that is not a violence or an erasure. A decolonial disappearance.
Je me lie d’amitié avec ce qui m’entoure. L’épiphanie est relationnelle. Je l’ai ressentie dans la lecture comme en forêt, en écoutant des étrangers me parler jusqu’à blanchir la nuit ou bien sur l’acide, effondrée par la montagne ruisselante de racines. Éprouver la relation me dissout. C’est la seule disparition qui demeure intouchée qui ne soit pas une violence ou un effacement. Une disparition décoloniale. (18)
Tapiero manages to achieve what I see quite simply as a feat. She lets us see colonialism without being overtaken by it, she makes something else out of it, in the moment of reading, in that lasting power that is created in the contact between the events she recounts with sparse detail, the speaker’s voice that prolongs them, their inscription in the body of the reader (“Nothing whiter than those blue eyes,” 41; “your eyes blue like death,” 83). She locates colonialism. In Algeria. In Europe. In Québec (and were I to write in a different context I might focus on that facet of the book - that, and my own blue eyes). In bodies. In minds. In relationships.
There is in each place the ghost of fantasies disappointed by the place.
Il y a dans chaque
lieu le fantôme des fantasmes déçus par le lieu. (65)
It’s fitting then that the book ends in Greece, that place to which the West traces its beginnings, that moment of great imperialism and collapse, in disappointment and in the disappearance of the self as the horizon nears, as something else is being prepared. Delphi becomes a place not for knowledge of the self, but to expulse the self and give birth to it.
Rien du tout is deeply political, it shares the intimate experience of oppression and the energies of revolt and revolution, it sides with the latter by focusing on them. The book is a series of revolutionary acts through unforgettable hyper-realistic and surrealistic images. An overthrowing of silence, of ignorance, of complacency. Of violence. All I can do, really, is say: as I read, this is happening; make it happen too.
