Jérôme Melançon : Rien du tout, by Olivia Tapiero

Rien du tout, Olivia Tapiero
Mémoire d’encrier, 2021

 

 

 

 

I’m choosing to read Olivia Tapiero’s book Rien du tout (Nothing At All) as poetry. There are good reasons not to. I don’t care much for them. Then again I don’t care much for the reasons to do it either – the poetic form of a few pages, especially in the section titled “Me voici greffe fade” (I am now bland graft). The movement in tone, the voice that can’t be dislodged from its words. The refusal to comply to a form, the eschewing of narration, of argumentation, of guidance. The overthrowing and transfiguration of language to make it say something else, to make oneself as writer / the other as reader be something else. But not all books that do all this are poetry, and this one also eschews the expectations around poetry. It’s a decision I made upon hearing about the book, it would be there even if I hadn’t spelled it out because of where I’m going to publish the review. And I could believe that my decision would change nothing to the book. A different decision would be just as justifiable, and would also change nothing to the book. This book that is in some parts addressed to me (83), insofar as am I being shit on:

Allow me to interrogate your hospitality, to suspect a transaction within it. Allow me to shit on your provinces, your choruses, your cowardice, the little nazis that warm up their hands in the historic church of your capital while you expand on democracy, minority governments, the great culture. Allow me to shit on your failure, your ambition, your linguistic anxiety, your values tests and your eyes blue like death. In your geometry, which is that of the world, my survival is a menace that’s quickly tied up, like a child’s whim.

Permets-moi d’interroger ton hospitalité, d’y soupçonner une transaction. Permets-moi de chier sur tes provinces, tes refrains, ta lâcheté, les petits nazis qui se réchauffent les mains dans l’église historique de ta capitale pendant que tu épilogues sur la démocratie, les gouvernements minoritaires, la grande culture. Permets-moi de chier sur ton ratage, ton ambition, ton anxiété linguistique, tes tests de valeurs et tes yeux bleus comme la mort. Dans ta géométrie, qui est celle du monde, ma survie est une menace qu’on garrotte vite, comme un caprice d’enfant. (83)

But of course I know that I also shit on much of that, knowing that that is one of my previous forms and very much what I come from, and that I try to expel that. This book is a rejection, an expulsion of colonialism that goes beyond critique and criticism and indictment – but also of Québécois nationalism (and parallels would be quickly made with Canadian nationalism). It’s a lesson in anti-nationalism. But the book isn’t anti-colonial, it’s decolonial, and the parallel between colonialism and nationalism makes me wonder what the equivalent of decolonialism would be, what a denationalism might be like - as my autocorrect takes the “de” out of both words and leaves red squiggly lines underneath, as if it knew all about the dialectic of emancipation and the return of domination. I will need to read through this book, again, to find the seeds of this denationalism (here we go again – and I won’t let the dictionary co-opt the term). And I find myself in agreement with the sentiment on that page, on a territory across which I’ve been led before, one I point to sometimes, as I suppose I do in my choice of books here. Because am I not extending some form of hospitality in my readings, in my reviews? Or perhaps there’s a difference between inviting people to visit a space and inviting them to visit with people (keeoukaywin), as my Métis friends and colleagues suggest, and this invitation might be recognizing the hospitality of those with whom I visit; in inviting people to visit with books, as I’m trying to figure out somewhere else right now; in turning the space rob gives me into a roundabout or something.

So while I know that my reading isn’t going to change anything to the book, I also know that the book is a voice, and not (only) a voice in the sense of literary analysis. The voice of a woman, of the women in her life, of the women before her, in her family, in Algeria, of the women around her, let’s say in Montreal, in Québec, in Canada. And especially of colonized, racialized women, of women who hold colonialism in their bodies because it was forced in. There’s a collective narration of stories so grand and damaging that they can only exist in allusions, in being named, in partial light, through a door that’s open for a moment. So many ways to tell, to bring truth out of silence, to bash ignorance in the head. And not run away, so that it doesn’t become a crime and validate the law.

My reading then affects the voice, its reach, its impact. That explains the tone I took in the review, but also this reflection. This is a post-scriptum and not a review. I couldn’t write about this book for months and then I recalled something Alicia Elliott said on the Can’t Lit podcast: if you struggle with your perspective, say it. She didn’t have this problem in mind, she was thinking about writing memoir, but there’s a lateral application. My decisions in writing about Rien du tout are not innocent: they can muffle the volume of its accusations, they can muddle the clarity of its descriptions, they can dull the edges of its affirmations.

It wasn’t only a problem with writing: I was going to translate parts of the poems, and I’m dealing with the work of a translator who has an experience and craft in writing and translating I can only dream of achieving – and the book is made up of what I take to be poems, two long paragraphs of prose, whose meaning comes from intense internal dynamics and dialectic exchanges across the pages. So I was intimidated by the book. And I just kept reading it, making it into something bigger than it is, because it is. And I also felt a debt of gratitude to Olivia for giving me the chance to take part in a virtual residency project on Instagram which has mostly been an introduction to a great group of writers and artists. I ended up accepting that in translating I was going to substitute my voice to Tapiero, that my translations aren’t meant to be definitive, but merely indicative, that they point to the book (after all, it is a review). And then I had to take out pieces from the review so it would stop being about me, turn it into a reflection on poetics, hence this post-scriptum. And even here I’m just pointing toward the greater questions, and in the end perhaps this is a review too, because all these questions are not only a matter of a cishet white Francophone man in a country that recognizes him as a citizen reading a book that is not written from his perspective or location; they are in the book itself. And they aren’t questions about reading, not only questions of writing and poetics, they are about coexistence and simply allowing people to live and find their own way of living.

 

 

To check out what I’m talking about:
Cindy Gaudet on “Keeoukaywin: The Visiting Way – Fostering an Indigenous Research Methodology”: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/aps/index.php/aps/article/view/29336
Alicia Elliott on Can’t Lit: https://podtail.com/podcast/can-t-lit/056-can-t-lit-alicia-elliott/
Résidences virtuelles archived on Instagram: @corona_culture
rob of course is rob mclennan and let’s say he’s at http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

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. He’s on Twitter and Instagram at @lethejerome and sometimes there’s poetry happening on the latter.