Les
boucliers humains, Danny Plourde
Poètes de brousse, 2020
Danny Plourde doesn’t quite meet the challenge either. Perhaps it’s because I’m setting this challenge for him – after all, he might be trying to express the experience of being drawn in by the exotic. And perhaps my hopes were too high coming in. His situation mirrors mine, or resembles mine, in several ways: the lone travels away from a partner and children, a teaching job, the location in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu and references to Montérégie, where I grew up. The basic theme of the book – the possibility of moving between places and cultures given our attachments – also led me to bring my own search for meaning and answers in relation to cultures into my reading. I was quite excited to read this book for all these reasons – and I can’t blame a book or an author for not satisfying a desire that has nothing to do with that which carries them.
Sections one and two of the book have to do with the self and its location; section three, with a trip taken alone and the loneliness of leaving a family behind. Here we find an openness about the uncertainties of fatherhood, about feeling removed, distant from children, while wanting so much for them. Section four is about hiking in South Korea, China, Japan, and in Montérégie, taking up the metaphor of paths. And section five is mostly about his relationship with his partner.
In a language that Plourde manages to make at once literary and familiar, we get a sense of a movement back and forth between places. In one poem, he designates but does not name what might be the book, or a way to speak about the book: “it’s a great big raft / whittled for Elsewhere / whittled to come back” (“c’est un grand radeau / gossé pour Ailleurs / gossé pour revenir,” 24). Québec and Korea occupy parallel places as “the planet is Québécoise / the planet is Korean [...] from one continent to another we are all Québécois all Korean” (“la planète est québécoise / la planète est coréenne [...] d’un continent à l’autre nous sommes tous des Québécois toutes des Coréennes,” 117). And this parallel takes up his own relationship to his partner, who is Korean, the two of them seemingly occupying the whole world as man and woman.
Love and conflict stand as opposite forces throughout the poems, the former being a means to overcome the latter – as well as to overcome multiculturalism as a superficial answer to conflict. There is a certainty at the heart of this project, that “it’s possible to chew on nettle without scratching the inside of your cheeks” (“c’est possible de mâchouiller l’ortie sans s’érafler le dedans des joues,” 47). The nettle in this poem is what Canada feeds Québec, what seems to get in the way of Québec welcoming newcomers, a symbol of its subordination. In the same poem, the cold is something from which the speaker, who just identified himself with the Québec nation, must protect those who are facing their first winter. Two pages later, it acts as a stimulant: “the cold is a trial for courage the cold is the occasion to distinguish oneself it’s initiative a hand held out the ice a stuck car that’s being pushed in January without asking for anything in return” (“le frette c’est le courage mis à l’épreuve le frette c’est l’occasion de se distinguer c’est l’initiative une main tendue la glace un char coincé qu’on pousse en janvier sans rien demander en retour,” 49).
Even as the cold and winter are necessary for the mutual help it fosters, fire is associated with freedom, with shelter (page 61), and with love:
you tell me your
tribe
it was defeated
it will be free
as for me, I’d
like you to believe me
believe that it’s
enough to pull up a seat
a warm, burning
log
our hands in love
in the right places
tu me dis ta tribu
elle a été vaincue
elle sera libre
et moi j’aimerais que tu me croies
qu’il suffit de se tirer une bûche
bien chaude bien brûlante
nos mains en amour
aux bons endroits
(60)
If this book is indeed a raft, I’m not sure I was ever brought on board for this trip, not sure the raft holds water. The book often dives into clichés about French and English Canadians without overcoming or subverting them, and perpetuates myths without giving them new life. A distinction I / you / we / they takes shape, where the first three persons are malleable, but “they” always refers to English Canadians, kept at a (scornful) distance. Names of places appear without a sense of their meaning, of the experiences that take root there, of their specificity – at most they invoke what they already represent in popular culture. These names are thrown around without context, referring to a general place: Mongolian and Manchurian, like Iroquois and Micmac (sic), Hirohito like Pontiac. These names are generic markers of foreignness, which may hold meaning for the author – but this meaning isn’t placed in the poems. The same goes for place names in Québec, listed in the same way, holding a mix of foreignness and proximity.
This is a book of cultural and territorial appropriation – it reads as a continuation of colonial attitudes, although there may be contradicting sentiments about this appropriation and a desire to overturn it which don’t clearly come to the surface. One poem (page 29) might offer the possibility of a closer study through the figure of a repentant explorer, ambiguous allusions to trade between Indigenous and French settlers, the tropes associated with French colonization, and “the responsibility of the survivors devastated of the inside” (“la responsabilité des survivants sinistrés de l’intérieur, 29).
It’s not clear to me whether this contrition is seen as the beginning of a change, or as something that must be cast aside. And I find it difficult to find a critical stance in these poems, notably because of the presence of familiar colonial themes such as the exoticized image of an Iroquois woman, the constant comparison of the self with French settlers, or a simple awareness that land was taken without any follow-up: “Pontiac’s river / our river now” (“le fleuve de Pontiac / notre fleuve maintenant,” 55). A certain pan-Indianism adds to this appropriation, as in the image: “our fires eight feet high tipis spit out kisses of welcome” (“nos feux tipis de huit pieds de haut crachent des baisers de bienvenue,” 113).
Likewise in the association with the coureurs des bois (“I retrace the path of the first / coureurs des bois of the Americas,” “je refais le tracé des premiers / coureurs des bois d’Amérique,” 79), the speaker is fully immersed in myth. It seems to make sense that the coureurs des bois competed with Indigenous traders, sought to replace them, in spite of how the poems present them. And right away we read more about an insecurity in identity, a desire for a stronger sense of self (and the book builds this sense of self):
on my way I have
come across
many familiar
toponyms
but I am no longer
French
I am not English
I am not Korean
I am Québécois
it seems to me
reassure me
en chemin j’ai croisé
plusieurs toponymes familiers
mais je ne suis plus français
je ne suis pas anglais
je ne suis pas coréen
je suis québécois
il me semble
rassure-moi (79)
In much of section four the myth of a pure nature far from the city is as much a background as the “animist decor” that is mentioned elsewhere (82). And fantasies of conquest are declared openly: “find me a country where I can take you abduct you give you something to drink” (“trouve-moi un pays où je pourrai te prendre t’enlever te donner à boire,” 97). Fantasies of rebirth are also claimed: “it’s happened that I have wanted to be reborn / at the other end of the world” (“il m’est arrivé de vouloir renaître / à l’autre bout du monde,” 106).
I must add that it’s difficult to review a book that seems to exclude the public I had intended for the review – a book that does not want to address this public. Indeed, it almost seems disingenuous to be writing about this book in English – I might be open to the criticism of being unfair, of writing behind the author’s back, of not daring to address directly, within Québec, what goes on in these poems. But the divide between Québec and Canada outside Québec that Plourde creates in these poems, and in fact takes up and attempts to lift up, is so great that I’m probably betraying the book by bringing it into this context. In this way Les boucliers humains is typical of a whole genre of writing in French within Canada and could be the subject of a whole, more fully critical essay on nationalism in poetry. And this is in addition to the ambiguous (at best) relationship to colonialism I’ve already mentioned.
The speaker expresses a desire for a country, a desire which does not need a reason other than the certainty of having nothing to do with the country that claims him, and this certainty is just as beyond reason as that desire. Thus there can be an easy criticism of youth hostels for being “multiculturels à l’anglaise” (72): the rare criticism of white supremacy or colonialism is placed onto “Anglo-Saxons,” excepting himself from it sometimes implicitly, but also sometimes explicitly: “I am this Francophone / American ghost who regrets / being associated with them” (“je suis ce fantôme francophone / d’Amérique qui regrette / de leur être associé,” 72).
And so my reasons for disliking Les boucliers humains are at least in part political. They also have to do with the writing, which often delves in clichés and myths and even more often falls into the didactic traps proper to political poetry.
However, I do have to applaud the form of the book. It is highly structured, and in a meaningful way that’s given me ideas for my own writing. In the first two and last two sections, the left page holds short stanzas of a few short lines each, while on the right page the first and third stanzas are in italics, aligned to the right, and frame a middle stanza in free verse brought together in quasi-prose, line breaks giving way to longer spaces in a single longer justified block of text. The two middle sections of the book offer more typical free verse, again with short lines, aligned to the outside of the book, bringing a form of balance in this mirroring that is absent from the other sections where the right page weighs so much more than the left. The overall result is something of a song, with a repeating structure, regularity in the emergence of themes outside of discernable patterns. Words in Hangul break the regularity of the forms, pierce through the repetition and offer the uninitiated reader a moment of unintelligibility. These poems remain unfinished to this reader, the answer, the fuller meaning laying outside the poem, outside the book, outside my languages, finished somewhere else. Such openness strengthens these poems.
Adding to this structure, the epigraphs spread throughout add a rhythm to the reading, moments of pause, of breath, a sense of coming after or alongside others. The drawings by Kim Eunki create an atmosphere of quiet and stillness, underlined by the disquiet of anticipation, of a transformation about to happen. They opened moments of contemplation for me, pulling me closer to the idea behind the book. One that’s worth pursuing.
