Jérôme Melançon : Sailor, C’est l’heure, by Rasiqra Revulva

Sailor, C’est l’heure, Rasiqra Revulva
The Blasted Tree, 2021

 

 

But is there any way to look directly at the ongoing catastrophe that doesn’t involve some kind of goofyness? Can we do anything else than force close attention to language when words of warning are being heard and ignored? Might meaning not be better off as a castaway thought, a floating possibility, a belonging to distance? Won’t puns bring our bodies back in line with the typography our hands force upon us? Isn’t distortion the only possible way for us to face the distortion we are imposing on everything that nourishes us and breathes us? Don’t we all need bright colours and stark contrasts?

Letters and words aren’t just traces, they also leave traces of their own. In thirteen haikus – nine of which have words - Rasiqra Revulva mixes visual poetry and alarm call, fishing something out of the depths. She writes and draws without inscribing, without scratching the surface. Words meant to be heard, read, meant to disappear, to stay with us because they are so fragile – because they will disappear.

This slippery writing doesn’t let itself be caught. The chapbook, like its matter, is fascinating, partly monstrous, partly enticing. I might be falling a bit too easily into the merfolk trope with all this fascination. But mermaids were inventions of people who wanted to see something else than what was before them – and they are sirens. Between the puns (I mean, “a krill for a krill” would have made the entire chapbook worthwhile even if the rest hadn’t) and the cryptic letterless visual poems we get less the impression of something that would be hiding or menacing as the sense that something is emerging. We know whatever we get out of these poems will be in great part our own work.

I keep going back to this one haiku. Black writing, pink frayed edges surrounding it, a blue striated background around the letters, a purple background where there’s no writing:

“no tongue – my lipstick!”
hissed an inactive taxon.
join her in the tubes.

This isn’t an interpretative essay so I’ll leave it alone, aside from pointing out the oh so precise mystery-building in between the alliteration. I can mention instead that Revulva out-odds David Lynch by mixing together the movie Wild at Heart, life of the aquatic depths (following her book-length treatment of that theme in Cephalopography 2.0), and the transformations we are bringing to ourselves through our environments (see: “microbead bloodstream”). This is the kind of writing, of art, that surrealism sought to make possible. Which is not to say that there is any discernable lineage here, only perhaps a sense of play and a lack of concern for forms even where the form of the haiku arranges words and images.

The letters are handwritten so that every descender feels like an object being dropped, every ascender like a possible handle – and there are more of the former than there are of the latter. There are much fewer chances to grab, to salvage, than there are chances that everything will sink. But that’s ok, there’s lots that’s still alive in the depths. Rasiqra Revulva reminds us that we won’t know what we’ll grab and if it’ll make us gasp until we start grasping.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He is also the author of a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup (2020) (as well as a second title, forthcoming this year), and of two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018) and a bunch of different attempts at figuring out human coexistence in journals and books nobody reads. He’s on Twitter and Instagram at @lethejerome and sometimes there’s poetry happening on the latter, although these days he’s mostly concerned with letting his thumbs cut up words on a note-taking app.