L'inverse
du sang, Rachel Bergeron
La Tournure, 2022.
The three sections each focus on a period of grief, the second section taking place chronologically before the first and last: grieving the death of an ex-lover; grieving the relationship that had already ended before his death; grieving the loss of something of oneself. “Period” might be an overstatement, seeing as the recollecting very much takes place in the present, where past pain is felt anew; not relived, but made present again. However there does exist a progression away from an entwinement with the other person toward a moment where a recreation of self seems possible. Bergeron plays on time expertly, allowing it to stand still and flow at once, eschewing chronology, rendering those moments when the future and the past can’t be untangled.
Perhaps this temporality is that of the introspection that follows the death of those who have a part in making us who we are; perhaps it belongs to pain and trauma, to what is relived. Beyond showing, describing, making palpable everything that living with an addict can do to a person, which is perhaps the central subject of the book, the two main characters display, differently, a variety of ways of being abusive and seeking abuse out of self-hatred. A scene from childhood suggests the meaning of male proximity for the main female character and speaker; a mention of Crohn's disease highlights the meaning that blood and feces take for her. We are given to understand something of her need to stay in a relationship and not be abandoned, despite being constantly abandoned; something of her feeling of being disgusting to others. I’m not sure inflammatory bowel disease isn’t being used as a device here, that it doesn’t explain too much; I’m also happy to see it be present in a book. But these glimpses are not entirely explicative, nor does the speaker or writer seem to adhere to them: the speaker fights against her childhood and her disease, even as she feels their inertia. A past rape also plays in the conception of herself and in the capacity to relate to others the speaker lets us witness. Here, rather than turning towards a narrative of trauma, Bergeron explores the breaking down of relationality and selfhood (which, granted, might well be part of the wake of trauma).
In a similar vein, the passages in verse are well used to play on the ambiguity of meaning. Line breaks allows the speaker to jump from one idea to another, sticking closer to internal monologue than prose usually can:
“you’ve pulled off
your face
torn off your
flesh
down to his
honesty
you know that he’s
not just a character
that he remains
whole behind the stained glass
you see him
he says you’re
crazy
and you found
yourself there
in your fear of
resembling him”
“tu t’es arraché
le visage
déchiré les chairs
jusqu’à son
honnêteté
tu sais qu’il
n’est pas qu’un personnage
qu’il reste entier
derrière le vitrail
tu le vois
il te dit folle
et tu t’es trouvée
là
dans ta peur de
lui ressembler” (125)
In some of the theatrical passages, the male character’s double does the same, sliding between thoughts at a fast pace. The frantic monologue and the verse writing play on speed in opposite ways, both serving to avoid continuity, to avoid linearity, and to suggest a secret logic inaccessible to others – and to the characters themselves.
Another beautiful jump between ideas takes place on a page where one short passage is displayed on top, one sentence over two lines appears at the bottom, separated by almost a full page of empty space. The top spells out the female character’s regret over not telling her lover that he ought to die and at least leave her alone; the bottom presents her current desire to run over men who find her sexually attractive (“You have as ultimate temptation to drive faster with your car toward the men you turn on,” 228) – emptiness bridging the two, but also time, silence, perhaps the realization that her anger toward her ex-partner also takes its source in other relationships and people.
That secret logic is also displayed in the speaker’s sudden community with other women who are ex-lovers of the same man, especially the one that lets her know about his infidelities: “women – strangers revealing you / evidences / like declarations of love / which were no longer expected” (des étrangères te révèlent / des évidences / comme des déclarations d’amour / auxquelles on ne s’attend plus, 154). The meaning of the revelation is doubled by the line break here: “te révèlent” by itself meaning revealing her (to others, to herself), and with “des évidences” it is truths already known that are revealed, and herself in the process. This exchange with other women who shared him and his loss, and who would share his death, unveils a need for community to a woman who had been increasingly isolated, a need for others with shared or similar experiences, before reality could change, before what couldn't be felt, or accepted, could be confirmed.
Indeed a major theme of the book – as the afterword also points out by quoting the line “to love is to make oneself readable” (9/245). In one of his cocaine monologues, the male character says: “now I’m no longer mad since i’ve understood and everything is figured out i know why i was ignoring you you will no longer be able to say it’s violent since i have the explanation it’s entirely banal in the end it’s thanks to your poem that i understood i truly understood everything i swear to you by reading your poem it explained everything we wonder about the same things i’ll plan to read your other poems one day nothing will ever be the same.” (205-6) Here he both addresses and deflects her need to be understood, gives her a morsel but keeps the best part for himself, a gesture that’s meant to be insufficient but promising. By touching on her reasons to write poems, on the desire that drives them, he gives them the smallest amount of power possible, enough that he can remain in that position of power, understanding only that there is much to understand, without giving a sense that anything will indeed change.
Much of the book touches on what it means to be a woman – “because to be a woman is to be furious” (“Car être femme, c'est être furieuse,” 229) – not for oneself, but for others. There’s a beginning of a path for the speak to come (back) to herself, but this book is less about this path or trajectory, than it is about L’inverse du sang, “the reverse of blood,” not its reversal, but its opposite, its opposite side, what’s felt as it flows, what it leaves behind, what it carries. It suggests that there is no path back, only a continuous circulation, perhaps a slow renewal that coexists with the continuation of what can be noxious within oneself.
