Chant(s), Andrée Levesque Sioui
Hannenorak,
2021
Open, but on the condition of bringing a desire to hear and learn, knowing that not everything is immediately accessible. Some work may be needed then, not to access the poem, but to access the language – an affirmation of presence, above all, but also a reversal of coloniality. While Wendat words are present throughout, they are only translated once, where knowing the proximity and difference between stars and strawberries (Tihchion’ and Tihchiont, respectively) is essential to the meaning of this poem in homage to Édouard Itual Germain:
Then the Tikeans
blew
In the ears of the
dormant tihchiont
Waking the Gardian
of the sky
And her resonant tihchion’
Puis les Tikéans ont soufflé
Aux oreilles des tihchiont en dormance
Réveillant la Gardienne du ciel
Et ses tihchion’ en résonance (28)
Reversal and correspondence are also at the heart of “Vulnérable” where Levesque Sioui addresses at once the land and those who might be willing to stop harming it, using two figures of the turtle to bring us away from the images that allow us to hide, toward a more concrete, immediate reality, while highlighting the necessary reversals within each line through the proximity of opposed words:
Shatter the shell
of intentions
Offload the
learned gestures
Search the remains
of spring in your fall
Let emerge, burst,
shine
Enough to blind
your pretenses
The sprouts of
your survival and your thirst for breath
[...]
The need to read
in a loop into the centre of the world
Ready: a gone,
erased scorn
Au nom du Bien
bring no more harm to Great Turtle
Fracasse la carapace des intentions
Déleste les gestes appris
Fouille les restes de printemps en ton automne
Pour qu’émergent, éclatent et brillent
Jusqu’à aveugler tes prétentions
Les germes de ta survivance et ta soif de souffle
[...]
Il faudra lire en boucle jusqu’au centre du monde
À go, nie le mépris
In the name of Good ne blesse plus Grande Tortue (37)
These reversals cohabit with continuities, linearities. In a few poems, blocks of prose are interspaced between stanzas in verse. Levesque Sioui points to paths and roads, traces a few others, always with a sense – but no perfect knowledge – of the origins of the present moment. She also pays tribute to the Innu poet Joséphine Bacon, alluding to her book Bâtons à messages / Tshissinuatshitakana, itself a constant reference to ancestors and to her own language, and closing another poem dedicated to Bacon with her words in innu-aimun. In this poem, “Femme-poème que j’aime,” Levesque Sioui insists on what Bacon shows, what the Innu poet continues and what she hopes to continue as well, and knows she needs to learn:
An Elder shows me
the earth
That which I no
longer feel under my feet
That which I no
longer see along this race
That to which I
owe all my life
Une aînée me montre la terre
Celle que je ne sens plus sous mes pieds
Celle que je ne vois plus dans ma course
Celle à qui je dois toute ma vie (68)
Bacon appears in the book shortly after Levesque Sioui returns to her father’s recent death, and her mother’s death in much more distant past. Here she explains her awareness that revitalizing the wendat language is a way to bringing something of her parents back to life, to revitalize something of so many generations:
at that moment the mist thickens the silence of the undergrowth then the morning and its dew bereft of the ancient words of thanksgiving then the great day and the great seasons and all the reigns without their usual orations then a new manner to see the sun set descend fall disappear turn tilt toward other sounds toward further narrowings of orality then these black marks upon a new whiteness to tell oneself without remembering by heart then the belt that blends our entrails together to avoid sinking under the squall of an open belly the den threatening to empty itself of its audible memory
alors la brume épaissit le silence des sous-bois puis le matin et sa rosée dépourvus des anciens mots de remerciements puis le grand jour et les grandes saisons et tous les règnes sans leurs oraisons habituelles puis une nouvelle façon de voir le soleil se coucher descendre tomber disparaître tourner basculer vers des sons autres vers d’autres rétrécissements de l’oralité puis ces marques noires sur une blancheur nouvelle pour se raconter sans se souvenir par coeur puis la ceinture nous métissant les entrailles pour ne pas sombrer sous la bourrasque d’un ventre ouvert l’antre menaçant de se vider de sa mémoire sonore (65)
This attention to reversal and continuity is also present in the poem “Ma peau,” where skin, rather than generations, language, or land, is the site of contradiction and simultaneity. In eight short sections, this poem addresses hunger, thirst, and lack; aging, suffering; exposure; pleasure; racialization; the difference between spirit and body; relationship to the land; and its life. Like this poem, the collection as a whole is a grand example of a reappropriation and a revitalization that do not stop at decolonization (as much as it is needed and desired), but also address the difficulties of being in relation, including in relation to ourselves.
