Wednesday, May 4, 2022

Jérôme Melançon : Chant(s), Andrée Levesque Sioui

Chant(s), Andrée Levesque Sioui
Hannenorak, 2021

 

 

 

The complexity, physicality, and plurivocality of song is both a topic and a mode of expression in this first collection by Andrée Levesque Sioui. She lends her experience as a singer and as a teacher of the Wendat language to this exploration of song, of musicality, and of the relations that make them possible. The overall effect is of a gathering: Levesque Sioui brings together traces from the past, bodies capable of songs, and words spoken and repeated, forming the three sections of the book. And she comes together with those who passed on the stories she references, the book an open invitation to join them.

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.

 

 

 

 

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). With above/ground press he is the author of a chapbook, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright, and a still-available bilingual chapbook, Coup (2020). He has also published 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 articles and articles and articles. He’s on Twitter and Instagram at @lethejerome and sometimes there’s poetry happening on the latter although not so much these days because it’s all too much, isn’t it?