Petites déviations, Lise Gaboury-Diallo
Éditions
du Blé, 2021
In her poem “hors champ” (“offscreen”) Lise Gaboury-Diallo presents poetry as a footbridge: it is either a temporary plank that can be placed where it is needed then taken away, having no natural or definite place; or a permanent, semi-solid bridge that is limited to a slower pace, that is not vehicular, that demands the body's own efforts. Earlier in the collection, in “mappemonde” (“world map”), she asks for “small poems built from poor bones / from limestone powder (“petits poèmes construits de pauvres os / de poudre calcaire,” 43) – poems that must be told like stories, poems that find their origins in the elements and in a history that does not separate out the winners, poems that have as much in common with the smallest living beings as with their movements across world maps.
The idea of connection and literal bridges is also found where she writes about her father and the weight of inheritances. In “le sacre de l’imité” (“the rites of the imitated,” a beautiful play on words around “the initiated,” as parents are to the world before their children, and carrying children’s imitation of their parents), she recalls her father’s admiration for Gaudi, for his rich, solid materials, these marbles, woods, and gold. These materials are the opposite of those she seeks in poetry. Her footbridge is also of another materiality as the literal bridge her father, the architect Étienne Gaboury, left between Saint-Boniface and Winnipeg. And the small poems she calls for are far from the new Saint-Boniface Cathedral he built within the ruins of the old. Through its echoes of the two poems already mentioned, this one-page poem allows her to quickly and implicitly constrast her aesthetic with his, even as they share the desire for an escape from the weight of materiality.
Petites déviations (“small deviation”) is Lise Gaboury-Diallo’s tenth poetry collection. In previous collections she not only made room for others, but also put on display the room that already exists between people and can be inhabited just as well as neglected, the space that relationships create. Experience is always multiple and many-faceted in these poems, which lead to books united by tone. She has often worked in collaboration with artists in books where poetry and painting or photography live together within the same spaces. At the Université de Saint-Boniface in Winnipeg, her academic work has explored the words of women and French speakers, especially in the Canadian prairies. While her work is multiple, her tone remains even. In Subliminales (1999) she adopted a series of voices and would shift between first and third person inventions, offering fluid impressionist stories. While here she juxtaposed her poems with watercolours by Monique Fillion, in Parchemins croisés / Crossworlds (2008) Gaboury-Diallo and the painter Monique Larouche each took inspiration from the other’s work to create two series of paintings and poems, the latter translated within the book by Mark Stout. The firm quietness of Gaboury-Diallo’s voice shows its depth and force here, taking on a shape that alludes to the waves Larouche paints in many of the works gathered in that collaborative work. Homestead (2005) had already gone farther, bringing together Gaboury-Diallo’s poems, their translations by Stout, photographs by Laurence Véron, paintings by Anna Binta Diallo, and drawings by Étienne Gaboury, allowing her to bring her daughter and father into a depiction of the prairies that takes form through a convergence of perspectives. Here her poems are precisely situated, moving through rooms and buildings and fields, ending on a reserve. These three books contain a relatively small number of poems, seem to lead to what might be her strongest book and at any rate a central work in Franco-Canadian poetry, Transitions (2002). Weaving around the themes of speech, thought, and communication, and densely illustrated yet sparse in their words and patient in their short lines, the poems in this collection soothe just enough to sharpen emotions and preserve the will to reach others and act for their sake.
While some poems in Petites déviations take up the style she has developed over this imposing body of work, many instead display a newer style, which echoes the more political poems in Transitions but eschew subtlety in order to favour the straight line made possible by blunt force. In order to account for the technological apparatuses that are both part of and an extension of our experiences, Gaboury-Diallo explores the possibilities of a language shorn of artifice, simple and straightforward in the doubts and emotions it names. This more tentative, less assured voice – this worried voice lets itself share an anger I hadn’t noticed in earlier work. It is shored up through this new collection by the better established voice, and their alternance make this a beautifully hesitant collection.
The first section, “surrogati,” is concerned with fakes, imitations, appropriation, surrogacy – here Gaboury-Diallo writes within the realm of replacement. This is a dangerous realm to approach, what with its current appropriation by fascism. The poet resists nihilism and the quest for purity by heightening tensions between what is replaced and what replaces it, and playing on the difficulty of accepting replacement. Writing on a surrogate giving birth, she asks: “where does this soul come from / this child / to whom their mixed flesh / for whom their tomorrows” (“d’où vient l’âme / de cet enfant / à qui ses chairs mêlées / et pour qui ses demains,” 15). Of those who invent identities to garner support, she recognizes an authenticity and a resemblance to herself: “you want to imitate honey / so we can live / better / you / you take the place / of the vague desire for forgiveness / brushing up against my watered / down appetite” (“tu veux imiter le miel / pour que l’on vive / mieux / toi / tu te substitues / au vague désir de pardon / frôlant mon appétit / édulcoré,” 19). The many political poems in this section often read like declamations and feel uncertain. This would be a criticism were it not for the courage of putting forward this non-bellicous, unassured position: the speaker here exposes herself and offers a stance that is the opposite of the piercing language of social media and of populist movements. She chooses weakness as a stratagem.
To this cartography of misappropriations succeeds a second section marked by a concern for place, geographies, and movement. There is an interplay between experiences of running into obstacles that are as insurmountable as they are weakened by these impacts, and those of fleeing threats that never really leave the speaker alone. In one of a few poems where cartography serves as the main reference point, Gaboury-Diallo illustrates what resists all attempts at creating stability, at naming:
on the map
the surroundings
have their quadrants
the countries are
sketched but
there is only
neglect
for the shifting
deltas
and the sky beyond
of the ripped
margin
with nowhere to
sprawl
sur la carte
on a quadrillé les
environs
esquissé des pays
mais
on a négligé
les deltas
mouvants
et le ciel au-delà
de la marge
déchirée
qui ne s’étale
nulle part (41)
Finding the same interplay of voices as the first section, the third, “spectres” (“specters”), provides reflections on social media from a distance. The speaker situates herself outside their realm of influence, and as a result some poems feel foreign to what they describe, as they rely on observation rather than on experience. The speaker understands what makes social media attractive, but misses what they also make possible. Yet this is far from being a reactionary critique of social media and again this unassured position has its strengths. Quite to the contrary in fact, Gaboury-Diallo explores a different source of meaning by comparing social media to older photographs – of her family, or from past ages. The sepia tones of the origins of photography echo back to what it is that social media users are seeking through their constant sharing. In “silhouette” we can see the photography of a parent, how their style, their corporeity is recognizable even though their face is not visible. Far into this section, in "Sépia," the speaker shares her main reason for rejecting social media: the lack of forgetting, the accumulation of passing thoughts and acts that would not otherwise define her. As we read through the section, relearning the patience and the composition that are needed to grasp the meaning of the words of others, these poems reveal their focus on memory, and on remembrance more precisely, rather than on the medium through which it emerges.
A long poem about COVID-19 closes this section, giving historical context for the distance that defines so many of the poems, the initial shock of isolation and the slight differences of later stages of the pandemic. Distance appears as an unavoidable condition as she addresses the virus, creates words with it. Wishes and certainty clash in the very same words, which show again Gaboury-Diallo’s capacity to create tension within meaning:
and we flee your
noxious
shadow by running
to the future
we won’t cross out
your asterisk
from the annals of
history
but someday you
will leave
your departure is
announced
et on fuit ton
ombre
délétère en
courant vers l’avenir
on ne pourra rayer
ton astérisque
des annales de
l’histoire
mais tu partiras
un jour
ton départ est
annoncé (90)
That impossible optimism is equal to the pessimism of the other long poem in this collection, “taire” (“keeping it quiet”), which explores environmental harm and ends on the prediction, also voiced as certainty, that the planet will go quiet. Several poems here, such as “charge électrique” and “charge statique” (“Electric Load” and “Static Load”) are mysterious in their intention, address, and subject, leaving the reader with more room to situate themself. This section is by far the best assured, where Gaboury-Diallo finds the voice that carried her through her past collections, adding a calm doom to what was previously playful. Not that the playfulness of her previous work is absent (in “en trombe” she plays on the proximity between the explosive meaning of “en trombe” and attachments to emails, “en trombone”), but it is certainly overshadowed by the darkness of the current moment. These poems are not acts or expressions of revolt; instead, they create an oscillation between hope and desolation and offer a knowledge that is neither true nor stable, but on which we can nonetheless rely.
In this collection then we find a mixing of registers – the poetic and formal meets and everyday language, creating more occasions for plays on words, taking the quotidian seriously, bringing the serious and contemplative into the everyday. The greatest achievement of this collection is in the arrangement of poems. Gaboury-Diallo misleads us, feints, builds on juxtaposition, unveils different meanings to the social and psychological realities she describes. We discover slowly through this arrangement the orientation, the experience at its core: not so much the experience of alienation nor of being lost, but that of having taken the wrong path, slowly, one wrong step at a time.
[Read Three poems from Petites déviations]
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His most recent chapbook is with above/ground press, Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022, after 2020’s Coup), and his most recent poetry collection is En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). 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). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that have nothing to do with any of this. He’s on Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.