D’ici et d’ailleurs, Gabriel Osson
Éditions Terre
d’Acceuil, 2021
Gabriel Osson’s collection D’ici et d’ailleurs (From Here and Elsewhere) shares a title with a book by the political scientist Chedly Belkhodja. Both books reproduce the movement of discovery and transformation that takes place through emigration out of one location and immigration into another. This movement is not only a function of renewed relationship to place – it also espouses the contours of the refusal by those who have always lived in the here and in the elsewhere to consider the immigrant as already one of theirs, the emigrant as still one of theirs: “not Haitian enough for the Haitians / too strange for the others” (pas assez haïtien pour les Haïtiens / trop étrange pour les autres, 31).
In the first section of the collection, Osson sets out his reason for writing: solidarity. In two poems titled “The Words” (Les mots), he finds solidarity in the struggle against assaults on languages. The first laments the Ontario government’s erasure of the language that unites Franco-Ontarians, adopting a posture of resistance; the second mourns the loss of Haitian and Indigenous children, tracing this mourning to the Great Plains and to the savannah. In the death of children, and in the silencing or death of words, he finds the death of peoples.
These poems follow daily events, news stories, read like reminders of what we might have sooner wanted to forget. They are written in the direct versification of songs – and a quick search confirms that a dozen of the poems in this collection appear on an album with the same title as the collection. Read like songs to be sung and heard, the straightforwardness of the writing takes on a musicality that a silent reading might have missed. In these song-poems, Osson praises health care workers for their struggle against COVID-19, and recalls the momentary acknowledgement that we abandoned the residents of long term care homes. He braves Montreal’s winter, faces what he has lost to the years, and takes care to bring colour to his life and his pages. He turns back toward his native Haiti after its devastation by earthquakes, unable to face them in the present: “Your dwellers have fled / your beauty buried under the refuse / over which the hogs fight with the dogs” (Tes citadins ont fui / ta beauté ensevelie sous les immondices / que les porcs se disputent avec les chiens, 50) He stares at the corpses produced by floods. He unveils the harshness of Port-au-Prince, as well as the beauty and the future it still holds: “you speak with an accent that does not yet exist / of your children who ask / nothing more than to grow beside you” (tu parles avec un accent qui n’existe pas encore / de tes enfants qui ne demandent / qu’à grandir auprès de toi, 43). Osson knows tragedy, the competing desires to remain and to leave, the impossibility of some lives under dictatorship. He calls upon mythological figures to grant him safe passage, and yet he witnesses the deaths of others on the ocean.
Throughout the second part of the book, Osson repeats his return to Haiti, his arrival, his surprise, its destruction, its transformation. As if he had lived the shock again and again. This shock is compounded by the reminders of the past destructions of the island, the capture of its revolution, the capture of the country. He does not merely accuse others, the elites and the entirety of the people, but also himself, in his departure and his distance, his lack of knowledge. The third part of the book feels more like the dying echo of the second, the images of Haiti and Port-au-Prince fading in the dreariness of certain days in Toronto. He hears, or speaks, Creole into the city Fading, but replaced by other loves, other silences to break. Osson attempts to give words to those who will not be heard, to lend his voice, to remain in a position of solidarity, firmly anchored to those to whose lives he bears witness. With these words he inscribes memories and opens the door to a world of pain which we should not ignore: “I dipped my feet / in the oceans of our complaints so that it remembers / my passage on its shores” (J’ai trempé mes pieds / dans l’océan de nos plaintes pour qu’il se souvienne / de mon passage sur ses rives, 73).
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.