Au seuil des mouches à fruits, Bobby Valérie
Éditions
Fond’tonne, 2023
With an enigmatic title and a variety of styles of composition and illustration, Bobby Valérie’s collection Au seuil des mouches à fruit (At the Fruit Flies’ Threshold) is immediately and continuously captivating. Using an aesthetic of variation, Valérie plays with contrasts, presentations, clashes, surprise, degrees of grey, sudden movements – all aspects of a slow, obsessive, merciless movement forward.
This kind of book is rarely found. To call it a collection is already to diminish its generosity. While I first assumed that each page presented its own poem or artwork (and each is strong enough to hold its own, even where a single phrase is present), the table of contents indicates four multi-page poems. The poems begin with a quotation (by a man on the street, a stranger on Pinterest, the unequaled singer Marjo, and the Théâtre des cuisines) and a collage, each combining two images (human and animal) and a shifting line. The pages with words vary in font and size, in background (at times white on grey or black), and in technique (many pages appearing to be photocopies of lines cut or torn and pasted). The sharpness of the poems is such that they regularly offer lines ready to become quotations that would in turn give birth to poems in the reader’s striving and reaching for a similar expansiveness.
The ensemble is neither whole nor fragmentary. Valérie doesn’t highlight the connection in content through these form that change from page to page. She does not keep a steady voice or rhythm. She does not obey the convention of keeping to a single register of language, mixing instead everyday québecisms with the most precise literary prose. In fact, she constantly disrupts herself and her reader. That disruption is the central element of the worded aspect of the book (worded, because the words are only one element in the interplay of form and content, background and figure, space and ink).
Yet disruption is not a sufficient word: overused to the point of becoming a cliché on a postcard or a road sign, disruption is now synonymous with “critical” or “different.” Valéry does not claim disruption, but does claim revolt, perturbation, resistance, and points out that “the path of subversion is a boxing match often by knockdown” (“le chemin de la subversion est un combat de boxe souvent knockdown”). This book is disorderly even as it remains coherent. It destroys an order while caressing the sharp edges of its pieces. It interrupts violently and insists that previous speech and actions not be picked up or pieced back together – it looks to what will come of the manipulation of the shards and the flesh they will cut.
This is a thoroughly feminist disruption angled toward liberation, embodying the desire “to liberate ourselves [...] of what will become of us” (“s’affranchir [...] de ce qui adviendra de nous”). We are given the body in its splendor and disgust, both flesh and spirit. Valéry weaves the body into its surrounding: there’s deboning, retching, vital signs, chapped hands; sheets with makeup; cleaning ladies who won’t rust; presence of the body to water, ice and snow; abortion is a metaphor; leaking pores are plugged; harvests empty their lungs. Even to speak of “the body” is not precise enough: we are shown a woman’s body amongst the elements, in the act of fighting, loving, and in their aftermath, for instance in relation to sex: “my sex burns with the desire to be eaten” (mon sexe brûle de l’envie d’être dévoré) responds to “thighs sticky with sperm” (les cuisses poisseuses de sperme). That the former arrives later in the collection may not be happenstance: desire arises once more after the completion of the act (be it sexual or revolutionary), even in spite of disappointment or failure, even after attack and defeat.
There is a harshness in Valéry’s choice and combinations of words; we read by feeling them in our mouths, like a mix of berries (some perfect, others under- and over-ripe), sand, rounded and jagged pebbles. The harshness partly comes from the repetition and reversal of certain images and references, as when “fireflies” (“mouches à feu”) responds to “fruit flies” (“mouches à fruits”), or when “lucioles” (the proper name of fireflies) responds again without repeating, moving from what disappears (along with the light and hope it carries) to what brings our attention back to the mysterious in our surroundings.
This harshness is also due to Valéry’s arrival following a debacle (of capitalism), in the midst of violence (against women), but also following the transgressions of a previous generation of women against the order that violates them – an arrival that takes place when disappearances and defeat are expected. She echoes something of Rosa Luxemburg’s certainty that radical change will take place no matter what, leading to either “socialism or barbarism” depending on our actions:
“an orgy of laughter and cries in the uncertain crowd between celebration and riot, we ask where we may find the emergency exit, please, and the answers remain ellipses. soon the evidence of the last daybreak will be behind us.”
(“une orgie de rires et de cris dans la foule hésitante entre la fête ou l’émeute, nous demandons où trouver la sortie d’urgence, s’il vous plaît, et les réponses restent points de suspension. bientôt l’évidence du dernier lever du jour sera derrière nous.”)
This last daybreak may be the beginning of a descent into darkness, or the first morning of a new era. There is a light that grows throughout the book, even as the intimate knowledge of silence, violence, and destruction remains as sharp as ever. In the dynamics of the succession of pages, we find a movement through loss and destruction alongside other people, toward community and new attempts, an intimate knowledge of the ongoing destruction and of the need for different destructions, based on a hope that’s constant: “I say hope is a word that is recognized within adversity” (“je dis l’espoir est un mot qui se reconnaît dans l’adversité”).
By touching the flesh and adding to the movement of these dynamics, Valéry’s book acts as a threshold. It opens onto a place where sweetness mixes with decay, a place into which we will find ourselves thrown or within which we can create new life from all that has already been lost.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, 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 various social media under variations of @lethejerome.