Scaphandre,
Mélissa Labonté
Le Noroît, 2024
The poems in Mélissa Labonté’s book Scaphandre are a series of explorations, discoveries that her speaker knows to be such only for her, forays into just barely charted territories. They take place within the relative safety afforded by the polysemic figure of the scaphandre – at once diving suit and space suit, a figure of courage and isolation. She is not the first to tread where she does, but her predecessors have not exactly opened the way to her.
This lack of a prepared environment and need for exploration comes from the uncertain path her predecessors have traced. As women, they have been left to die, prevented from exploring further, or prevented from exploring at all. In this shared condition, Labonté finds a kinship that allows her to avoid the analogical register. The designed death of Laika, the first dog in space, is thus the first in a series of examples of the disposability and expandability of female life, of the containment forced upon women, and of the experience of the arbitrariness of limits.
Much like we can imagine Laika alternating between staring at space through the window in her capsule and staring at her reflection, Labonté’s speaker spells out the murky experience of reflection and transparence as experienced throughout a seventy hour train ride:
beyond any doubt I
still have a face
the reflection in
the glass tells me so
in the tattered
canopy, the sky demands I be
dispersed: my
particles ripple
with waiting for
an adequate form
the birds taunt me
with agile insults
the dirty window
welds us together – friendship
in the
transparency of our heads in the blue
hors de tout doute
j’ai encore un visage
le reflet de la
vitre me le dit
dans la canopée en
lambeaux, le ciel m’exige
dispersée : mes
parcelles ondoient
en attente d’une
forme adéquate
les oiseaux me
narguent avec des insultes agiles
la fenêtre sale
nous soude – amitié
dans la
transparence de nos têtes dans le bleu (18)
Where Labonté does write in the analogical register, it is to further the proximity of the extreme experiences of Valentina Tereshkova, a Russian cosmonaut who went to space but then was prevented from going back, and of the Mercury 13, a group of women trained for a space flight but never allowed to join NASA’s program, with those of girls who are prevented from going into the forest is spite of their training and readiness, or those of women facing the possibility/ impossibility of giving life – or of living. The analogical register is then a conduit for proximity, allowing Labonté to eschew similarity in favour of a deepened description of what is at stake in each of these situations. For no situations is truly like the others, except for the fact that they are all manifestation of the same condition. In spite of everything they could learn,
that was not enough
they gave us our
orders and sent us home
the world we had
imagined
did not exist
cela n’était pas suffisant
ils nous ont
ordonné de rentrer à la maison
le monde que nous
avions imaginé
n’existait pas
(90)
Yet Labonté moves through such observations without the slightest hint of resignation:
we resisted within
the brushwood
of a secret
language
under the dead
light of the stars
nous avons résisté
dans le branchage
d’un langage
secret
sous la lumière
morte des étoiles (91)
There, in a refuge – where it becomes clear that worlds do end – learning, training, new possibilities can continue. The move into space or more generally to spaces that are not well charted is akin to leaving society to find respite and new possibilities on the outside, in nature. The image of hiding or being stuck among leaves, branches, or trees returns on a few occasions, acting as a counter-weight to the oppressive openness of space.
It is likewise a shared animality that ties the speaker and more generally human women to animals that are rarely named or described – dogs, groundhogs, cats, bats, alongside leeches, spiders, bees, crickets and flies, but mostly simply and generically insects, birds, animals, or the word animal used as an adjective (and here I leave out the vegetal, also present throughout). Animality is what resists and, more importantly, what remains outside of the world and the forms of life that create such stifling limits to women. It is also what remains when the speaker is unsure of what is left of her, of still being a woman, of what it means to be a woman.
After all, the recurring motif of space calls in fact for rest, for an end to drifting and struggle:
I tend to the
darkness and it finds its place
in the corners of
rooms or eyes
to dream, to
worry: the same undulation
on the morning’s
wide collarbone
I thought of the
pliability of the world respite
but depths offer
me no rest
outside crumbles
away, soon we’ll get a rainfall
perhaps the last
snow
je soigne la
noirceur et elle s’installe
dans les recoins
des pièces ou des yeux
rêver, angoisser :
un même ondoiement
sur la clavicule
large du matin
j’ai pensé à la
souplesse du mot accalmie
mais les
profondeurs ne m’offrent aucun repos
dehors s’effrite,
bientôt ce sera l’ondée
peut-être la
dernière neige (72)
Through seven multi-pages poems, Labonté explores a single tone under different lights and pressures. Through quickly developed images she points to lasting emotions and, more than repetition, the recurrence of what this world asks of her. The same metaphor of the space suit and confined space is present, the same feeling of abandonment haunts the pages, the same concern for the immediate future defines the weight that slows the speaker down from moving forward, toward something else. The last poem, New Form of Life” (“Forme de vie nouvelle” – a clever play on what new life can mean here and in space and on utopia desire), is like the hem of the tapestry: the colours and patterns are discernable, but the loss of focus only forces the eye back to the picture or outside the frame, leaving us with the work of attention.
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.
