Pigeon rouge, David Galvaude
Les Éditions de la
maison en feu, 2025
Before it was amalgamated together with Aylmer
and Gatineau – the latter itself the product of an earlier amalgamation, and
the entity that gave its name to the newly formed municipality – Hull formed a
quasi-entity with Ottawa. Known in statistics as part of “Ottawa-Hull” and
gathering in name only the cities on the north side of the rivière des
Outaouais, Hull existed in great part, though not chiefly, through the morning
southbound and afternoon northbound movement of commuting and carpooling
vehicles on a few bridges. Québécois civil servants would work in Ottawa, and
return to sleep and shop in Hull, Gatineau, or Aylmer. Oh, and for a while
after the Bytown market bars would close, people would continue partying in the
Promenade du Portage bars, often brawling. But then they harmonized the hours,
so peace ensued once more (at least that’s the story I’ve heard).
In the middle of these loosely held together
urban spaces, there exist organic neighbourhoods – which are currently being
destroyed by gentrification and, let’s face it, time and the erosion of any
kind of village-like life. “Hull” itself is, was, not so much a city as a
cluster of neighbourhoods without a clear downtown area, but a clearly defined
bureaucratic centre.
Headless and limbless as it is, Hull is certainly
not a character in David Galvaude’s collection Pigeon rouge (Red
Pigeon). Instead, he fills it with all sorts of supernatural beings. The
matchstick houses from the first years of the city become monsters with doors
for mouths, eternally helplessly facing each other. There are butterfly wrecks
in Galvaude’s head and ghosts escaping from his ears – these beings exist in a
flash, lost, seeking for connection, without clear agency. The night itself is
a witch; several witches inhabit Hull, including in the Domaine Fairview, where
they resist the paving of streets and the management of land by the National
Capital Commission. These, it turns out, have an agenda of their own, and
Galvaude and his speaker are happy to assist.
Thus Hull is “materialised insanity.” Galvaude
speaks of Dante coming to get him but smokes up with him rather than taking him
anywhere… or perhaps turns the city into a disco, “vieux-hull inferno.” He
lives in the inescapable shadow of the Terrasses Chaudière (you know, those
brown high-rise office towers by the Portage bridge), whose main tower, it
turns out, is a deep fryer and a cage for the sun. This insanity is already
spreading: his experience of the city goes together with the disaster that is
gentrification and mass evictions. Galvaude’s outlook is consistently absurd
and silly: “property is theft like seagulls / taking off from the maisonneuve
mcdonald’s” (la propriété c’t’un vol de mouette / au-d’ssus du mcdo
maisonneuve, 18).
Why “red pigeon” then? Because eventually,
Galvaude wakes up as one. Before that, he is born again with each fall. He
appears as a wolverine at the Pataterie hulloise, a white tiger who wants to be
giant (this, after the giant tiger store was bled dry by the city), a chromatic
bear, a moth, a blue peacock, something with teeth – “we’re getting closer but
that still ain’t quite it” (on s’rapproche mais c’pas encore tout à fait ça,
30) – a lizard, a crab, a bat (a green bat, une chauve-souris verte, like the
tv show La souris verte), and then finally:
c’est ça qui est ça
I’m a goddamn red pigeon
with eclipses for wings
and the entire world is
just a big almond
a ticket that should be
handed out like a dish that’s best served cold
so that all the police
cruisers crash into one another
in a sweet and sour city
that soils itself
I’m a goddamn red pigeon
I’ve got a job to do
and I’m making sure that
there’s room for everyone.
that’s it
that’s all
chu un fuckin’ pigeon rouge avec des ailes d’éclipses
pis le monde entier c’t’une grosse amande
qu’y faudrait servir comme un plat qui s’mange froid
pour que toutes les chars de police s’écrasent les uns
contre les autres
dans une ville sweet and sour qui s’oublie
chu un fuckin’ pigeon rouge
j’ai une job à faire
pis j’m’assure que y’a d’la place pour tout le monde. (34)
Was he transformed by the witches, or did they
allow him to be reborn entirely? Throughout this second section, a narrative
that is unified through a constant transformation, Galvaude mixes nostalgia and
loss with a sense of hope for the future, death with rebirth, pause with
briefly beautiful images and exaggerated metaphors.
As still and patient as this metamorphic being
may be, the red pigeon favours action in the third section. Here he constantly
drops kinds of red berries, which we can guess will first splatter and stain
and look like blood, before burrowing in the ground and growing anew:
baneberries at the corner of Kent and Laval, “on
spectacular merchants of sleep / who wait for misery to do its work / who dream
of sponsored exorcism” (sur les marchands d’sommeil spectaculaires / qui
attendent qu’la misère fasse sa job / qui rêvent d’exorcisme commandité, 41);
elderberries behind the Burger King, while “the
seagulls look at me go / I see in their eyes / that they’d like to abolish the
streets” (les mouettes me checkent aller / j’vois dans leurs yeux / qu’y
aimeraient ça supprimer les rues, 44);
lingonberries in the Gatineau Parc, falling out
of his full mouth, taking the place of the imported cherry trees;
bittersweet nightshade on new cars and expensive
houses, “hoping it’ll poison the comfort / in indifference / hoping it’ll
awaken the pitch / in the tar / all while drumming with my wings the magic
words / everything is free” (en espérant qu’ça empoisonne le confort / dans
l’indifférence / en espérant qu’ça réveille la poix / dans l’goudron / tout ça
en dodeldirant les mots magiques / tout est gratuit, 48);
and serviceberries around the Lac des Fées, “to
quench their thirst” in reference to Denise Boucher’s feminist play The
Fairies are Thirsty.
He also pecks at a statue of the Queen, and poops
on other statues. With these seeds planted, he continues worrying about
everyone having enough to get by, settles in and watches the witches’ work
coming to fruition.
Pigeon rouge is a
new myth, one that draws from the past and collapses time to use it to destroy
the present. One destruction replaces another, bringing hope instead of ruin,
as Galvaude seeks “to actively refuse the spectacle of disintegration / by
crashing the chasse-galerie / right into the canadien museum of history”
(refuser activement le spectacle de la désintégration / en faisant crasher la
chasse-galerie / direct dans l’musée canadien de l’histoire, 47). As the
witches’ incantation rise, a barn burns, a shadow spans over everything – and
the birds take over.
Jérôme Melançon writes
and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth
chapbook, avoice be heard, is now out with above/ground press, alongside
the previous three: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going
to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020). His most recent collections
are Prairial·es and En d’sous d’la langue, both with Prise de
parole. Let us not forget his occasional translations and his book of
philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has
also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles
that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media
under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
