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.
