Jérôme Melançon : Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres, by Mayra Bruneau Da Costa

Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres, Mayra Bruneau Da Costa
Éditions Mains Libres, 2025

 

 

 

The title to Mayra Bruneau Da Costa’s second collection, “Cartographie des apôtres à deux sucres” might translate as “Map of the apostles with two sugars.” It encapsulates the tone and the topic of the poems: they map out a separation and a series of encounters with men, and that amount of bitterness requires at least some sugar. They lay out men, each adoring in some way, or too eager to follow her, each adopting some position in relation to her body and the distance she has since taken from them. She displays both tenderness and sadness toward them, but also toward herself, bringing balance to the book through a constant teetering.

A deep self-awareness keeps the collection on track. Distance from herself allows her to maintain some distance from us and keep us in the role of readers rather than confidants. I felt a desire to say what isn’t meant to be shared, what’s held back out of decency and respect for her relationships.

The poems are mostly short and brought together tightly in eighty pages. We move through the separation from the father of the speaker’s children to moments of closeness with other men – there may be very few, there may be more, and she prohibits any such questioning by giving only extremely specific details about interactions and bodies, any of which could be amalgamated into two people, and addressing each in the second person singular. There is plausible deniability as to the identity of this you, the number of yous, their specificity, their coexistence – “how could I feel I had lost my way / when each of you / is a room in a house?” (comment me sentir égarée / quand chacun de vous / est une pièce de ma maison?, 27).

Around her separation, Bruneau Da Costa shows the stickiness and messiness of prying apart intertwined lives. Addressing her former partner in the second person like all the others, she places herself in the position of the deer in headlights and of a charging bull’s target. Yet both former partners are immobilized: “I smile when we end up / together in the same room / you seem even more striken than I am / in my straightjacket” (Je souris quand nous nous retrouvons / dans la même pièce / tu sembles encore plus atteint que moi / dans ma camisole de force, 29)

The two main clusters of poems are more or less divided by poems that borrow from ancient and contemporary mythologies. “To each their legends,” she writes. Nirvana, the golden fleece, Ariadne’s thread, Sun Tzu and Wu-Tang, tarot, Narcissus, Cinderella, the Gorgons, the Snow Queen, prayer, all appear for brief images, reigniting our myths. Bruneau Da Costa even mobilizes misunderstood and misappropriated symbols to display the cavalier manner we so often treat meaning, especially those of people(s) we do not take the time to understand but instead turn into our own stories.

Passing Haven

I hide in the map of tenderness
Carmen Santiago
to steal shards of you
to mould
an inukshuk a voodoo doll
I will leave with

  

Havre éphémère

Je me cache dans la carte du tendre
Carmen Santiago
à voler des éclats de toi
pour mouler
un inukshuk une poupée vaudou
avec laquelle je repartirai

When she speaks of the men she sleeps with, the speaker makes two fundamental aspects of their encounters clear. They both desire closeness, intimacy, and pleasure, but they each desire entirely different things: “I asked for nothing / you stroke the back of my neck / I make you want to be soft / you don’t quite want me / but are afraid of losing me” (je n’ai rien demandé / tu caresses ma nuque / je t’inspire la douceur / tu ne veux pas tout à fait de moi / mais redoutes de me perdre, 57).

And so it is her who leaves furtively or actively. Simply because there is nothing to keep her around. Likewise, there are no teachings, no lessons in these poems. Perhaps the speaker has difficulty being close to people (and she does recognizes something like that). Perhaps being close to people is difficult more generally, and the characters in the poems are full of character traits that can be read as endearing or infuriating depending on the tone that accompanies the readings.

This ambivalence is present throughout – “I made us into / foul cranberry cakes” (j’ai fait de nous / des gâteaux infects aux canneberges, 30) is as likely to be an adorable attempt or a complete disaster. Likewise, there is both relief and regret in “you were an octopus I was a ghost / and I frenched you like California / even though we were bitter” (t’étais une pieuvre moi un fantôme / pis je te frenchais comme la Californie / même si on était amers, 44), although there is also a tinge of humour since “on était amers” can be read “on était à’ mer” (à la mer), “we were at the sea.”

The first time I read the collection, I had an impression of joy, of freedom, of constant liberation from others accompanied by a kind of expected exasperation. The second time, I saw a profound sadness in the poems. And somewhere Mayra Bruneau Da Costa is shaking her head at me, happy with what she is doing, whatever that really is – stepping away from her character to breathe, finally but only for a moment.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, is now out with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), 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.

Jérôme Melançon : La femme meurt en juillet, by Mélanie Béliveau

La femme meurt en juillet, Mélanie Béliveau
Éditions Mains Libres, 2022

 

 

 

 

Having had the good fortune of hearing Mélanie Béliveau read several times from her second collection, La femme meurt en juillet (The Woman Dies in July), I wanted to spend more time with the collection as a whole. Béliveau made herself vulnerable by writing about having breast cancer and being treated for it, and presented her vulnerability both as a person and as a physician who was forced to rely on others. As a listener, not yet a reader, I struggled not to hold back, not to hold her voice and the poems at a safe distance – I struggled not to engage in voyeurism. By sitting in a room, quietly, and listening, by sitting with her, by attempting to carry the moment and the months and life it held, I hoped I would be able to welcome these poems. Immediately, I wanted to read the poems by myself, in a different state of vulnerability. Not exposed to others’ gaze and view, not open to the destruction a response can wreak. Knowing that I wouldn’t fully hear or read the poems, I thought I could at least gain something if I sat with nothing but the words and their accumulation, until I could let them create an impression within me, until I could let the collection shift something in me, as the excerpts did. Certainly any book of poetry ought to do this, at least to some extent.

Instead of focusing on cancer, Béliveau writes about her body, her capacity to see it, her relation to it, to herself, to life. She has explained in many interviews that she did not write about cancer, or even about the possibility of death, but about the transformation they brought to her life.

As the site of cancer, and as the object of removal through mastectomy, her breasts take on a variety of meanings. First, literal: “I see death / my breast always on me / I’d like for it to be     elsewhere” (je vois la mort / mon sein tout le temps sur moi / je voudrais qu’il soit     ailleurs, 19). Also sore, or simply nude. And then they are qualified as more or less unreal: a ghost breast; inflatable replicas; one an elite sniper menacing the other; unknown; car rims; RoboCop; vacant; expropriated – and felt up, subject to wandering hands.

The allusions to sex are far from limited to mentions of the breast – indeed, the poems include, but do not describe, unsexy sex, sex where anger and fatigue hover, where a desperate search for life dominates. There’s a desire to be desired, one that is met but unfulfilled at the same time. Sometimes desire is brutally negated:

I passed through the stained glass of your warm neck    in bloom
powdered my desire everywhere
shattered my orgasms, pluralized
you struck your eyes into mine
I set the operating table

j’ai traversé le vitrail de ta nuque chaude     fleurie
poudroyé mon désir partout
fracassé mes orgasmes au pluriel
tu t’es acharné sur mes yeux
j’ai mis la table d’opération (20)

In this poem, we see the percussive effect of the writing, which at once carries anger and holds it back; we see the immense metaphors that allude to all that is unreachable, unattainable. The violence rises from passing through, to powdering or dusting, shattering (but say: fra-ca-sser, feel how hard it feels in your mouth), and finally striking (but think: s’acharner, striking over and over, getting into the flesh, chair). This crescendo takes what might be lovely moment of eyes locking into eyes during sex into a refusal to look at anything but the eyes: a moment of shared desperation and impossible proximity. La femme meurt en juillet is full of moments like this, full of the tragedy of uncertain transformations and (self-)destruction (and here I use tragedy in the strong sense of a force which cannot be controlled and dooms those who suffer from its action, not something that is merely incredibly sad). A few pages further, the hope of abandon through sex meets the reality of pain. Without pointing to a divide in the couple, Béliveau shows the conflict between sexual desire and the need for comfort and a different kind of intimacy, both within herself and between her and her partner: “love or sex / the sign can’t be read from here” (amour ou sexe / la pancarte n’est pas lisible d’ici, 84).

A deepening anger underlies most of the poems, beginning with memories of childhood and adolescence which rather than being moments of innocence, have become moments of not-yet knowing. Béliveau can no longer access these memories without going through the shock she is still experiencing, and which has displaced what she might have learned since her youth:

in my pocket a shard of broken glass
fixes everythings       at fifteen years old

at forty you receive a blow to the face
you no longer know anything
and golden cemeteries await us

dans ma poche un bout de verre brisé
ça règle tout     à quinze ans

à quarante on reçoit un coup au visage
on ne connaît plus rien
et les cimetières dorés nous attendent (14)

Yet there are limits to this anger. The lack of titles and strong statements, together with the short lines that make up poems that are themselves relatively brief, all point to fatigue. Expressing anger then appears as a choice, as is letting exhaustion orient her response. In the “Three months post-op” section, anger seems to dominate: “the world could go right to hell” (le monde pourrait aller chier comme il faut, 68); “I lost my empathy / at the corner of King street and 13th avenue” (j’ai perdu mon empathie / au coin de la rue King et de la 13e avenue, 69). But anger is never the sole emotion: this seventh section ends with fear and the feeling that something remains hidden – and Béliveau struggles with the scarves she must wear and which appear in a sequence of poems as an obstructing extension of her being.

The titles of the last two sections play on the meanings of leave – to take leave of cancer, to be on leave from work. The emptiness of the post-cancer period is surrounded, cushioned, by the realization that life remains possible, one which Béliveau makes less and less futile efforts to seize. She learns to see herself anew through someone else’s eyes – the one who loves her, who continues to desire her, but also her “amazon,” another person who underwent a double mastectomy but chose to go without implants.

Together they learn to see themselves through one another: “our seams we showed / one another and me” (on s’est montré nos coutures / l’une et l’autre et moi, 70); “our scars we unveiled / told a story” (on s’est dévoilé nos cicatrices / raconté une histoire, 71). Only once the transformation is complete can Béliveau see herself without needing someone else’s gaze as mediation:

I was able to look at myself without your eyes
a hundred and ten bandages     a hundred drains
before me a creature that was not being born
this time    it will have taken more than forceps
curled up clammy trembling
she was strong   yelled at passersby

j’ai été capable de me regarder sans tes yeux
cent dix pansements      cent drains
devant moi une créature qui ne naissait pas
cette fois     ça aura pris plus que des forceps
recroquevillée moite tremblante
elle était forte     criait aux passants (99)

Comparisons of herself to a scavenger give way to metaphors of her and her partner as “benevolant predators / friends to the great cold / each at their window     against absence / drawing great things / captive birds” (de bienveillants prédateurs / amis des grands froids / chacun à sa fenêtre     contre l’absence / dessinant de grandes choses / oiseaux captifs, 84). In the very last section, analogical thinking seems less necessary, as Béliveau writes more directly about clear results from follow-up appointments and a new proximity to her partner. Pain remains, even though “nothing can prevent the we any longer” (plus rien ne peut empêcher le nous, 103).

Writing a book, of course, allows for another view altogether, far from those of those who people her life. Coming Béliveau, who now sees herself as a poet who practises medicine, a mention of the Québécoise poet Marie Uguay, despite its sobriety, marks the shadow that disease and death cast upon poetry. Uguay’s work remains on the whole to be translated (but see three poems in periodicities and the selected poems published by Guernica), but she is known among readers of poetry in Québec to have died of cancer at the age of 26, at the beginning of an already fruitful life of writing – while Béliveau, not that far later in life, was being treated for cancer around the time when she published what was only her first collection.

In spite of this explicit comparison, Béliveau only addresses the act of writing in her poems at the very end, as a way to acknowledge what she does to those she loves as she emerges from the anger, fear, and fatigue of the treatment. Writing seems to come after the fact, not as document but as yet another movement through the transformation, a way to complete it, to make herself visible not only to those she trusts, to herself, but to the world – irrevocably putting herself into the world. “I must write my being brought into the world” she concludes, “red like July” (je dois écrire ma mise au monde / rouge comme juillet, 105). These last words echo the line that gives the collection its title where she becomes a third person to herself. Here, like in the rest of the collection, she alternates between the direct and obvious, and the highly abstract and metaphorical. But in the writing, as opposed to the experience of cancer and the transformations it initiates, nothing is cloaked.

 

 

 

 

 

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.