Jérôme Melançon : Il n’y aura pas de safety word, by Dominique Hétu

Il n’y aura pas de safety word, Dominique Hétu
Hurlantes, 2025

 

 

 

Dominique Hétu’s collection Il n’y aura pas de safety word (“There will be no safety word”) begins with a section titled “Nommer” (“Naming”), and so I shall also name its topic up front: fatphobia, fat-shaming, fat existence. Its poems are neither round nor angular – which is worth stating, since the collection ends with: “and then / if someone / wants to be clever / wants to be cute // and says (to me) that / I made poems / that are so full // I’m gonna break something” (“pis là / si une personne / veut faire sa fraîche / veut faire sa cute // et (me) dit que / j’ai fait des poèmes / tout en rondeur // j’casse toute”).

In this collection Hétu uses confessional poetry to express what is not allowed to be said publicly, to give it shape, to let others hear what they tell her. She responds to social discourse as well as to very specific encounters. Her humour is biting; it does not facilitate exchanges and does not defer to the power of shaming. She takes a position that complicates feminism and the demands to be proud of oneself. By bringing forward, in verse, her internal monologue, she allows the internal and everything that is internalized to pierce through to the external, to the behaviour that is imposed on her, to work against it. More than self-affirmation, then, these are poems of self-reconstruction – not in the sense that is expected of body sculpting through various (paid for) technologies, but against the constant damages that come from intimate and social interactions: “clothes tagged x / mark of the fault / of error // we know it / it’s whatever / but still it’s violent” (vêtements taggés x / marque de la faute / de l’erreur // on le sait / que c’est n’importe quoi / mais reste que c’est violent,” 70).

Part of her approach is to dare us to be as forward about fatphobia as she is, to acknowledge its presence within us. One of the sections in the book is titled “Du vent,” or “Hot air” as in, “ce n’est que du vent,” “this is nothing but hot air.” Hétu targets the false niceties, the empty encouragements, the backhanded compliments, the hypocrisy of interactions around fatness. In the process, she leads an anti-meditation on beauty, focusing on the dynamics of expectation and imposition, focusing intensely on events, words, letting them repeat and showing them for what they already are and displaying everything they already contain, rather than letting go of them or deepening them. Take this poem, for instance:

for the moment
we’ll admit
that you have the adequate outline
of beauty somewhere 

traces
clues
we see them
under your soft
under the full flesh 

be happy 

pour l’instant
on va reconnaître
que t’as le contour adéquat
du beau quelque part 

des traces
des indices
on les voit
sous ton mou
sous la chair pleine 

sois contente (44)

Hétu keeps her focus on pointing out the violence of forced compliments, pointing out what people are saying and doing when they are praising a picture, an outfit, in which she does not recognize herself. 

She lets us see the amount of energy that is needed to resist the behaviour that is expected of her, notably with a giant break on the page between the two following stanzas: “christ are we ever obliging / we consent to everything / free for all // we / when I / cost too much courage” (“on est serviable en crisse / on consent à toute / free for all // on / quand je / coûte trop en courage,” 82). As in many other passages, Hétu plays on the strength of the “on”: at once they and we, someone and everyone, it is a force that is as much internal as external, making resistance a transcendent necessity, all the more difficult for the lack of external supports. Here then I translate “on” as we, to show the presence of undefined others in the self, the agency they have within the self, but especially the depersonalization of the self, its loss in an undefined group as she acts, something this passage in particular addresses through the loss of the je in the on, looking at herself in the third person instead of acting in the first.

Perhaps in order to gain some ground on the self, it is in great part through exploring an intimate relationship that was lacking in respect, in fact devoid of it, that Hétu develops a voice and gaze that talks and looks back: 

I carry on my somber shoulders
the burden winds that ensure
your kind love
conditional
like a chorus
never fitting 

flayed
I dance
you feel like lip sync
in spite of the heat
and the asthma that keeps me weak
that hinders all rest 

bitter and constant noises
all around
that always take
that spoil the tune 

I will not be your karaoke

je porte sur mes épaules sombres
les vents fardeaux qui assurent
ton amour gentil
conditionnel
comme un refrain
jamais raccord 

au vif
je danse
tu as le goût du lip sync
malgré la chaleur
et l’asthme qui me garde faible
qui empêche tout repos 

bruits amers et constants
autour
qui prennent toujours
qui gâchent la toune 

je ne serai pas ton karaoké (40)

Poetically speaking, the collection functions so well because of its straightforwardness, its plays on silence and quick turnarounds, and the explicit avoidance of rimes, of things being neatly put together, since for her they are not neatly put together, or placed in a manner that is accessible. Still, Hétu ends on the possibility that poetry might open onto other subjects – other topics and selves – and help her reconcile with uncertainty. Without hoping for this poem, for this poetry, she desires it, and goes a long way to bringing it to the page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 : Madame full of shit, by Catherine Paquet

Madame full of shit, Catherine Paquet
Hurlantes, 2023

 

 

 

As you open Catherine Paquet’s debut collection, knowing that “Madame full of shit” is the French equivalent of “Little Miss Full of Shit” and that it appears within the collection in tandem with “Manic pixie dream girl” will give you two elements that seem essential to its construction. In these poems, the search for balance between self-deprecation and self-awareness is woven through with a criticism of the demands placed on women and the fantasies they resist or create in response.

Throughout the collection, Paquet expresses a desire for movement, for transformation, for a dynamic future, in part by the repeated use of the vocabulary of immobilization (“stallé,” “jammé”), partly through straightforward images like “I look for meaning like a top / at the risk of falling I spin” (“je cherche du sens comme une toupie / au risque de tomber je spinne,” 39). This expression is meant to make life possible and better instead of being an expulsion:

we should start up the fan
shake up the air along with the ideas
give ourselves the spaces of our ambitions
so that the wants that assail
stay put in a dirtpile
instead of getting expelled
on a porcelain seat 

il faudrait partir la fan
brasser l’air avec les idées
se donner les espaces de nos ambitions
que les envies qui assaillent
se tiennent dans un tas de terre
plutôt que d’être expulsées
sur un siège de porcelaine (90-91)

English speakers with some knowledge of French might find the book somewhat more approachable for its use of Franglais, which the publisher (the percussive Hurlantes Éditrices) defends in a prefatory note. Though this defense continues to be necessary in a context where attitudes toward the French language and its defense remain conservative, the text presents its own defense. It takes up and radicalizes the rhythm of spoken language, allows it to hit, to surprise, to shift ideas suddenly even as the languages flow together. Through very short lines and phrasings, it accelerates the speed of reading and of speaking, it holds a joy that is contagious for the reader.

The collection is organized in three sections, each focusing on loose themes: a youth that is lived as fleeting, and the elements of the body, inner life, and selfhood; placelessness, distress, and what existentialism looks like today; and the imperative to heal and take care of ourselves in ways that disarms the strength of anger and anxiety and their potential for change.

the veterans of “resilience”
pick up the dead soldiers
in the parks,
battlefields for dignity between
judgment,
       overdoses,
                    giving up
it’s true that the hand
is invisible that forces responsibility
down the throats of the famished 

les vétérans de la “résilience”
ramassent les corps morts
dans les parcs,
champs de bataille pour la dignité entre
le jugement,
           les surdoses,
                       l’abandon
c’est vrai qu’elle est invisible
la main qui enfonce la responsabilité
dans la gorge des affamé·es (87-88)

Paquet’s poems are highly concerned with, full of concern for, everyday life. They transform everyday clichéd expressions into new, fertile images, avoiding our expectations. Bringing water to the mill, amener de l’eau au moulin, adding proof or arguments, becomes “a seduction hydraulic / at the mill” (“séduction hydraulique / au moulin,” 18). A disappointing ending to a story (finir en queue de poisson) gives way to an improbable “fish bottom for an ending” (“cul de poisson comme fin,” 22). And the simple idea that things come in threes (jamais deux sans trois) becomes a comment on loneliness (“never two without a chill,” “jamais deux sans froids,” 25). She also details the insufficiencies of daily life by selecting simple objects that carry weight and exemplify fatigue and the dreading of change, as in the poem on page 50: the corner of the kitchen, neon lights, fingerprints on stainless steel, washcloths and jogging pants, extra-large band t-shirts, love handles, Epsom salts…

Throughout, the relationship to self passes through the relationship to the body and to clothes, and specifically to the expectations that others place on them. Reflecting on weight loss and exercise, she writes: “I think people thought I was prettiest / when I was lose in a storm / frozen mermaid / faults all over my shape” (“je pense qu’on m’a jamais trouvée aussi belle / que désorientée dans une tempête / sirène surgelée / des failles partout sur la shape,” 30). Paquet instead locates beauty in the acts of promising and rebounding:

the path the beautiful the great one
sketches itself like an abyss
rock bottoms are fertile
the softness of a warm pebble
at the end of trembling fingers
resonates like a prayer

le chemin le beau le grand
se dessine comme une abysse
les rock bottoms sont fertiles
la douceur d’un galet chaud
au bout des doigts tremblants
résonne comme une prière, 80-81

Paquet is able to create tension and awaken desires that keep us engaged. Her writing is clear and inviting, and I wrote down too many passages for me to be able to share them all here. And even as she sometimes cuts herself in the process, her precision and irony are sharp and direct – she makes language at once into a tool and a weapon. And indeed, the strongest poem might just be the one on page 73 (they are all untitled), where she describes the ruinous effect on her fingers of digging in the soil of meaning so that something new may grow.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 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.