Jérôme Melançon: Scaphandre, by Mélissa Labonté

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.

Jérôme Melançon: Au seuil des mouches à fruits, by Bobby Valérie

Au seuil des mouches à fruits, Bobby Valérie
Éditions Fond’tonne, 2023

 

 

 

 

With an enigmatic title and a variety of styles of composition and illustration, Bobby Valérie’s collection Au seuil des mouches à fruit (At the Fruit Flies’ Threshold) is immediately and continuously captivating. Using an aesthetic of variation, Valérie plays with contrasts, presentations, clashes, surprise, degrees of grey, sudden movements – all aspects of a slow, obsessive, merciless movement forward.

This kind of book is rarely found. To call it a collection is already to diminish its generosity. While I first assumed that each page presented its own poem or artwork (and each is strong enough to hold its own, even where a single phrase is present), the table of contents indicates four multi-page poems. The poems begin with a quotation (by a man on the street, a stranger on Pinterest, the unequaled singer Marjo, and the Théâtre des cuisines) and a collage, each combining two images (human and animal) and a shifting line. The pages with words vary in font and size, in background (at times white on grey or black), and in technique (many pages appearing to be photocopies of lines cut or torn and pasted). The sharpness of the poems is such that they regularly offer lines ready to become quotations that would in turn give birth to poems in the reader’s striving and reaching for a similar expansiveness.

The ensemble is neither whole nor fragmentary. Valérie doesn’t highlight the connection in content through these form that change from page to page. She does not keep a steady voice or rhythm. She does not obey the convention of keeping to a single register of language, mixing instead everyday québecisms with the most precise literary prose. In fact, she constantly disrupts herself and her reader. That disruption is the central element of the worded aspect of the book (worded, because the words are only one element in the interplay of form and content, background and figure, space and ink).

Yet disruption is not a sufficient word: overused to the point of becoming a cliché on a postcard or a road sign, disruption is now synonymous with “critical” or “different.” Valéry does not claim disruption, but does claim revolt, perturbation, resistance, and points out that “the path of subversion is a boxing match often by knockdown” (“le chemin de la subversion est un combat de boxe souvent knockdown”). This book is disorderly even as it remains coherent. It destroys an order while caressing the sharp edges of its pieces. It interrupts violently and insists that previous speech and actions not be picked up or pieced back together – it looks to what will come of the manipulation of the shards and the flesh they will cut.

This is a thoroughly feminist disruption angled toward liberation, embodying the desire “to liberate ourselves [...] of what will become of us” (“s’affranchir [...] de ce qui adviendra de nous”). We are given the body in its splendor and disgust, both flesh and spirit. Valéry weaves the body into its surrounding: there’s deboning, retching, vital signs, chapped hands; sheets with makeup; cleaning ladies who won’t rust; presence of the body to water, ice and snow; abortion is a metaphor; leaking pores are plugged; harvests empty their lungs. Even to speak of “the body” is not precise enough: we are shown a woman’s body amongst the elements, in the act of fighting, loving, and in their aftermath, for instance in relation to sex: “my sex burns with the desire to be eaten” (mon sexe brûle de l’envie d’être dévoré) responds to “thighs sticky with sperm” (les cuisses poisseuses de sperme). That the former arrives later in the collection may not be happenstance: desire arises once more after the completion of the act (be it sexual or revolutionary), even in spite of disappointment or failure, even after attack and defeat.

There is a harshness in Valéry’s choice and combinations of words; we read by feeling them in our mouths, like a mix of berries (some perfect, others under- and over-ripe), sand, rounded and jagged pebbles. The harshness partly comes from the repetition and reversal of certain images and references, as when “fireflies” (“mouches à feu”) responds to “fruit flies” (“mouches à fruits”), or when “lucioles” (the proper name of fireflies) responds again without repeating, moving from what disappears (along with the light and hope it carries) to what brings our attention back to the mysterious in our surroundings.

This harshness is also due to Valéry’s arrival following a debacle (of capitalism), in the midst of violence (against women), but also following the transgressions of a previous generation of women against the order that violates them – an arrival that takes place when disappearances and defeat are expected. She echoes something of Rosa Luxemburg’s certainty that radical change will take place no matter what, leading to either “socialism or barbarism” depending on our actions:

“an orgy of laughter and cries in the uncertain crowd between celebration and riot, we ask where we may find the emergency exit, please, and the answers remain ellipses. soon the evidence of the last daybreak will be behind us.”

(“une orgie de rires et de cris dans la foule hésitante entre la fête ou l’émeute, nous demandons où trouver la sortie d’urgence, s’il vous plaît, et les réponses restent points de suspension. bientôt l’évidence du dernier lever du jour sera derrière nous.”)

This last daybreak may be the beginning of a descent into darkness, or the first morning of a new era. There is a light that grows throughout the book, even as the intimate knowledge of silence, violence, and destruction remains as sharp as ever. In the dynamics of the succession of pages, we find a movement through loss and destruction alongside other people, toward community and new attempts, an intimate knowledge of the ongoing destruction and of the need for different destructions, based on a hope that’s constant: “I say hope is a word that is recognized within adversity” (“je dis l’espoir est un mot qui se reconnaît dans l’adversité”).

By touching the flesh and adding to the movement of these dynamics, Valéry’s book acts as a threshold. It opens onto a place where sweetness mixes with decay, a place into which we will find ourselves thrown or within which we can create new life from all that has already been lost.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Jérôme Melançon : De chacun des jours, by Isabelle Courteau

De chacun des jours, Isabelle Courteau
Éditions Pleine Lune, 2024

 

 

 

In her latest collection, De chacun des jours (“Of each of the days”), Isabelle Courteau returns to some of the central images of poetry – night, light, air, breath, words, perspectives, and paths, most notably – and sheds them of the layers of versification that have attached themselves to them over the last centuries. She lets the images appear, uncomplicated and weightless, in short, direct poems. Although set in verse, they strictly obey the rules of punctuation and grammar. Each could be read out loud in one breath, as one breath. Yet these poems avoid the density of haiku. They have the energy of butterflies, the relation to space of a person who looks up from a table or desk to a window and gazes out between thoughts.

The collection’s sections are as brief as their titles are straightforward: “Time without primer,” “An obscure daylight,” “The freedom of leaves,” “Mobility” – each contains just over a dozen poems. The artworks on the cover and within the book, pastels by Françoise Sullivan, give the same bright calmness, the same presentation of clear elements that functions without filling in the whole page or even whole thoughts.

The poems themselves are light. This lightness gives us lines like “This gone-away presence / inflicts pain” (“Cette présence en-allée / fait souffrir,” 39); “False ideas crack high above / like a hazelnut’s shell” (“Les fausses idées craquent en l’air / comme la coque d’une noisette,” 28); or “To be reborn infinitely / as in a hollow within a wide basin” (“Renaître à l’infini / comme en creux au sein d’une large vasque,” 54).

Courteau’s poems are material: they can be felt, their texture being both vocal and oral, and soft, cool to the touch. They are to be read like we hold objects that excite our hands, felt without design or instruction, their shape espoused, their contours explored. Reading them places us entirely in the moment – a moment that is at once Courteau’s and ours.

 

 

 

 

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.

Jérôme Melançon : Mayday, by Dyane Léger

Mayday, Dyane Léger
Prise de parole, 2023

 

 

 

 

With Mayday, Dyane Léger wrote a book that might just be the Acadian Second Sex. The first woman to publish a book of poetry in Acadie (in 1980 – the second being Rose Després), Léger relies on the mixing of languages that constantly occurs in Acadian speech and on the description of women’s experiences. The result is a book-length story in verse that presents clear emotions and states of mind while eluding the naming of events and people. By focusing on an unnamed woman as the main character of the story, Léger is able to confront social forces and structures as Mam’zelle experiences and resists them.

It would be false to say that the book is written in one language. In creating her narrator, Léger turns to the person who speaks rather to her languages, and moves between what could be distinguished as French, Chiac, English, Mi’kmaq, and other languages that also slip in, like Gaelic, all of which exist as a single fabric without seams or edges for she who is speaking it. Léger presents a philosophy of language in action here, a refusal to separate, a dwelling in the constant birth of expression. English pronunciation is acknowledged through umlauts (“bräcer,” “Whäm,” “too bäd”), familiar pronunciation through creative spelling – including showing a French pronunciation of English words (see: “de” or “di” for “the”; “sinjoye” for “s’enjoy”). Puns abound throughout, sometimes within French (“ses l’armes” instead of “ses larmes,” transforming tears into weapons), but particularly through the mixing of French and English: “déwrenche” transforms “dérange” (bother) into a de-wrenching, showing Mam’zelle’s great strength. Common expressions are transformed to mark her determination: “No wäy! Oser!” (“No way! Dare!”). We find this inter-linguistic movement of speech within verses such as “right now si tu câres une petite miette about moi.” (26) We also find it in longer passages, which also often feature aspects of this spoken language (like “os” being spoken “ous” and giving us a possibly pluralized “ors”):

Can’t afford to be anywhere else, really.
So, sadly and madly,
[the little one], she’s always on the edge because
[she never knows when the seven-headed beast will turn right back around
to come collect is due: the skin she has on her bones.]

Can’t afford to be anywhere else, really.
So, sadly and madly,
la petite, she’s always on the edge because
elle sait jamais quand la bête-à-sept-têtes va ervirer bäck de bord
pour venir collecter son dû: la peau qu’elle a sur les ous. (24)

The poetic aspect of the book mostly exists through the rhythm that enjambment and white space create and through the heavy presence of linguistic innovation and transformation and the constant recourse to imagery. While the book is set in verse, much of it reads like a story told in prose poetry. And this story is made all the more tangible by the light but constant presence of popular culture. To limit the non-exhaustive list to music, we move through many lullabies through Whisky in the jar, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Serge Gainsbourg, Bob Seeger (or Metallica?), Pink Floyd, Janis Joplin, Stevie Nicks, David Bowie, Men without Hats, and The Tragically Hip. Literary figures also play an important role, Gabrielle Roy and Patrice Desbiens among them as non-Québécois Francophones writer who opened up possibilities for writing in French in English surroundings.

The most radically feminist aspect of Mayday is the development of the character’s interiority in relation to events that might inspire pity or scorn – two ways to refuse to recognize her as an equal and to negate her agency. There is nothing normal about Mam’zelle, except for the fact that, like every person, she exists outside of norms and brings them into question simply by living. Her eventually falling into norms or entirely rejecting them then has an effect similar to the second volume of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: unveiling that thoughts, hesitations, emotions, situations are shared by many women and are not particular to any one woman, are not abnormal aberrations. There is a great potential for recognition here, or learning about past personal struggles, and the blurry figures of the events that Mam’zelle confronts will only help readers recognize them by letting them stand as archetypes present in historically and geographically specific situations.

Solidarity runs through the book, including the poem-within-a-poem Mam’zelle writes and significantly reads out loud about the repression of the Elsipogtog resistance of 2013. In fact, the book displays a transformation of Acadian society and culture by spending very little time on the memory of the Deportation of Acadians, mentioning it quickly without making it into a symbol for personal tragedy, and instead offering several pages on this resistance, including the role of Acadian police officers in the repression. “It felt like we were in a different country,” Léger writes, twice (205).

That the events are recounted in English and their consequences in French is also significant. Not only is this story being told, in person, in the book, in a manner that is open to accountability with Indigenous readers given the choice of the language. What we can learn from the story is specifically aimed at French speakers, who tend to refuse to see themselves as settlers on account of their own relationship to the British Empire. And here too, gender plays a role, through masculinity and what might overturn it: “More and more, I wonder if among this gang of Rambo wannabes, / there’ll be one who’s woman enough to face the machine of death, / [dead-on], bare-handed and without blinking” (“De plus en plus, je me demande si parmi cette bande de wannabe Rambos, / y’en aura un assez femme pour affronter la machine de la mort, / dead-on, nu-mains et sans blinker,” 207).

To focus solely on these elements that make up the book would be unfair to the story that drives it. The narrator is entirely external to the main character, la petite, and later Mam’zelle, who is “cursed with an unquenchable turmoil” (50). The only other clear character is LaVoix (TheVoice), a mysterious presence that both guides and leads astray but ensures that Mam’zelle lives her own life in spite of all that is already set out or determined for her, and often brings conflict into her life. The narrator looks at Mam’zelle with amusement, pride – as if she was looking back on a younger version of herself (which is possible, given the timeline suggested by cultural references), or simply at someone who reminds her of herself. She wants certain outcomes for Mam’zelle, she has hopes for her, and sometimes switches to the first person to emphasize it:

In some fine kettle of fish, some might say Mam’zelle is asking for it.
That she’s already gone way past [the limit.]
[That if she keeps on looking for trouble,
it’ll find her, bang on! Coming to her defense, I say:
Nay, nay, nay, Mam’zelle is still far from having reached too far.]
But that’s just me dropping a loonie or two in the wishing well,
mindfully hoping
[that the canari still sings sings sings,
that the firedamp hasn’t already blown up the miners.]

In some fine kettle of fish, some might say Mam’zelle is asking for it.
That she’s already gone wäy past la limite.
Que si elle continue à chercher le trouble,
il la trouvera, bäng on ! Me portant à sa défense, je dis :
Nâni, nâni, nâni, Mam’zelle est encore loin d’avoir reché trop loin.
But that’s just me dropping a loonie or two in the wishing well,
mindfully hoping
que le canari chante chante chante toujours,
que le coup de grisou n’a pas encore tué les mineurs. (59-60)

The strong presence of the narrator emphasizes the linearity of the story as a story that is being told. Beginning with a description of a child hardened by abuse who remains open to the natural and symbolic world, the story moves into early sexuality and a teenagehood that slides into motherhood and the traps that (continue to) accompany it. It includes asides on Mam’zelle’s thoughts, including her sadness and grief at the story of Laika which allows Léger to create a knowingly imperfect analogy on the cruelty of men. The story climaxes around a birthday party gone wrong and the possible loss of a child, a climax that is framed by the desire for, and by the writing of, a book of poetry.

Léger wants this book to be understood – and not only because a reader would need a strong understanding of both French and English to catch all it has to offer. Mayday carries a heritage with it, a moment or a series of moments in language and culture, in collective being. She thus includes an imposing glossary, followed by detailed explanations of many of the references. These serve as much to make the book more accessible as to preserve this heritage which, as Léger suggests through the ways she uses it herself, can be taken up in the name of solidarity and social transformation.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), all with above/ground press, 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 much to do with some of this.

Jérôme Melançon : Notes and Theses on Zong!

Zong! As Told to the Author by Setaey Adamu Boateng, M. NourbeSe Philip, Fifteenth Anniversary Edition
Invisible Publishing, 2023

 

 

 

 

I write with a certain measure of doubt as to whether I have the ability to meaningfully add to the discussion around this book. Zong! opened possibilities for poets and the visual aspects of its form (the methodical filling in of the full space of the page through gaps allowing each cluster of words to breathe) made its way to me before I even read it. This book has been read out loud by so many voices to create as many echoes as possible for the voices the author wanted to bring back to life; it deserved an anniversary edition so it could be discovered anew, like new; it required a reedition and a restatement of its purpose and being after it was flattened in an unauthorized translation.

I doubt myself, but I see Philip doubting herself in the entries she shares from her writing journal. The weight of Zong!’s history and of the history it carries, combined with the weight of the book itself, makes the paper even more beautiful, the reading even more solemn. The new essays it contains, by Philip herself, Katherine McKittrick, and Saidiya Hartman, come to explore its significance, both at the time of writing and in relation to the scholarship on slavery and Black life. In every aspect of these poems and of the texts that support them there is song, there is incantation, there is a singing of the dead to rest and a singing of those who lived to be slaves to another kind of rest. To read it is to learn about the possibilities of reappearance of what was thought to be lost and to participate in bringing it back to the surface, to another kind of life.

I

Books only come through books, like voices only continue the speaking of earlier voices.

.

This book comes announced, lauded, read, spoken. Reeditions are rare, anniversaries even more so. Its merit is already established, it only needs to be discovered anew. Once opened and its pages felt, its chronology effaces itself, it propels itself, it finds its own wind. Yet having been talked about and around, mentioned, named, it remains more grave, more solemn, its aims grander, wider – too wide for any two hands.

II

Voice is material. Carried onto paper, voice brushes against ideas, faces its flattening. Writing is an effort to maintain a voice.

.

The material is everywhere, the words are ostentations, pointings, cries. The poems are told by a person who is fictional but entirely real in their standing in for others unnamed and unknown; told by those who reported in cold legal prose on a mass killing; told by a person who carries rather than author, molds rather than create, compose for an ensemble rather than paint. There is urgency in the timber, furious helplessness in the silences and spaces; resignation in the inability to choose the voices heard; new meaning in the vibration of ink on the paper; creation and new life in the capacity to tell, to rearrange, to refuse a linear telling.

III

The changing of verb tenses creates equivalence as well as difference. They who tell are out of time at the moment of telling, ahead of what is to be told, behind the arrival of their words. Those written, those writing, those receiving the words are entirely present to one another, fully alive – but not at the same time.

.

Taking on someone else’s voice creates equivalence in spite of any difference in humanity, in treatment, in respect. Philip knows this and searches the entanglement of authority and justification – “the could.” She deflects her own authorship, deflects the authorship of the legal documents, finds herself and places us at the moment of an act that can neither be authored, claimed, recognized, nor be justified. In “Zong! #19” she permutates authorship and justification until they cease to bring any certainty – shows both as neither afloat nor grounded, perhaps only run aground, without a reason. In “Zong! #9” lines on the right-hand side end with “in” until “in” moves to the left side at the end of the poem. She breaks the harmony of repetition, opposes her authorship to the author of the document and to the author of the action, even as she refuses to have the last word.

IV

Silence is not a gap; it is what up-holds speech.

.

Permutation and erasure make us experience the bad faith in the speech of legal documents, the speech of declarations, the speech of sales; they make us see the choice of words as well as the choice of deeds and the impossibility of their meeting. Murderers and underwriters, all those who take part in the slavery that stops being ‘ordinary’ or ‘of the time’, lose all their ties and positions, are left out to drift without an anchor or any recourse. The poet and the voices she carries choose their deeds as belonging, as actions against their own dehumanization and deaths.

V

Not every text is within every text. Every text can be turned into its opposite. Not everyone is capable of everything – or anything. Within the words we speak there is potential for fewer words. We need only speed up, chop up, to give life to what the text had prevented.

.

The section titled “DICTA” is about permutations and the hope that some version of the past might have led to a different reality. Words are aligned, each and none qualifying the reality they attempted to slant, to distort. The tort is turned against them, then, becomes unspeakable harm, as the succession of events is both ascertained and affirmed and shown as possibly other, possibly fictitious, replaceable. Other events could have taken place, every murder of slaves disguised as loss of cargo could have been imagined, every person taken could have remained with their loved ones, carried on with their lives.

VI

There are always many people in each voice. Voices are not found, voices are composed.

.

Philip sought out voices, and ensured that her own did not drown them again. There is attribution of a first telling to a collective voice, that of Setaey Adamu Boateng. Philip lets voices pass into hers, not through hers, does not make them a vehicle for her own (and here I sadly flatten the page onto a single line, marking distance with a >):

“tes moi > je am he / am at last > omi water / l eau > l eau” (84)

She does not delineate or distinguish voices, nothing cuts through them. Slave owner and slave are at a distance but in tension through their bonds.

In other poems, she separates each ‘s’ from the words it pluralizes, thus keeping the plural at a distance, keeping the third person at a distance, maintaining the individuality not of each death, but of each life. Plurality exists in distance on these pages, in a coming together Philip makes possible. And the coming together is clear: Philip lets us feel the proximity of words by separating them, but also by moving between languages. These poems are a microcosm of the rest of the book, where the same separation is performed upon words; this separation of the plural ‘s’ reminds us of the aim of the book as a whole, the smallest distance being the most deeply felt.

VII

Experimental writing is writing that makes us learn to read again, writing that is exhausting because it does not rely on habits, because it aims to break habits to make us hear what we could not hear, beautiful because we can feel what we are achieving by reading.

.

The second last section is the most challenging to read. Most of the text is chopped up into small bits, couplets of words. Reading requires so much effort in bridging the gaps between the words. There is so much meaning to create, so much meaninglessness to overcome.

Similar clustering of parts of words can be found throughout the book. The format of publication of this review limits what we can do, a picture from page 134 will serve as an example for those who have not yet encountered the book:

Philip protested against a translation upon which there had been no agreement and, more importantly, which flattened her poem. She was right to do so: no matter in which language, “we are outside of time and out of time” would not read the same as

“ers we a > re out s > ide of time and o /
>ut of ti > m dar” (144)

VIII

The law silences and ends speech. Even where certain devices elicit speech and defenses and discourses and dissenting opinions, others come to stop it, destroy its movement. Under the rule of law, speech must be constantly kept in movement, and some poetry can accomplish this task.

.

In the poem there is a challenge to the authors, to the men who share in the responsibility of the crime and the larger dehumanization, as they are forced to reckon with their actions as they write to women (Claire, Ruth, many others) – and as they avoid this reckoning, reflection, or responsibility by falling from the us to ius, that is, law, right, what they have the right to do by law. Philip shows that the law is what holds them together, what binds them to others, and what makes them able to enslave and murder others. The law becomes an alibi, a well of bad faith, a permission, a disappearance of the “I” into an unspecified but well enforced “us.”

“let us / claire / just / us > just / us / & / ius” (94)
“in this age > of gin rum / & guns this age > of los negros les / nègres ignore the age > the rage of sane / men just > us ruth just / us just ius” (115)

IX

Poetry can breathe life into what we can no longer experience as it was.

.

So much of the poem is about making it possible to tell the story, its horror, its mundanity, without flattening lives, that the act itself only rarely appears, and only appears in its full strength. We see mourning on page 110; the weight of truth on page 111; an admission of guilt on pages 120-121. On pages 140-141, we understand that if the horror is seen as sin, it is lessened, because it becomes both inescapable (humans are sinners) and expiable, thus forgivable.

X

To allow a story to tell itself is to avoid throwing it overboard in exchange for some kind of compensation or certainty.

.

Philip’s own thesis is that there is a mystery in the story of the slaves aboard the Zong, “the mystery of evil.” Philip’s own thesis in writing the story is that “this story must be told by not telling” (190) so that the mystery may be preserved.

A story that cannot be told other than by not telling cannot be flattened, have its gaps filled, have its refusal of structure brought into the immediate access granted by prose, have its hope turned into certainty. Philip gives us poetry at its most political, as it rearranges the elements of reality, of certainty, as it refuses the alibis of authorship and justification, as it refuses the underwriting that holds up those who risk others, as it rejects balance sheets, tidy orderings, and placement.

Post-Scriptum

Other theses would be about slavery and (in)humanity. To continue turning slaves back from objects, cargo, resources, into human beings.

Writing them is beyond my current capacity – not my role as a reviewer or critic, which very much includes the need to develop the capacity to do so, but exactly that current capacity as ability, that knowledge of a lack of knowledge, that reflection that ends at the fact of ignorance, that presence on my bookshelf of works by Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, and Rinaldo Walcott. That current capacity as leading into a future possibility.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), all with above/ground press, 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 much to do with some of this. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome.

Jérôme Melançon : Lessons from Venice, by Denise Desautels, transl. Alisa Belanger

Lessons from Venice, Denise Desautels, transl. Alisa Belanger
Ekstasis Editions, 2020

 

 

 

 

Alisa Belanger’s translation of Lessons from Venice, by the Québécoise poet Denise Desautels, was perhaps a casualty of the early pandemic, of our common and collective incapacity to see beyond the immediate present. We regretfully have little of Desautels’s work in English, which is surprising given the honours she has received – but less so when we consider the fluidity of her writing, which creates wonderful challenges for translators. So it is worthwhile to (re)visit Alisa Belanger’s second translation of Desautels’s poetry, after Things that Fall (Guernica, 2013).

Like many of Desautels’s collections, Leçons de Venise is built on ekphrasis – here, three sections each focus on one sculpture or installation by Michel Goulet. In the translation, Goulet’s name has disappeared from the cover pages and the reproductions of the sculptures are absent from the book altogether (in my original French copy from 1990, they were printed apart from the book and inserted at the beginning of each of the three sections, like leaves pressed within pages that become a part of the book). Even the references to the artwork at the end of the book were removed. The chair on the original cover is replaced by an unattributed stylized picture of Venice; the editing process pivots the poems away from the artwork toward the city, from the lessons to Venice itself. As a result, we miss something of the intertwining of the poetry and the sculptures.

Without immediate access to the original, some lines become unnecessarily enigmatic: “The chairs piled in the bed boards have struck a pose” (19) is an almost literal description of the sculpture, adding metaphor only to the impression given by the placement of the objects. Likewise, a direct reference to Cézanne or to the sculptor becomes metaphorical, wildly open to interpretation:

“I cannot forget that there is a bed, chairs, a table, guns, more cumbersome than the fruit bowls in a painting by Cézanne.” (25)

“The sculptor piled up chairs that face us and that we observe; he set them against a wall inside the posts of a bed.” (28)

While ekphrastic poetry can gain its autonomy from its original object and need not remain tethered to it, Desautels writes through the artwork; in the case of Goulet’s installation of chairs in public spaces, she sits on the artwork and plays the literal and figurative meanings of this sitting. Writing then becomes a collaboration after the fact, the poems attesting to the life of the artwork as others do of past experiences and encounters. The absence of images to accompany the translation then points to Desautels’s practice of weaving the metaphorical and the material, whether it be in relation to artwork or to everyday acts and experiences.

The preface by the poet Louise Dupré to the English edition does explain Desautels’s relationship to the artwork and artist – and gives some clues about her writing practice in relation to art. “Art favors introspection, an unexpected encounter of internal realms, contemplation of certain familiar objects,” Dupré writes (6), also highlighting the sorrow that runs throughout the poems – alongside the sharp desire to cut through time and history I find more generally in Desautels’s poetry.

That said, the absence of the artwork in the book takes nothing away from the poet’s concern for the very material existence of the sculptures, which remains clear in the poems. Each of the three sections explores a sculpture after which it is named, as well as the world onto which it opens in its own modality. The first section, “Motif / Mobiles,” plays with entanglement and distance in relation to objects, naming the gaps and the movement through them as well as the clutter and movement around them. The second, “Factitious Faction,” on precarity and states of dangerous balance, is full of sudden actions and eruptions. The third, “Work Table” (which could also have been translated as “The Work’s Table”), explores the inscrutability of purpose in other peoples’ objects and their potential uses.

As the second section begins with a description of the sculpture (“Ten rifles, real ones, are lined up against the wall,” 39), we can enter the space of the artwork. While the translation makes room for Desautels’ breath (short lines interspaced within longer lines) and quick turnarounds, some of the translator’s choices take away from the sharp precision of the original. “Lie in wait” suggests either an element of surprise that clashes with the clear presence of the rifle, or a horizontal position that is contrary to their vertical placement. And “I’m recycling them” takes away from the dual meaning of “Je les récupère,” recycling and taking back – “I’m reclaiming them” would have been a more direct choice, like “I’m recovering them.” In other cases, some choices are off-putting: “Rifling through the soul’s reasons,” while “rummaging” and “scouring” were acceptable alternatives, might have been a bit too on the nose.

On the whole, the translation does clearly render the movement present in the poems and lead to a translation that is more than worth reading, as it gives us the most important elements of the work and of the style. This second section backs away from ekphrasis, into reality: with each poem we get a wider perspective. This sculpture intermingles with Giacometti’s Women of Venice, which takes on a firm supporting role. And further out, suddenly but softly, through five dated poems and especially one poem that recounts a letter from the speaker’s friend Louise (unintentionally giving an anticipatory echo of the English preface by Desautels’s friend Louise Dupré), we encounter a historical moment in the lives of so many women in Canada, but especially perhaps in Québec: the massacre of fourteen women at Montreal’s École polytechnique on December 6, 1989. The event is thus approached softly in the collection, even as the poet faces its brutal irruption in reality. And even as Desautels marks the powerlessness and futility of language when faced with such violence, she displays its force outside of the moment when women are faced with their deaths, when violence simply looms. This section becomes a meditation not on firearms, but through firearms, against the direction they indicate in their aim and in the aiming, against the movement they create when they are fired, toward the source of violence, against it, taking on the role of sentry, moving in onto thought where it can be inflected, becoming a rifle rather than a statue. She maintains the capacity for distinction and highlights that the fight is continuous: “Lifting a shadow, then another, there is so much resistance before the true story.” (58)

In the third section, the artwork becomes something else, is reborn anew in each poem, leads the speaker back to herself. Chairs lead to other chairs, break habits by making them explicit and conscious. We find descriptions of the sculpture and of the objects it evokes, descriptions that are at once precise and direct, and grand. We feel how art breaks the order of things. The title of the collection is at its clearest here: the lessons are tied to what precedes and follows the experience of the work of art, the aura art takes on not because its location, but because of what its location makes possible. And yet Desautels is able to maintain (and Belanger is able to render) hesitation in facing what the artwork suggests and the response it elicits:

“At the moment when writing, my hand falters. An empty space in the self...
Only a shell before the luxury of words. An isolated event: thinking.” (80)

One of the strengths of the original collection is in the occasional halt to the rhythm of the prose poems Desautels imposes through single, percussive and profound end lines that read like aphorisms.

While in the first poem, the translation cuts the ambiguity the wrong way (“In Venice, beauty is a response to mourning that doesn’t exist” (13) where “to the mourning that doesn’t exist” would have been more faithful), others are quite happy finds. “The sculptor will learn that I ensue in history” (59) is a clear choice through a rarely used word where there was originally both decision and ambiguity. “Then I imagine myself polishing firearms” (57) maintains the reversal, the cut in the poem and in experience. “No happiness is hidden behind sounds loaded with ashes” (53) carries the image as well as the dry desolation without resignation of the original.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon is aware that there is not usually an ‘s’ after a possessive apostrophe at the end of a proper name ending in ‘s’, but does want to point out that the ‘s’ is Desautels is silent, and the absence of a possessive ‘s’ would make a very strange gap in these sentences indeed. He lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK and has published three chapbooks with above/ground press, two collections with Éditions des Plaines, and one with Prise de parole. He sometimes translates poetry for periodicities as well as other text in other places, and is currently working on translations of books by Denise Desautels and by Phyllis Webb.

Jérôme Melançon : Peur pièta, by Nicholas Dawson

Peur pièta, Nicholas Dawson
Le Noroît, 2024

 

 

 

 

Perhaps I ought not to begin this review by mentioning that Nicholas Dawson’s sister, Caroline Dawson, passed away just over a month ago. I ought not to even mention it, because it might seem unrelated and odd; because that’s how I, very specifically, approached this collection, in a manner that those who will read this, and perhaps then pick up this book because of it, will not. Knowing the strength of the work of these siblings, I can only regret having so unfortunately lagged and waited so long that I only very recently read this book, and then more, and all in the light of this loss. Both are poets and researchers and incredibly gifted writers, both are incredible humans – or so I was told by those, some of them close to me, who are mourning Caroline and know Nicholas. Yet this is how I approached this collection, and so perhaps for someone who sits outside the conversations that take place around poetry and literature in Québec, perhaps there’s a possibility of reading these poems without their foreclosure, without the intrusion of reality into poetry. Yet at least for a time, many readers will be in a paradoxical reading situation in which the poems remain open in a manner that Caroline’s foretold death makes impossible: playing with the passage of time, they resist what time adds to them.

Regardless of how I might write about it, this is how I approached this book, picking it up a few weeks after reading the news after letting it sit on a shelf for a few weeks, and there is likely no way for me to write about it without beginning with this awareness of a loss I am seeing others feel. No matter what words I am to write about this book, they will come out of the awareness of distant relationships. I bring awareness, and not knowledge, being caught up in other people’s relationships, adding to the dense and carefully looked after relationships that run through the poems.

Ultimately I can begin by mentioning Nicholas Dawson’s (the Dawson to whom I’ll refer here) sister, since there is a sister in this collection, a sister who has her own section, “Hermana,” alongside “Madre” and “Abuela.” Dawson himself comes into our hands in a minor mode, as a child brought into the world the others had prepared for him while working out their own difficulties moving through that world. That is, he appears as a grandson, as a son, and as a “little brother,” notably in the poem that is reprinted on the back cover. In that poem, his minority appears alongside the main themes of the collection: cartography, prayer, transformation, calling out, memory, body and planet, childhood – all shiny and treasurable. One can hold any of these poems like a child holds a nice rock, like an adult holds a small seashell, their gleaming allowing us to appreciate their dulled or abrasive facets.

This collection, Peur pièta, follows Dawson’s Désormais, ma demeure, which was recently translated as House Within a House by D.M. Bradford. As Bradford mentions, translating Dawson involves going deeper into a relationship with the author which he facilitates by his care for his readers. And Peur pièta takes up some aspects of that previous book, including family relationships and depression. The dull or abrasive aspects of existence are fully rendered here as well. In many poems through the section titled “The Cruel Disturbance of the Cosmos,” an obsession with counting up or down often surfaces, proper as much to childhood as to those who seek to educate, or to those who attempt to breathe themselves out of rage and anxiety. Here a desperation for luck joins a habit of knocking on surfaces, including on wood, to ward off fright:

One two three times on wood – make it so that the word be not prophecy of the poets of yesteryear, damned and sent away, wandering alone and punished in lands, fissured scattered with forests teeming with creatures and demons with piercing eyes, ready to snatch lyres and verses so that today everything may die. One two three on my skull because there is no more wood, there is only terrified speech, and I fear that my head may not suffice.

(Un deux trois sur le bois – faites que le mot ne soit pas prophétie des poètes d’antan, maudits et congédiés, errant seuls et punis dans des terres fissurées, parsemées de forêts qui grouillent de créatures et de démons aux yeux perçants, prêts à subtiliser les lyres et les vers pour qu’aujourd’hui tout meure. Un deux trois sur mon crâne parce qu’il n’y a plus de bois, il n’y a qu’une parole terrifiée, et je crains que ma tête ne suffise pas, 83)

Yet within the collection poems balance each other out, and writing plays a role not only in warding off, but also in bringing together. Dawson’s relationship to his sister is one of unequivocal love and happiness, even as it is surrounded by the difficulties their mother, and her mother, experienced:

we had a mysterious speech
a communion woven with spells
guardian fortress of pillows and cushions

nous avions une parole mystérieuse
une communion tissée de formules magiques
forteresse tutélaire d’oreillers et de coussins (65)

Even as the perspective shifts, even as tonality and mode change, the voice remains the same. In free verse without capitalization or punctuation that makes subtle use of short lines and cuts, of all the silence and dream that white space on the page provides, poems without a centre; or in prose poems that keep thoughts together tightly and ties them together through an imposing and precise use of punctuation, poems without edges. Here we find one of the sharpest poems of the collection, where line breaks open universes:

the stars and lime teach us
times in circles

whose cycles tie together
at questions
addressed from the shore

now
that the vastness is of fire

(les étoiles et le limon nous apprennent / des temps circulaires // dont les cycles se lient / par des questions / adressées au large // maintenant / que le large est de feu, 97)

And the voice also remains the same even as its language shifts. Dawson’s Spanish is the tongue of his grandmother and mother, a tongue share with his sister, the tongue in which he maintains their presence through speaking of them and to them in French. Distance, death, loss cannot erase the traces that language and people leave within us. Spanish does not fight French; Dawson writes bilingually, incorporating each language into the other, avoiding the temptation to turn toward language and away from people – or toward readers and away from language. The two languages do not coexist, then, so much as form a whole; forming neither a chain nor a braid, Dawson allows them disappear into each other, into his tongue, into speech. No glossary, no explanation, no mention even of any hybridity: there is only a person’s unbounded manner of speaking:

“she bends down, y ruega, y ruega, día y noche ruega como yo so that her Virgin may hear her, so that the debt, whatever it may be, never swarm into anyone’s body” (elle se penche, y ruega, y ruega, día y noche ruega como yo pour que sa Vierge l’entende, pour que la dette, quelle qu’elle soit, ne s’essaime jamais dans le corps de quiconque, 47)

“With all these adjurations, todo tiembla, todo se mezcla, even the birds crash into my window and disappear” (À force d’adjurations, todo tiembla, todo se mezcla, même les oiseaux s’écrasent contre ma fenêtre et disparaissent, 81)

In their failures, languages give way to tongues and speech:

“when it failed we tripped / on a linguistic hiccup // then we turned our tongues in our mouths / to unbind new words” (quand ça échouait nous trébuchions / sur un hoquet linguistique // nous tournions alors nos langues dans nos bouches / pour délier des mots nouveaux, 64).

In this intense, precise work, Dawson displays his ability to bring together a world – whether it’s by placing together quotations by Billy-Ray Belcourt, Louise Dupré, and Björk; or by carving out space on the top of the page for cloud-like formations over space for us to hear our own breath, for us to find flight (rather than escape); or by moving through linguistic boundaries, breaking up other, more arbitary boundaries that separate and isolate – surmounting those separations against which we are not helpless.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water, was published by above/ground press in August 2023. 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 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, with handles resembling @lethejerome.