Jérôme Melançon : La patience du lichen, by Noémie Pomerleau-Cloutier

La patience du lichen, Noémie Pomerleau-Cloutier
La peuplade, 2022

 

 

 

 

Noémie Pomerleau-Cloutier’s journey on the Lower-North-Shore of the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence begins where Québec’s highway 138 ends, and brings her to Blanc-Sablon, where Québec and Labrador are indistinguishable – where Newfoundland no longer shields the view to the ocean. Pomerleau-Cloutier’s book does not condense or weave or connect the 150 people with whom she talked and whom she recorded, or the locations she names. It also avoids the aesthetic of the postcard. Through this rather thick book of poetry (over 250 pages) she passes on to her readers what each place, each person gave her. The result is a generous, engrossing book.

Each page in La patience du lichen (The patience of lichen) contains an untitled poem. Few offer a conclusion. Since many run to the bottom of the page, we get the sense of longer, continuing poems, with short breaks between moments. They remain distinct mostly because of the different stories they tell, but the stories themselves feel like they run through one another, without clear boundaries. The distinctions between stops on the trip and conversations are not absolute. The book taken as a whole capture the blurring of hours, days, encounters, and stories; but also the feeling of sharing time with others, of community, of not entirely belonging to oneself alone.

Each section focuses on a location along the trip. The last poem in each section tends to be more reflective, to share an insight that is not a lesson, a story whose meaning envelops other stories, suggests what other stories are also present but not gathered or shared. These are often moments of great beauty, as when Pomerleau-Cloutier mentions a small group of women: “they look at each other / while they talk / their words darned // a sorority / crimped with threads / for what can fray” (“elles se regardent / en parlant / leurs mots reprisés // une sororité / sertie de fils / pour ce qui s’élime,” 34). Some sections also end with a short personal narrative in prose, a respite that offers the energy to move forward; a detachment from one place to make way for another.

While Mutton Bay gives personal stories, La Tabatière offers stories of change, and Old Fort is more personal to Pomerleau-Cloutier, giving her space to situate herself more explicitly in her poems. The “Old Fort” section feels the most like a single poem, containing different moments of a narrative. The shift in pronouns give the impression that the poet is speaking to a roomful of people, and tells us as reader a different version of what she tells (back) to those she has met.

The journey ends where Québec ends. This is perhaps an unavoidable result of the material conditions of a trip by boat with a private company, but it is also a reflection of the Québécois imaginary. Yet throughout the journey we sense that Québec keeps its distance from this land, we are given to see the lack of supports and of permissions, the control that takes place without the distribution that’s promised to the population. Resources and youth are taken, and little of these losses find their way back.

Throughout we feel a concern for the arbitrariness of borders imposed from afar (as they always are):

“you get up in the middle of the night
you get wet
so that a Quebec
that has no idea
of your presence
eats its share of treasures

pourtant
here it’s Newfoundland
that’s keeping you afloat” 

“vous vous levez au milieu de la nuit
vous vous mouillez
pour qu’un Québec
n’ayant aucune idée
de votre présence
mange son lot de trésors

yet
ici c’est Terre-Neuve
qui vous maintient à flot” (217)

Borders are thus irrationally imposed and constantly transgressed. They are also relative, as when Pomerleau-Cloutier speaks of a river between an English-speaking community and an Innu community, “a border / that opens up wider / when it’s frozen” (“une frontière / plus ouverte / quand elle est gelée,” 167). And borders are simply ignored, without defiance: “couples go to bed / on a border / quick to learn / how to live midwater” (“les couples se couchent / sur une frontière / vivre entre deux eaux / ça s’apprend vite,” 224).

Pomerleau-Cloutier moves through borders herself, both by addressing different people and bringing them into the book through their stories, and by using bilingual or multi-lingual passages – words told to her in English; words translated for her in Innu-aimun. She owns this capacity and decision against the (imagined? by her or me?) criticism of her use of English: “it’s not called a mix / when we reach each other” (“on n’appelle pas ça un mélange / quand on se rejoint,” 225). Having recourse to different languages can be a way to repair what has been broken, especially what colonialism and residential schools (which are only alluded to) attempted to destroy. As in this use of the comparison with embroidery: “reparation / ka uaueshtakan / might take place / put ma tshipa tshi / one stitch at a time / papaiuk e tshittapatakanu” (“la réparation / ka uaueshtakan / se fait peut-être / put ma tshipa tshi / un point à la fois / papaiuk e tshittapatakanu,” 62). Pomerleau-Cloutier ends the book by questioning the distinction between Québec and Newfoundland and Labrador, simply by putting side by side the same sentiment in English, French, and Innu-aimun. 

In spite of the presence of larger systems, there is no concern here for the structural, the causes of the changes that lead to the loss of ways of life, of the objects and people that used to fill daily life. She comes to the territory after, but this after is not defined. The change is felt, lived, sensed, but not named. Except for the odd time when a government decision has an immediate effect on the local economy. Using once again the idea of a dominant society that ignores the existence of these communities, Pomerleau-Cloutier, likens their members to marine life that sustains their own but is not directly experienced and is easily forgotten in spite of its necessity: “in this ecosystem / you are a plankton” (dans cet écosystème / tu es un plancton,” 234).

Through metaphors and the stories themselves, the relationship to the territory on the Côte-Nord includes both land and sea. This relationship is a continuous concern, changing for Indigenous and settler communities, although constant on many points between them as well: “the flesh / the skins / the pelts / the lobsters / have fed their organs / have paid their studies // the territory educates / in different ways” (“les chairs / les peaux / les fourrures / les homards / ont nourri leurs organes / ont payé leurs études // le territoire éduque / de diverses façons,” 176).

We see then that this territory is fully peopled, lived through, and we feel Pomerleau-Cloutier’s admiration for her interlocutors. For a woman who crosses the river by boat regularly to ensure there is food available even when the thawed river separates the community from the next, she writes:

“she sees shelters
up before the torrent
to bring knowledge of
her land

your neck must be well-toned
to visualise
the trajectory of water”

“elle voit des abris
en haut du torrent
pour faire connaître
sa terre

il faut avoir le cou musclé
pour visualiser
la trajectoire de l’eau” (164)

We also feel her tenderness, and her capacity to pass on the love she witnesses:

“married for over half a century
they have always worked
together
polish the schools’ floor
to prepare the flight
of their neighbours’ future
in love
a couple, two loons
on the bay” 

“mariés depuis plus d’un demi-siècle
ils ont toujours travaillé
ensemble
polir le plancher des écoles
pour que s’envole
le futur des patelins
ils s’aiment
un couple de huards
sur la baie”
(209)

Amid the reasons for leaving and the reasons for staying she is told or notices, Pomerleau-Cloutier gives life and space to a part of the world that so often does not count for others. With this book she fights against carelessness, exploitation, and neglect:

“the rest of the world / is not any larger / than these tributaries” (“le reste du monde / n’est pas plus large / que ce qui afflue ici,” 196).

 

 

 

 

 

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 at @lethejerome.

Jérôme Melançon : Chauffer le dehors, by Marie-Andrée Gill

Chauffer le dehors, Marie-Andrée Gill

La Peuplade, 2019

The expression “chauffer le dehors” is part of an annoyed injunction to close the door whenever the furnace is turned on: “Ferme la porte, on chauffe pas le dehors!” – “Close the door, we’re not heating up the outside!” As if something would be lost, energy wasted. It carries echoes of houses and cabins without central heating, where the stove was carefully stoked and the stock of firewood carefully managed, where all this effort might be lost to carelessness.

Marie-Andrée Gill consciously refuses the injunction and the way of life that comes with it:

si vous me cherchez, je suis chez nous,                      if you’re looking for me, I’m at home

ou quelque part sur Nitassinan,                                  or somewhere on Nitassinan,

toutes mes portes et mes fenêtres sont ouvertes         all my doors and my windows are open

je chauffe le dehors. (84)                                           I’m heating up the outside.

Wherever she is, and whatever she is feeling, the speaker is at home: Nitassinan is ilnu-aimun for “Our territory.” Her desire is to let warmth exit the house and circulate, but also to let in something of the outside at all times, as much by entering the outside as by taking down defenses erected against it. She acts on this desire by finding ways to feel better – by getting some air – and, at the same time, by communicating, by writing poetry: “The outside is the only answer that I have / found to the inside” (“Le dehors est la seule réponse que j’ai / trouvée au dedans,” 66). The circulation between inside and outside is part of a more general manner of living and relating to emotions and feelings.

These affirmative lines come rather late in the book. They help set the meaning of the first two thirds of the book, which provide images of a failed relationship. Failed not in the activities, the interests, the actions, the way one treats the other - no one does anything bad to anyone, the relationship is not depicted as bad. But failed in the incapacity to meaningfully relate to one another, to create bonds, to meet. In the good that isn’t said. Chance encounters after the breakup reignite attraction and bring back the kitchyness, the deep everydayness and ordinariness of romance that Gill embraces:

La peur, c’est te croiser au dépanneur et qu’on sache

pas quoi faire de nos corps. (34)

The worry, is coming across you at the depanneur and that we

wouldn’t know what to do with our bodies.

Enjambements like this show the disappearance of familiarity where it ought to still belong (and translating as “we would know / not” would be a loss of the familiarity, the everydayness of language that Gill renders throughout the book).

Attempts at relating take place through what gives home its certainty, its solidity. The territory is present throughout the book, extends from the forest to the city, it includes Céline Dion and arenas:

Quand on s’embrasse, c’est comme dans les films :

on s’envole doucement, on monte et on reste pris

au plafond de l’aréna avec les drapeaux des équipes

gagnantes des années passées. (53)

When we kiss, it’s like in the movies:

we take off softly, we rise and we get stuck

on the ceiling of the arena with the flags of the teams

who won in past years.

The hyper-awareness of and play on clichés include the relationship to the territory and the depiction of Innu in the popular imagination. Some of these plays pierce through to a spiritual experience grounded as much in memories as in relationality:

C’est juste impossible que tu viennes plus                It’s just impossible that you’d stop coming

t’abreuver à mon esprit ancestral                               to drink from my ancestral spirit

de crème soda (12)                                                    my cream soda spirit

Others are a reappropriation of both popular culture and cultural clichés - as when the speaker imagines herself in a state of surrender to her partner’s expert manoeuvering of a snowmobile:

Je me dis que ça ferait un beau titre de quelque        I tell myself it would make for a nice title for

chose : Il danse avec les ski-doos. (14)                            something: Dances with Ski-Doos.

Through a series of plays on cultural references – figure skating and chef Ricardo, crows and The Thorn Birds – the book’s speaker is consciously getting over a relationship and relating to herself. Narrative passages throughout explain little, deepening instead a sense of being lost among the familiar. The book highlights that what’s missing after a relationship ends is not only the result of an external loss, but also indicates a return to an internal longing:

Quelque chose en moi garde sa lampe allumée –

une déchirure, pas tout à fait une blessure, plutôt

comme quand les nuages s’ouvrent là au milieu,

dans la craque entre les poumons – une envie qui peut

pas s’empêcher de chercher le trouble, provoquer

la rencontre, essayer n’importe quoi tout à coup que. (17)

Something in me keeps its lamp turned on –

a tear, not quite a wound, but more

like when clouds open there in the middle,

in the crack between the lungs – a longing that can

not keep itself from looking for trouble, provoking

the meeting, trying anything in case that.

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. He is the author of two books of poetry, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016) with Éditions des Plaines, one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018), and has a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup.