Jérôme Melançon : Main d’œuvre, by Lorrie Jean-Louis

Main d’œuvre, Lorrie Jean-Louis
Mémoire d’encrier, 2023

 

 

 

 

With her second collection, Main d’œuvre (Workforce, or Labour), Lorrie Jean-Louis offers a song of love and repair. The theme of the collection is ostensibly work and exploitation, especially as they are found in what we briefly called ‘essential work’ and which Jean-Louis explains is the modern equivalent of slavery, marred by lack of respect and dignity.

The poems are short, untitled, unpunctuated except for question marks, uncapitalized except for the first letter. They are sentences that do not have an ending, or have not yet found one. They strike back; they are furtive, assured gestures that unmake what forced work creates – not the labour itself, but the lack of personhood, the disposability, the destruction of bodies. It begins with a lack that cannot be filled, and an impossibility of naming this hollowness:

“The choreography / of my servitude / has no title”

“La chorégraphie / de ma servitude / n’a pas de titre” (50)

The collection refuses structure: it begins with a short preface that sets the tone and brings the necessary concreteness to balance out the airiness of her writing; it moves into a first, untitled section, which interrupted by the title “Profane” which appears alone on a page and begins the longest section of the book. “Profane” can mean both “not sacred” and “non-specialist” – that which requires and contains no specific skill, that which is available to everyone, and needed from everyone:

“I am not workforce / I am an artisan of humanity”

“je ne suis pas main-d’œuvre // je suis artisane d’humanité” (56)

In repairing, Jean-Louis in no way attempts to fix: she mends, she makes better, she helps keep people alive, she takes part in the task of living that work undermines:

“It is with stubbornness / that I cover my cracks”

“C’est d’entêtement / que je couvre ma fêlure” (94)

“What are you becoming / in this city / full of holes?”

“Que deviens-tu / dans cette ville / trouée ?” (54)

She takes on several voices, bringing in what we can assume are various speakers on the basis of conjugation and grammatical agreement. Yet she also takes on a collective voice through the indefinite character of these voices: “I write myself / in the masculine plural // I am / feminine singular” (“je m’écris / au masculin pluriel // je suis / féminin singulier,” 86).

The capitalization of the first letter of each poem only marks an arbitrary beginning, and a speaker dreams of a history without beginning or end (69). Jean-Louis’ voices are without a fixed origin, though she traces them back in their work and in the lineage to slavery:

“Africa missing / like a gaping // a vague memory / a deep notch // a song sweet / and bitter // like a belly / like a mouth // a lie / a gift // like a phantom limb”

“L’Afrique manquante / comme une béance // un souvenir vague / une entaille profonde // une chanson douce / et amère // comme un ventre / comme une bouche // un mensonge / un cadeau // comme un membre fantôme” (71)

This collection is one to dream with, to hold close, to pick up in moments of sadness and joy alike. It is a reminder of the life that runs through all work and, for most readers, through the lives of others who were only celebrated for a short while, and only so that they may be better exposed to death and further exploitation. It refuses the romanticization of the present, or of any future that might bring transformation: history will only pass through more hands – but it does, indeed, pass through them, becoming in the process of living.

 

 

 

 

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 : Rien du tout, by Olivia Tapiero

Rien du tout, Olivia Tapiero
Mémoire d’encrier, 2021

 

 

 

 

I’m choosing to read Olivia Tapiero’s book Rien du tout (Nothing At All) as poetry. There are good reasons not to. I don’t care much for them. Then again I don’t care much for the reasons to do it either – the poetic form of a few pages, especially in the section titled “Me voici greffe fade” (I am now bland graft). The movement in tone, the voice that can’t be dislodged from its words. The refusal to comply to a form, the eschewing of narration, of argumentation, of guidance. The overthrowing and transfiguration of language to make it say something else, to make oneself as writer / the other as reader be something else. But not all books that do all this are poetry, and this one also eschews the expectations around poetry. It’s a decision I made upon hearing about the book, it would be there even if I hadn’t spelled it out because of where I’m going to publish the review. And I could believe that my decision would change nothing to the book. A different decision would be just as justifiable, and would also change nothing to the book. This book that is in some parts addressed to me (83), insofar as am I being shit on:

Allow me to interrogate your hospitality, to suspect a transaction within it. Allow me to shit on your provinces, your choruses, your cowardice, the little nazis that warm up their hands in the historic church of your capital while you expand on democracy, minority governments, the great culture. Allow me to shit on your failure, your ambition, your linguistic anxiety, your values tests and your eyes blue like death. In your geometry, which is that of the world, my survival is a menace that’s quickly tied up, like a child’s whim.

Permets-moi d’interroger ton hospitalité, d’y soupçonner une transaction. Permets-moi de chier sur tes provinces, tes refrains, ta lâcheté, les petits nazis qui se réchauffent les mains dans l’église historique de ta capitale pendant que tu épilogues sur la démocratie, les gouvernements minoritaires, la grande culture. Permets-moi de chier sur ton ratage, ton ambition, ton anxiété linguistique, tes tests de valeurs et tes yeux bleus comme la mort. Dans ta géométrie, qui est celle du monde, ma survie est une menace qu’on garrotte vite, comme un caprice d’enfant. (83)

But of course I know that I also shit on much of that, knowing that that is one of my previous forms and very much what I come from, and that I try to expel that. This book is a rejection, an expulsion of colonialism that goes beyond critique and criticism and indictment – but also of Québécois nationalism (and parallels would be quickly made with Canadian nationalism). It’s a lesson in anti-nationalism. But the book isn’t anti-colonial, it’s decolonial, and the parallel between colonialism and nationalism makes me wonder what the equivalent of decolonialism would be, what a denationalism might be like - as my autocorrect takes the “de” out of both words and leaves red squiggly lines underneath, as if it knew all about the dialectic of emancipation and the return of domination. I will need to read through this book, again, to find the seeds of this denationalism (here we go again – and I won’t let the dictionary co-opt the term). And I find myself in agreement with the sentiment on that page, on a territory across which I’ve been led before, one I point to sometimes, as I suppose I do in my choice of books here. Because am I not extending some form of hospitality in my readings, in my reviews? Or perhaps there’s a difference between inviting people to visit a space and inviting them to visit with people (keeoukaywin), as my Métis friends and colleagues suggest, and this invitation might be recognizing the hospitality of those with whom I visit; in inviting people to visit with books, as I’m trying to figure out somewhere else right now; in turning the space rob gives me into a roundabout or something.

So while I know that my reading isn’t going to change anything to the book, I also know that the book is a voice, and not (only) a voice in the sense of literary analysis. The voice of a woman, of the women in her life, of the women before her, in her family, in Algeria, of the women around her, let’s say in Montreal, in Québec, in Canada. And especially of colonized, racialized women, of women who hold colonialism in their bodies because it was forced in. There’s a collective narration of stories so grand and damaging that they can only exist in allusions, in being named, in partial light, through a door that’s open for a moment. So many ways to tell, to bring truth out of silence, to bash ignorance in the head. And not run away, so that it doesn’t become a crime and validate the law.

My reading then affects the voice, its reach, its impact. That explains the tone I took in the review, but also this reflection. This is a post-scriptum and not a review. I couldn’t write about this book for months and then I recalled something Alicia Elliott said on the Can’t Lit podcast: if you struggle with your perspective, say it. She didn’t have this problem in mind, she was thinking about writing memoir, but there’s a lateral application. My decisions in writing about Rien du tout are not innocent: they can muffle the volume of its accusations, they can muddle the clarity of its descriptions, they can dull the edges of its affirmations.

It wasn’t only a problem with writing: I was going to translate parts of the poems, and I’m dealing with the work of a translator who has an experience and craft in writing and translating I can only dream of achieving – and the book is made up of what I take to be poems, two long paragraphs of prose, whose meaning comes from intense internal dynamics and dialectic exchanges across the pages. So I was intimidated by the book. And I just kept reading it, making it into something bigger than it is, because it is. And I also felt a debt of gratitude to Olivia for giving me the chance to take part in a virtual residency project on Instagram which has mostly been an introduction to a great group of writers and artists. I ended up accepting that in translating I was going to substitute my voice to Tapiero, that my translations aren’t meant to be definitive, but merely indicative, that they point to the book (after all, it is a review). And then I had to take out pieces from the review so it would stop being about me, turn it into a reflection on poetics, hence this post-scriptum. And even here I’m just pointing toward the greater questions, and in the end perhaps this is a review too, because all these questions are not only a matter of a cishet white Francophone man in a country that recognizes him as a citizen reading a book that is not written from his perspective or location; they are in the book itself. And they aren’t questions about reading, not only questions of writing and poetics, they are about coexistence and simply allowing people to live and find their own way of living.

 

 

To check out what I’m talking about:
Cindy Gaudet on “Keeoukaywin: The Visiting Way – Fostering an Indigenous Research Methodology”: https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/aps/index.php/aps/article/view/29336
Alicia Elliott on Can’t Lit: https://podtail.com/podcast/can-t-lit/056-can-t-lit-alicia-elliott/
Résidences virtuelles archived on Instagram: @corona_culture
rob of course is rob mclennan and let’s say he’s at http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/

 

 

 

 

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 more recently a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup. He’s on Twitter and Instagram at @lethejerome and sometimes there’s poetry happening on the latter.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Rien du tout, by Olivia Tapiero

Rien du tout, Olivia Tapiero
Mémoire d’encrier, 2021

 

 

 

Everything is related in Olivia Tapiero’s grand, immense book Rien du tout (Nothing At All). Mummified children, assimilation, Québécois nationalism, urchins, misogyny, colonialism, war, family, the sea, the body. Violence is everywhere: the destruction of marine life for the sake of human comfort; insanity placed within people so they may be taken away; bodies that burn, that are shot, that are tortured; clumsy attempts at penetration; unwilling accommodation and underlying resistance; the Russian front during the first World War; France’s oppression and executions in Algeria, the destruction and murders and rapes that generations carry.

The mouth is a recurring image, but in general orifices stand in for one another, take each other’s place – and not just on the human body. Too much is being forced in; so much needs to be expelled that bodily functions replace one another, that new ones emerge. The speaker is becoming something else within herself that is both parasitic and liberating:

I would like to name the parasite, but I only see my face. Soon the thing will occupy the greatest part of me, it will come out of my skin and leave behind it what I will no longer be.

J’aimerais nommer le parasite, mais je ne vois que mon visage. Bientôt la chose occupera la plus grande partie de moi, elle sortira de ma peau et laissera derrière elle ce que je ne serai plus. (17)

There is no distinction between depression and systems of oppression; between pain in the hips and the pain felt by others across continents; between disappearance and mutation – because they are experienced from the inside throughout the book, through the body, through diasporic collective being. And Tapiero’s writing displays a deep awareness of contradictions, in the attitude of Canadian and Québécois men toward the speaker, in the attitude and longings of the women in her family as they play out the effects of colonialism; in her training through culture and education to become a collaborator of Québec’s own brand of (re)colonialism. And in the disjunction between being born and not being, naître and n’être (63).

I need to feel death to determine the contours, I need to examine the signs of the decomposition of others. Everything reveals itself in its damaging. It doesn’t stop me from grabbing on to things for fear that they might wane between my hands. I accumulate to slow the loss and it ends up destroying everything.

J’ai besoin de sentir la mort pour déterminer les contours, j’ai besoin d’examiner les signes de la décomposition des autres. Tout se révèle en s’abîmant. Ça ne m’empêche pas de m’agripper aux choses par peur qu’elles s’étiolent entre mes mains. J’accumule pour ralentir la perte et ça finit par tout détruire. (79)

The nothingness of the title is carried through a meditation not on emptiness but on appetite, hunger, absorption, creation, and birth. An emptiness perhaps in the sense of a transfer of matter or emotion, a transfer of life. There is the desire to assimilate, to appropriate, to possess, felt within the speaker at time, and for the most part felt as an outside threatening force, which threatens to swallow everything up:

to subjugate : to flatten out to exist : good intentions erase history : protocols are established : administrative sadness : it’s the order of things : what swallows us : all bodies included

assujettir : aplanir pour exister : les bonnes intentions effacent l’histoire : les protocoles sont établis : tristesse administrative : c’est l’ordre des choses : ce qui nous avale : tout corps confondus (97)

Yet through most of the book, the dominating desire is for the possibility that something great might be contained inside what seems to be empty but is instead absence, collapse, engulfment. A decolonial hunger for something other than what fills the bodies of colonized women and destroys them from the inside. Usually it emerges from loss and what has been kept from the speaker – language for instance, the forgetting, the denial, the confiscation of Arabic – often it is menacing, but it also motivates something like hope:

I make friends with what surrounds me. The epiphany is relational. I have felt it in my reading as in the forest, while listening to strangers speak to me to the point of whitening the night or on acid, collapsed by the streaming mountain of roots. To go through the relation dissolves me. It is the only disappearance that remains untouched that is not a violence or an erasure. A decolonial disappearance.

Je me lie d’amitié avec ce qui m’entoure. L’épiphanie est relationnelle. Je l’ai ressentie dans la lecture comme en forêt, en écoutant des étrangers me parler jusqu’à blanchir la nuit ou bien sur l’acide, effondrée par la montagne ruisselante de racines. Éprouver la relation me dissout. C’est la seule disparition qui demeure intouchée qui ne soit pas une violence ou un effacement. Une disparition décoloniale. (18)

Tapiero manages to achieve what I see quite simply as a feat. She lets us see colonialism without being overtaken by it, she makes something else out of it, in the moment of reading, in that lasting power that is created in the contact between the events she recounts with sparse detail, the speaker’s voice that prolongs them, their inscription in the body of the reader (“Nothing whiter than those blue eyes,” 41; “your eyes blue like death,” 83). She locates colonialism. In Algeria. In Europe. In Québec (and were I to write in a different context I might focus on that facet of the book - that, and my own blue eyes). In bodies. In minds. In relationships.

          There is in each place the ghost of fantasies disappointed by the place.

Il y a dans chaque lieu le fantôme des fantasmes déçus par le lieu. (65)

She names colonialism, colonialism, just as she names fascism, without being didactic or turning poems (if these are poems) into essays. She shows it as a nothingness that is passed down (“a time bomb,” 47), a desire to be other, to escape the effects of colonialism by becoming more completely colonized - and not as trauma.

It’s fitting then that the book ends in Greece, that place to which the West traces its beginnings, that moment of great imperialism and collapse, in disappointment and in the disappearance of the self as the horizon nears, as something else is being prepared. Delphi becomes a place not for knowledge of the self, but to expulse the self and give birth to it.

Rien du tout is deeply political, it shares the intimate experience of oppression and the energies of revolt and revolution, it sides with the latter by focusing on them. The book is a series of revolutionary acts through unforgettable hyper-realistic and surrealistic images. An overthrowing of silence, of ignorance, of complacency. Of violence. All I can do, really, is say: as I read, this is happening; make it happen too.

 

 

 

 

 

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 more recently a bilingual chapbook with above/ground press, Coup. He’s on Twitter and Instagram at @lethejerome and sometimes there’s poetry happening on the latter.

 

Jérôme Melançon : Nous ne trahirons pas le poème, by Rodney Saint-Éloi

Nous ne trahirons pas le poème, Rodney Saint-Éloi

Mémoire d’encrier, 2019

Rodney Saint-Éloi founded Mémoire d’encrier (Inkpot Memory) in 2003 to add to the stories that were told in Québec, so that more stories may circulate and reach to those who didn’t find themselves in the rather homogeneous collective narration of the province. There is an approach to creation in such an editorial project, both of which have been incredibly successful. Mémoire d’encrier now gathers many of the strongest voices from immigrant and racialized Quebecers, Indigenous authors living in the province (Joséphine Bacon, Natasha Kanapé Fontaien, Naomi Fontaine), and translations - notably Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. In a province where the collective narrative and collective narration are so strong, assertiveness and strength of voice are not sufficient to interrupt the stories that are retold in each publication.

In Saint-Éloi’s Nous ne trahirons pas le poème, a sense of history and a deep relation to it juxtaposes pasts, presents and futures to those of Euro-Quebecers (and would work just as well for Euro-Canadians). It does not go beyond juxtaposition, does not call out, does not seek recognition or inclusion; it’s enough to mention the Saint Lawrence river once to offer a point of junction and force a reconsideration of history and open a breach in what seems like a watertight vessel.

A strong, single poem runs across the entire book, sectioned on the page according to the length of the stanzas. Apart from the prologue and perhaps one break (63), there’s no narration. Some themes run throughout, others only for a few pages as the poem focuses and refocuses on varying aspects of a landscape. Saint-Éloi casts himself in the role of the poet who takes on songs of the world and of the past. Hence perhaps the title of the book, We Will Not Betray the Poem. I hesitated before picking up the book because I simply do not enjoy poems about poetry or about writing (or novels featuring writers). But there is no writing here, only singing. This poet is capable of metamorphosis, presents himself as both a pyromaniac and someone who is eager to share. The poem is all of this movement between states, often through portmanteau words and syntaxic deviations (31):

poussez fleurs blanches               grow, white flowers

arc-en-ciel mauve                        tidal rainbow

poussez phrases rebelles             grow, rebellious sentences

je existe je                                   I exist I

la foule attendra                          the crowd can wait

je m’aîle                                      I wing myself

je m’enîle                                    I island myself

je m’encannibale                         I cannibal myself

je m’africane                               I African myself

je nous utopie                             I utopia us

je dérisionne                               I deridize

déconfictionne le récit                defeactionize the story

The title also points to a sense of collectivity. The poet in the book is a single voice which carries the voices of others in his own: ancestors, ghosts, legends, lovers we imagine being in the past, the exiled, slaves, refugees, migrants, his own past, Damas, Gaza. They contain the experience of blackness, decoloniality, wars, and ties to Haiti and Africa. It is not clear who makes whom speak, who speaks through whom. The stories of the past, of the ancestors before and during slavery, are also his own. They move through him, as he moves through elements, transforms the elements, lives through earthquakes, shares the nature of animals, and moves through time. It’s not surprising then that the poet would have trouble adhering to his own body, to seek adherence to it. He seems more at ease with the sea, more immediately able to take on its materiality. He wants storms in the sentence (la phrase: there is no legality in the poem). Storms bring hope. He presents himself as arriving after the hurricane, an elemental figure of revolt and insurgency, as being born in typhoons, wanting his speech to be lapidary.

Taking on the figure of the sea is also a way to take it back from those who control it and dehumanize migrants - like Achille Mbembe (Politique de l’inimitié) and Patrick Chamoiseau (Migrant Brothers) he ties together the fate of migrants and that of slaves crossing oceans. The poem makes the sea into more than a mass grave and reaffirms solidarity where it is illegal (88-89):

défense de solidarité                             solidarity defense

je commande mes fantômes                 I command my ghosts

m’apprête à faire communauté             ready myself to make community

m’apprête à faire humanité [...]            ready myself to make humanity [...]

migrants au corps lacéré                       migrants with lacerated body

gonflé d’un rêve radical                        swollen with a radical dream

Writing is an act directed toward the future - it lies ahead, like the poet’s childhood remains ahead of him; as such, it will not betray the past, nor the future. The betrayal is that his name is not his own: it is borrowed, it bars him from playing his role as “guardian of the continents.” It continues the first betrayal, which he mirrors and brings to an end by selling the poem to something greater:

          je vends à crédit le poème                               I sell the poem on credit

aux esprits (13)                                                to the spirits

Whereas 

          l’ancêtre maîtrisait les ombres                         the ancestor mastered the shadows

          sa voix n’était pas négociable                          his voice was not negotiable

          son âme n’était pas négociable (35)                 his soul was not negotiable

Of course, he was sold nonetheless. The poet, in solidarity with James Baldwin, refuses to belong to anyone, rejects and accepts his blackness. The poet here seeks to be true to the shout, the scream that comes from the past, from history, and from the earth, and continues through generations to bring air into time, to free it from asphyxiation. This shout takes down “nobilities properties / empires dynasties / constituted authorities.”  (105)

The poet becomes the song, has an appointment with history. He passes through history as he passes through language, in the manner of saying as well as in what is said. Aside from his borrowed name, he is also named and names himself (je m’appelle) decolonial. His decoloniality is tied to remembrance and is a way to swim, to dance, to live in two elements at once. His proximity to elements, especially to storms, makes him a “decolonial wildling.” His “decolonial faith” is the sole ray of light in a series of oppressions and makes him able to live in movement and insubordination (79):

          chemin d’eau                                                  path of water

moitié décoloniale                                          decolonial half

j’aurai une maison pour l’errance                  I will have a house for wandering

And (75)

pour ne pas trahir l’horizon                            to not betray the horizon

bâtis la maison de la phrase insoumise          build the house of the insubordinate sentence

History is material in this book, perhaps even elemental: an element that has the same weight and possibility as the traditional elements, not metaphorically like the sea, but sharing an ontological status. Saint-Éloi sings at the same time oppression and the oppressed, domination and emancipation; he sings “freedom/nothing but freedom” (92), hears and conveys the injunction to become song rather than to be a builder. Shortly after the image of “insurgent dusks,” he ends on “the decolonial dawn / of high tides” (107) that is at once tied to his existence, and what he demands.

In his breath, his manner of singing, Saint-Éloi reminds me of Neruda’s Canto General, although the poem is more existential than epic. It might also be facile to say that I was also reminded of Dionne Brand; after all, they share Caribbean origins and a commitment to developing a voice that belongs to both worlds, with hope but without compromise with the forces of history that define their positions. Saint-Éloi’s poem does not tell a story, develop a discourse on history, or advocate for change. It embodies them, intertwines them with beauty and hope, gives them the materiality of voice, and transforms language to be able to do so.

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in 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 forthcoming with above/ground press, Coup.