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.