Bennett Malcolmson : 2026 VERSeFest interviews: Olivia Tapiero

 

 

 

 

Olivia Tapiero (1990) is a writer, translator and musician, born in Montreal. She has authored several books, including Les murs (2008), Phototaxis (2017/2021), Nothing at All (2021/2026), and Un carré de poussière (2025). Her work has been awarded the Robert-Cliche Prize and the Spirale Eva-le-Grand Prize, and has been shortlisted for awards such as the Lambda Literary Awards, the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal and the Governor General’s Literary Award. The editor-in-chief of the Quebec creative writing review Moebius, she regularly contributes to national and international publications. She has translated authors such as Anne Boyer, Roxane Gay and Billy-Ray Belcourt. Her performance and musical work, in collaboration with choreographer and composer Charlie Khalil Prince, has been presented at the Festival TransAmériques in 2025. She lives in Marseille.

Olivia Tapiero reads [virtually[ in Ottawa alongside Marie-Célie Agnant and Sanita Fejzić at the Riverbed Reading Series event on Tuesday, March 24, 2026 as part of VERSeFest 2026.

Is this what a black hole looks like from the inside? 

In astrophysics, it is said that when a body enters a black hole, it undergoes a process called spaghettification: an almost infinite horizontal stretching and vertical compression. This is due to the extremely strong tidal forces of black holes. Maybe this book is the reverse process: something emerging from a black hole, with a very dense shape, in fragments, following a spiral, mixing temporalities and spacialities. Or maybe every sentence is a semantic noodle.

In your text, Nothing at All, you bring to it visercal descriptions of numbness, pain, rape, menstrual blood (much of it literal viscera). You write, I give birth to myself. I repeat it in order to exist, to dissolve in a different way. This is the experience of externalizing the internal (internal to the body, internal to the structures that guide us), is this writing? 

I think that my work generally questions this delimitation between the internal and the external. Intuitively, I would say that it is more like an internalization of the “external”: how history, colonialism, gendered violence, but also nature, the elements, the land, are felt in the flesh. This can manifest itself as traumatic, fragmented memory, chronic pain, etc., but also a deep awareness of interconnection.

Sexual violence, like rape, is probably one of the strongest manifestations of a paradigm of violence penetrating the flesh the flesh, leaving an imprint on the body-mind. This is why it is often used as a weapon of war, as a tool of conquest and genocide. To conquer the land, one repeats different abjections and injuries on the bodies that inhabit that land, that embody it. We see this very clearly today with Palestine: the way people are mutilated, raped, amputated, traumatized by the ongoing Zionist aggression. This is how settler colonial violence writes itself inside indigenous bodies, as is also the case on Turtle Island, or, not so long ago, in Algeria, in the Congo, for example, during brutal colonization processes.

If we accept, momentarily, your definition of writing as externalizing the internal, we have to add that this process follows a long, sometimes satisfying and sometimes painful, but always profound, internalization of the external. It is a fermentation of the external in the internal, made external again, but with something shifting in the language, transforming it, so that subjection becomes something else, something that is powerful because it cannot fully be grasped.  

However, one could argue that these binaries of external/internal are themselves colonial, structured by an understanding of the individual/the body as something separate from the world. Writing for me is at the border, questioning the border. Much like language itself.

To follow from the above, the text uses cosmic language (i.e. black holes, creatures from the sea) and speaks to global experiences of colonization and increased visibility and influence of fascism and yet, it is very much anchored in the body. Can you speak to how in this text, one informs the other, the personal and the cosmic/global? 

The personal is global, the global is personal. The political is intimate, and vice-versa. It is just a question of scales, and scales can always move and shift depending on how you choose to look (and a lot of artistic endeavor is about this, how we choose to look). I like thinking of the “personal” as a biopsy, a sample of the general phenomenon. Look at a leaf through a microscope, it is cosmic. Look at the cosmos from far away, it is dust. Look at rape, it is political. Look at colonialism, it is personal. Look at History, made of so many histories, but also so many erasures, and look at how these erasures show up in different ways. I think that the astrophysical angle speaks to me because of the way “dark matter” structures space: this void that is not void, this mysterious space-time that both binds and separates things. This is how History works, this is how resistance works. Everything is haunted by what has been erased, I really do believe that. And we must protect this haunting, because it whispers a subterranean truth that fascism cannot erase.

For me, and particularly in regards to colonization, the text does the work of demythologizing. You write, Exociticism compresses me to make me readable, desirable. It also constructs mythology around the self – which is a powerful thing, especially as it exists in the text, so outside of cliché. Do you find power in this building and breaking myths? Again you write, if I name it I risk its destruction. Is there power in naming it?

Naming is not always identifying. Writing is not always naming. I can be a way to not name, but rather to make felt, in order to protect something. Like Glissant says, the right to opacity. Mythology is interesting: like literature, and particularly poetry, it often speaks of something besides itself. This slippage is powerful. Because if something is just named, without the language making it felt, making it embodied through its music, its composition, its particularities, then that something can be cut out, bought, and sold, recuperated, corrupted. This is the challenge artists face: how to give something without simply communicating it, so that it can be passed on with truth and integrity.

A couple of years ago I bought a zine by Isabella Roman that read: I want to think of each other the way I think of the ocean. A place I visit to feel small. Since then I have built a running list definition of good small and bad small. I was thinking about this while reading Nothing at All (a good small experience). If I were to give you these concepts (good small and bad small), could you redefine them as understood in Nothing at All? As redefined by you? 

I would reframe this as: the illusion of separation (what you call bad small) and the truth of interconnectedness (what you call good small). The illusion of separation, which violence seeks to reinforce, is always linked to suffering. The truth of interconnectedness is not always joyous, it comes with grief and responsibility, but it carries a fragile beauty that is worth defending.

I know you are a translator so hopefully you can pull back the curtain on what often feels like a mystery to me. Your works (Phototaxis and Nothing at All, both translated by Kit Schluter) have both been translated to English, how does the relationship to the text change? How does it feel from this side, the side of the author? What is gained and what is lost? And what is the relationship to the translator for you? 

I am very lucky to be translated by Kit Schluter, who is a brilliant translator, writer and visual artist. He really gets the music and rhythm of my work, and I feel like his translations not only match my writing, they elevate it. It is a blessing to rediscover some passages after he translates them - like something both foreign and familiar. Of course, since I speak English, I can give my input from time to time, but it's important for me to leave quite a bit of freedom to the person translating - translation is a creative act, and this creation is founded on a profound understanding of the source text. As a translator myself, I understand the research and responsibility, the ethics even, that comes with carrying a text towards another language. There is​ some loss, and some unexpected gains, it's part of the magic and the mystery. Maybe loss and gain is not the way to think about it : more like a metamorphosis, a shifting. It's also very interesting to see how the "same" text can resonate differently in another language, another context. For example, in Phototaxis, the francophone readership did not find the book humorous -  the dark humour "only translates", as Kit and I said in a previous interview. I am looking forward to seeing how this will play out with Nothing at All. Also, the temporal décalage between source text and translation can shift the weight of things - Rien du tout names, in 2021, how fascism arrives "with a red cap on its head", it sits down because we give it a place. This resonates more heavily in 2026.

This stems from your answer just now and how I see the works are marketed – memoir, prose, poetry. I will ask to reinforce and follow from the above comments, is genre something you're conscious of as you're working? Is that mixing of memoir, poetry, essay, etc. about working around and with confined genres? Or is it less conscious, and it is how you collect and make your work?

The marketing of genre is, for me, often an obstacle to the truth of the text in terms of the preconceptions/expectations it can put in a reader's mind. I do not consciously think of genre-bending when I write, of course not. I just write, and it ends up not quite fitting in market categories. It's just how I've been working, especially since Rien du tout (for me, Phototaxis was more of a novel carrying its own death, exploding into something more poetic, but there are already some theatrical monologues in it). For me, what counts is the truth of the text, of its music, its intuitions, its internal logic and composition. The question of categories is business, so none of my business. I do, however, appreciate how texts can make these categories expand, and maybe one day they will be as obsolete as nation-states.

How does it feel to have your newest text, Un carré de poussière, nominated for Le Prix des libraires du Québec, and what did that recognition mean to you in terms of visibility and connection within the literary community?

I am very moved to be a finalist for the Prix des libraires. I wrote an entre-genre work, mixing essay, poetry, and visual interventions (erasure poetry). To have this work recognized in the poetry section feels validating, and also gives me hope, knowing that the definition of poetry is expanding to include strange monsters. Poetry is less and less a « genre », and it is the quality of poetics, of interrogating language, that is valued here. My book was  also awarded the Prix Spirale Eva-le-Grand, which recognized essays. To have this work celebrated as a thinking poem is moving, and encourages me to keep ignoring market categories of genre. I am also glad that this nomination gives visibility to Les éditions de la rue Dorion, a small, independent press that does important work, and that aligns with my ethics and politics. 

So, I like to read through the New York Times' By the Book, but I don't often read American authors so I have little relationship to the texts or the authors. I always wanted a personal canon of By the Book, for what I'm reading. So... 

Where do you like to read? 

I like to read in my bed. Or, generally, lying down. Sometimes, I’ll put a chair by the kitchen window, and I’ll read there. But I enjoy feeling boneless when I read, like some invertebrate, gelatinous creature absorbing it all.

Do you dog-ear your books?

Yes. Top and bottom corner, depending on where the passage of interest is. The books I read do not get out intact. I’ll underline, scribble in the margins, dog-ear a lot.

What are you reading now? What is on your "nightstand"? 

I often read many books at the same time. Right now, I’m reading long-form big boys, because I am recovering from a hit-and-run which left me pretty wounded (the brain is fine, the rest is a question of patience and mechanics).

I therefore have a lot of time and stillness in front of me. So for now the fiction is: War and War by László Krasznahorkai, Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar.  The essays are Imperialism by Hannah Arendt, and Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti (I feel like it’s very important, right now, to educate ourselves about the workings of imperial and state-violence.)

 

 

 

 

Bennett Malcolmson is a photographer, zine maker, and occasional writer. His photographic work has been presented at Amberhill Gallery and in an offsite exhibition with the Art Gallery of Sudbury. He has also exhibited in group shows, including with La Galerie du Nouvel-Ontario and Play Smelter, presented by The COVERT Collective. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario, with his partner Chloé and their three cats.

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.