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 : Des fleurs comme moi, by Xavier Gould

Des fleurs comme moi, Xavier Gould
Prise de Parole, 2023

 

 

 

 

In their debut collection, Xavier Gould firmly establishes their right – and capacity – to move through language and gender. This moving through gets them to where they are. Acadian, queer, trans, they give a new form to Chiac and French – and to Acadie.

There are a few elements around French language poetics that I want to share in order to make sense of the accomplishment that is Des fleurs comme moi (Flowers like Me), before talking more directly about the poems. It’s no surprise that Gould thanks France Daigle, Gérald Leblanc, and Paul Bossé in their acknowledgements. All three Acadian poets have worked to give Chiac legitimacy as a language and as a literary language, and to develop its linguistic possibilities.

Chiac is mostly spoken in southeast New Brunswick. Linguists tend to typify it as a way of speaking French that includes many elements from English, as well as specific lexical, grammatical, and syntaxic forms from Acadian French (“ej” for “je,” “quance que” for “quand est-ce que,” the first person singular borrowing from the plural (“ej voulons” rather than “je veux”), the third person switching its endings (“y parlont” and not “ils parlent”). As Gould points out in some poems, code switching is a part of the linguistic habits of Chiac speakers, since they also speak both French and English. Poetry in Chiac is not bilingual, then, but written in a language that is both and neither. My translations here are not the right translations – Chiac speakers would be better placed to give the equivalent in their own spoken English. Instead, I’ll focus on translating Chiac into English, which means losing most of the work Gould does on language.

There’s great attention to detail here. In their poems, Gould updates the written code, using for instance “yink” instead of “yinque” (“rien que,” “only”); “wois” for “vois” (“see”), since the “v” is pronounced like a “w”; or “er,” given that “est” is generally pronounced “é.”

Their most important updating of Chiac however is in the breaking of the French gender binary. Using the pronoun “iel” (which is becoming the most popular alternative for the singular “they”) brings all kinds of grammatical and syntaxic issues. Do we choose the masculine or feminine forms, or do we make up new forms, or use one of the forms nonbinary people have suggested? The main opposition to inclusive writing in French focuses on readability; here, there are poetic choices that would make the language more radical, but also place all the attention on the signifiers instead than on what is signified.

Gould adopts a solution that is emerging for many: they use the median point (·) that is part of one form of inclusive writing and employ it in the singular. With this form, we might write “les poète·esses sont venu·es” instead of “les poètes et poétesses sont venus/venues,” or “un·e poète·esse est venu·e” instead of the clunky “un poète ou une poétesse est venu ou venue.” This form has the advantage of being not only inclusive of women, but also of nonbinary people by preventing any stillness on either side of the gender binary.

Pushing this practice to its limits, Gould brings the nonbinary character of that act of writing and transgressive transformation of language to the foreground. They use the median point to speak of one or many people, but they also highlight the presence of the median point as allowing not only for the expression, but also for the existence of a reality that is otherwise too intangible.

The title of the poem “être un·e” points to a being outside of what a definite “un” or “une” would let us see – the newness of this form of writing pointing at once to the indeterminacy of a person whose gender is unknown and to the certainty of the person who is something that cannot be reduced to either nor to both.

By bringing the focus to the median point, Gould gives us a means to understand their poetics and its political implications through a metapoetics of sorts. In the poems “bye past self” and “bye past selves,” “·e” appears by itself, gaining independence for the words it would modify. The line is quite simple: “chu maybe / ·e     iel” (69, 93).

in the day of the night
I’m maybe
em                                    they

dans le jour de la nuit               
chu maybe
·e                                      iel

This poetic use of the punctuation contains a refusal to settle on a single signifier; a hesitation through the “maybe”; a hesitation through the “·e” which sounds like the “euh” (uh) of uncertainty; a doubling of the pronoun and the ending; and an indeterminacy of the words to which “·e” might be the ending.

This same impossible coexistence of ambiguity and decisiveness is present in the interplay between the two poems. The first poem (with the title in the singular) works as an erasure poem of the second – just as the latter comes to complete the former, which then forms its core. The effect is especially strong as the words are displayed across the page, forming stanzas and isolated words in the first poem, with the addition of small or larger circles of words in the second. Finding oneself (“I found myself” / “ej me suis trouvé·e”) is simply “good pis positive” in the simpler version, but becomes “good pis positive / beauté / trans,” with the mention of “love     finally,” in the second version. In a poem that seems to seek its own wholeness, it seems that several selves and togetherness are needed for there to be any kind of an ending to this search – or a being who has their own (provisional) ending.

This ending, moving toward wholeness, takes place against the possibility of endings as loss and death. In “fleur 3 (j’existe)” (“flower 3 (I exist)”), Gould brings together the existential threat of transphobic violence and the existential certainty of trans queer corporeity as (currently) indivisible. This longer poem recounts the discovery of the evidence of selfhood and existence (“and I had the most powerful revelation ever” / “pis j’ai eu la most powerful révélation ever,” 106), its fragility in the face of the possibility of a violent death, and the need to make a place that hasn’t been set at the table. Its conclusion annihilates the borders between reality, time, and imagination:

but even if I were to be lost to this here world
I existed before I was born
like I’ll exist after my death
like tomorrow I’ll exist in your mouth
like I’ve always existed in your children’s imaginary

but même si qu’on me perd à cte monde icitte
j’ai existé avant d’être né·e
comme qu’ej va exister après ma mort
comme que demain ej va exister dans ta bouche
comme que j’ai tout le temps existé dans l’imaginaire de vos enfants (109)

In gendering Acadie as nonbinary – they use “iel” to speak of it –, Gould pushes themself in, ensuring their own inclusion and participation in the nation. They take up the Acadian tradition of resistance against displacement from oneself (from its (claimed, stolen) land, from its past, from its language) to include resistance against Acadie’s own limitations. They point to its imperfections, its own internal oppression, its own settler colonial character. Their vision of Acadie is not a Queer Acadie as a subset or at the margins of the whole, but an Acadie that has queerness as a functional part of its collectivity and is fluid (“la queer Acadie”).

Through this poetics and politics, Xavier Gould gives us good poems. The collection functions as a whole: while some single-line poems working as affirmations or replies, other shorter poems introduce each section. We find the presence throughout of elooooooooongated vowels, and the return of a series of themes (notably dissociation). Gould’s work on language opens up many repetitions to open as many reversals in meaning. And the poems elude the respectability that acts to prevent any deviation from the norm in social life. There’s a poem about farts. Dudebros discover that their homophobia is born out of fear of touching their own asshole (“trou de tchu,” which is perhaps the first time that its Chiac form is put into writing). Gay elders demanding that young queers lead a normal(ized) life get reminded of their own trauma. But there are also poems addressed to a comedic alter ego, Jass-Sainte Bourque (Jacynthe, Saint, get it?). There are poems titled “dissociating” that also work as more complete or more essential versions of one another, unveiling more, or hiding more behind clothes and makeup (which are, as Gould calls them, armour). There are connections with a grandmother that grow, friendships that endure. The arc of the collection is clearly optimistic, and it ends on the image of flowering, yet there remains hesitation and ambiguity down to the very last poem. These poems are a lesson in love and self-love, as they can grow around the hatred of others and the self-hatred it engenders.

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water, is forthcoming 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 Twitter mostly, and sometimes on Instagram, both at @lethejerome.

Jérôme Melançon : Séjour à Belle-Côte, by Rose Després

Séjour à Belle-Côte, Rose Després
Prise de parole, 2022

 

 

 

 

Over seven collections, the Acadian poet Rose Després has developed a voice that reaches the extremes of social emotions. Rough, biting, and harsh, it can also be soft, pillowy, welcoming. In the diction and in the percussive attack she favours, and in the respite she creates in moments of tenderness and connection, Després voices revolt.

Her uncommon voice and voicings, and Despré’s skill and precision in their use, are likely the reason why a recent article on her new collection, Séjour à Belle-Côte, describes it as the harshest, or most difficult to read among her books. For those who want a quiet, enjoyable read, or a peaceful meditation, this collection will certainly be difficult. Yet even the poet Chloé Laduchesse, her editor at Éditions Prise de parole, who is no stranger to such sharp writing, shares this reaction. The poems here are indeed demanding, although I would hesitate to call them dense. Simply, its demands are those of struggle.

The political lessons Després offers are not tactical, nor are they ideological. Her writing is political in abstraction of politics. She eschews knowledge and theory, she does not aim to teach; she recounts, tells the violence as well as the love that are experienced in the company of others. She whittles away the concrete, situated aspects of political experience, so that solely its sharpness is transmitted. And this latest collection goes the furthest in this direction.

Looking at her previous two collections, also published with Prise de parole in Sudbury, we see other advances, and instances of this balance between harshness and love – a balance that tilts toward the former, as befits revolt.

In 2009’s Si longtemps déjà (So Long Already), Després juxtaposed fright and plenitude, with the latter remaining untouchable. This short collection is dazzling and biting, comforting but not soothing – it is an invitation to everything that might develop this sense of plenitude, or protect it: “our children await / their mouths / watering with the revitalizing / blazes to come” (“nos enfants attendant / l’eau revifiante / à la bouche / des incendies à venir,” 43). Després sees “the drunken audacity of a new fraternity” (“l’ivre audace d’une nouvelle fraternité,” 54) emerging within those who had been drowsy, indulgent, coupling images of springs and fire so that joy may be palpable.

Després deepened this work of juxtaposition in Vraisemblable (2013), continuing her meditation on violence and struggle, on relationships in their midst, and on difficult joys and forbidden desires. Here she interspaces the French text with many passages in English, one of which summarizes her political approach: “We pretend submission / in momentary increments / emulate surrender / and the too small reprieves // [...] we charge headlong / into someone else’s folly” (“Aimer,” 80). Throughout this intense collection, refusal and struggle open onto liberation and rebirth.

As was the case for these two previous books, the title of Després’s newest collection is misleading, creating a tension with the contents of the poems. “A Stay at Belle-Côte” hints at travel, at a longer stop between other locations, perhaps at a peaceful moment. Belle-Côte is a Cape Breton Acadian community, but it is also the name of other locations along the coast of the Acadian peninsula. But the poems are set outside of this restful temporality, and Belle-Côte might also refer simply to Després’ home. The “stay” might then be a humble way of referring to a life that is limited in time, to an attachment in place. Després brings together a sense of serenity – or serene irony – to her revolt. The titles of some of the poems create a similar distance between what is said and how it is named. “Tracer la carte d’un nouvel espoir” (“Tracing the map of a new hope,” 79) focuses on subsequent forms of destruction, hope being a necessity rather than an open possibility. Rather than a picture of a beloved dog, “Mon chien n’a que trois pattes mais toutes ses dents” (“My dog only has three legs but all his teeth,” 84-85) offers a scene of desiring crowds on the brink of being attacked. Given these distances within poems and between the title of the book and its poems, it is not surprising that the book reads like a collection without a strong thematic thread, even as it includes recurring themes and an overall sense of anger alternating between dismay and hope.

The political strength of Després’s poems lies in their going beyond the denunciation and condemnation of violence. Instead, they lay it bare, leaving only one possible judgment. In “familias,” she points to the violence done to children, and draws the contours of residential schools and other abuses committed by members of the clergy: “because since then / it’s a transparent apartheid / a generational cork / of despicable plagiarisms / of sequestered everydayness / reality aborted also // where alone survives / the reincarnation / of stillborn children” (“car depuis / c’est l’apartheid transparent / le bouchonnement générationnel / de plagiats infâmes / de quotidiens séquestrés / le réel lui aussi avorté // où seule survit / la réincarnation / des enfants morts nés,” 14). She is at her best when she does not directly address a social problem, and situates herself instead within the most metaphorical register. But we also see her own judgments and positions and her empathy for the distress of others when she writes on migrant lives and deaths, on abuses committed by the church.

Després does not comment, nor does she speak any “truth.” She traces, makes visible the destruction brought by climate change and its selfish causes, the destruction brought by “their” wars to which she opposes “our” struggles (21), showing the cleavages that already exist because of this violence. She also gives us to see the difficulty and weight of resistance, the uncertainty not only of its outcome, but of the kind of person is formed through it (“while the heavy weight of a resistance,” “tandis que le poids lourd d’une résistance,” 59). And she writes in grief, within grief, as for her sister (“for a single dazzled look,” “pour un seul regard ébloui,” 38) and others she names, deepening the sense of loss that a common past resistance seems to heighten. In this particular poem she evokes a longing for the beauty of childhood, a hope that the peace of childhood might come after death – an after and a before of these struggles:

you are finally free
of the perfidious planetary gloomeries
those that brought even greater waves and winds
and flight
to your already distraught nature 

a life dismembered
ruined

you are bathing finally in the cleared waters
you swim with the dolphinian children
we were
in our salutary oceans

  

tu es enfin libre
des perfides maussaderies planétaires
celles qui rendaient encore plus houleuse
et fugitive
ta nature déjà désemparée 

une vie démembrée
ruinée

tu bagines enfin dans les eaux éclaircies
tu nages avec les enfants dauphines
que nous étions
dans nos océans salutaires (38)

As Després places herself firmly between these extremes, the figure of the vigil or sentry and the theme of vigilance are present throughout, in their full ambiguity, sometimes appearing in all the danger they represent for those simply attempting to live their lives, sometimes emerging as necessary in order to protect these lives. What might be its opposite, the figure of the mole, is present in the title of three consecutive poems one third into the collection: tunneling, mining, living “a sandy life” (“une vie sablonneuse,” 26), moving in dangerous terrains and gases, being unearthed. The mole is no more an unambiguous figure than the sentry: in the struggle against war, there are no neutral roles. Adding to these figures and perhaps above them, Després adds ventriloquists, eagles, hawks. “We” appear as puppets, but she also identifies herself with turtle doves and with pterodactyls (80), which suggest other ways to see from above which maintain an access to several horizons, without brutality or hierarchy: “I would have looked over / the velvety jungles” (“j’aurais surplombé / les jungles veloutées,” 80).

The warlike figures above relate to those she names “yelles” and “zeux,” which I might translate as “themz,” always in the plural, and who might be “shez” and “yhe” in the singular. Also present in past collections, they are those who want too much and always want more – jealous, envious, prepared to betray or sacrifice others or themselves. They are “shrill shrikes / robbers of peaceful mornings / screechy waders of red ponds / troubling blood red” (“pies grièches / voleuses de matins paisibles / criardes pataugeuses des mares rouges / rouge sang troublant,” 65); they “nibble on the breathing of others” (“grignotent la respiration des autres,” 72).

Against the violence she gives us to see and feel and this sense of being outnumbered by all these enemies, Després shares a utopian vision. This utopia is not a political programme; it is found in what is already indicated in existing relationships, in experience. The title of one poem, “marcher plus doucement désormais” (“to walk more softly from here on out,” 17) sounds like the expression of a desire for a new way of being, allowing for the peace and tenderness that comes with the touch of others and the humming of songs – a vision of being reborn, “unmuzzled” (“démuselée,” 58), where the furthest stars and the oldest mythological figures find new life within.

[Read three poems from Séjour à Belle-Côte]

 

 

 

 

 

 

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, both at @lethejerome.