Salomé Assor published two exceptional books with Poètes de brousse, Un (2019) and Nue, a few days ago. Two titles comprising only a few letters under which, however, hide dense content, using a language on edge and words.
The author admirably mixes literary genres, thus recalling the books of other high-level contemporary Quebec writers: Daria Colonna, Andréanne Frenette-Vallières and Olivia Tapiero, to name a few.
Nue merges essay with personal story, philosophy with poetry. Less compressed and more accessible than in Un, thanks to tighter punctuation and narration.
The events unfold over 12 hours and as many chapters. A woman who has always been silent and never slept will walk in the night. An assault will finish cutting his life in two. Even if “closing your eyes is enough to deny the cruelty of an image”, the bruised woman will wait “for dawn without believing it”.
The story of this unspeakable aggression proceeds with lucidity and dreamlikeness with poetry as a lifeline, even if the poet seems swallowed by the fangs of the night at the end of an unnamed alley.
“I want to scream I want to run I want to fight and yet. How urgent is paralysis. I feel myself decreasing, shrinking, like a vanquished spider cowering at the terminal moment, swallowing its own gesture of the end of the world, inward I fall: it is a narrowness, protection. »
If in Un solitude was displayed in capital letters, Nue is tied to the concept of duality, first represented by the aggressor, then by a friend as unexpected as it is surprising, an insect, perhaps the most repulsive of all. them, a cockroach.
The narrator will try to crush it, like the stranger in the alley with her, but without succeeding. With this confidant, this ally, the survival mechanisms activate to signify to the universe “our rebellious existence”.
Before and after the tragedy, the poet “tries a little to love” despite the “human banalities” and this mania for reducing love to the verb to love.
“And what a shame, in the end, I love you starts with I.” Make the other a direct object complement. »
Salomé Assor reflects as she writes. “Writing is all I have,” she once said in an interview. Generous, without false modesty, neglecting neither contradictions nor vulnerability, her poetic prose shares with us all that she has and is. His mastery of language carries us easily by exploiting a rich thought, in perpetual motion.
Somewhere between Kafka and Beckett, the book speaks of the absurdity of life, but also of the imagination that saves us from its worst moments. A few notes of playful humor appear precisely in this desert which is “a place of hope” despite everything.
Because the mind can wander there, invent oases and gather there “this wonder that is calm”.