After having drawn on the ink of his own existence and that of his family for his tetralogy River, Sylvie Drapeau is publishing her very first work of fiction these days, The bird game. A novel carved in hard rock, where every word seems to have been torn from the heavy silence that surrounds domestic violence.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
“This fiction, I have carried it in me for a long time, says the author and actress. The premise comes from an experience I had when I was 8 or 10 years old. I had been invited to dinner at a little girl’s house, and on my way back, in the schoolyard, the other students had said to me, with such contempt: “You went to eat at a battered woman’s house.” I had been very disturbed by this twist of reality, by this contempt reserved for the battered woman and not for the man who beats. As if receiving blows was despicable…”
Camped who knows where, on a date that the author will never reveal – “because domestic violence can happen anywhere, anytime” -, The bird game features twins, Claire and Raymond, who, from the height of their 12 years, must learn to survive in a cruel world that is beyond them.
The children’s point of view
“I chose to adopt the children’s point of view on violence. I returned in my confusion of the time and I entered this little girl who had invited me. Contrary to River, I chose another voice than mine. A bit like what I do in my job as an actress, I got into Claire’s skin…”
For Claire and Raymond, the father’s violence is a source of a lot of anger, incomprehension, but also of questioning. “The little girl wonders how not to suffer violence like her mother when she becomes a woman. The little boy wonders how not to be violent, so as not to become like his father. Are they doomed to repeat the family pattern: beat or be beaten? »
But in the midst of this muted violence, the tenderness of Fabienne, the mother, acts like a beacon. And when the real becomes unbearable, there remains the refuge of the imagination, this place shared with their mother to which the father does not have access.
The power of imagination represents hope. When the father is not there, everything is permitted: the mother and the children can fly very high in their heads. Everything is allowed.
Sylvie Flag
“For Fabienne, it’s her only way to survive. This is the inheritance she gave to her children. It is a very great power,” she adds.
Get to the point
Sylvie Drapeau knows the great power of evocation, of metaphor which is worth more than a thousand images. His short novel is bathed in a gloomy and dusty atmosphere: the house planted on the edge of a hole near a factory which vomits suffocating smoke, the carpet where a colony of mushrooms grows. The world of Claire, Raymond and Fabienne is cruel and hostile down to its smallest corners.
To tell the story of this family which is too often silent, Sylvie Drapeau has chosen to stick to the essence of her characters, without overflowing with any words. “It’s very simple, this text, but it took a very long time to write, admits the author. I wanted to devote a year to writing this story; in the end, it took me two…”
Held away from the boards by the health crisis, she was able to immerse herself to satiety in her writing. “And like everyone else, I have seen this upsurge in domestic violence since the start of the pandemic. I didn’t think my novel would be so frightfully topical. »
Outraged The bird game, Sylvie Drapeau will see her tetralogy this week River reissued in a single volume in the Nomades collection by Leméac. “The cover is illustrated by a drawing my brother made a few days before he drowned. It is very beautiful. »
The bird game
Sylvie Flag
Lemeac
118 pages
In bookstores on January 26
River
Sylvie Flag
Leméac (Nomadic collection)
344 pages