I was 15 when I read Whore (Threshold, 2001). Well, “read” is a big word. I was too shocked to finish the novel.
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
It was not the sexuality portrayed by Nelly Arcan that upset me, but all that it underpinned in her female characters. The pressure to conform to male desire; the thirst to be noticed that arises from it; the fear of seeing your body age and lose all interest; the resulting competition between women…
The good old imperative to please despite our inevitable expiry date, what.
I didn’t want to recognize all that in me at the time. Nelly Arcan had understood many things, but it tempted me moderately to contemplate my paradoxes, rages and failures to come. I closed the book feeling something like disdain.
It was the first time that I was afraid of the reflection sent back to me by an author.
Every year, when we mark the anniversary of her death – September 24 – I think back to the power of Nelly Arcan. I wonder what she could tell me about myself today. On you.
After Arcan, there was Marie Uguay.
Love at first sight and stomach ache.
In Log (Boréal, 2015), writes about his relationship to art, nature, the hospital world, the body (his being mutilated by bone cancer which was to kill him at the age of 26). In the course of her thoughts, she depicts a femininity, certain aspects of which are often hidden, no doubt because they are considered ugly.
On the threshold of death, the poet clings to passion. She focuses on the love she has for her spouse, but also on the dazzling desire she cultivates for her doctor. She unvarnishedly reveals her need to remain a coveted woman despite illness and exhaustion.
She writes desire in its most vital and saddest form at the same time. Being seen by the other becomes a question of survival.
Nelly Arcan opens our eyes to the desire imposed on us. Marie Uguay reminds us that we can make it a driving force. (But do we really want to make it an engine?)
Then came the brilliant Daphne B.
The author blew me away with the essay Made up (Leaf Merchant, 2020). Like many, the rigor of his dive into the world of beauty amazed me, but I admit that some chapters gave me the effect of a cold shower. Or, more honestly, a raised middle finger in my direction.
To read Daphne B. is to recognize that I have often judged women who voluntarily make themselves beautiful. You know, the ones who dare to stand out with their bright eye shadow and colorful lips?
In a world where desire is an injunction, I looked down on those who decided to take up arms. As if they were less interesting because they knew how to handle the brushes or, even worse: more in search of male approval than another.
Desire, competition, we always come back to it.
However, I had never made the effort to educate myself on makeup as a ritual or an identity tool. Read Made upso it was reminding me of my internalized misogyny.
If these three authors contributed to the deconstruction of my biases, they also pushed me in the back. They are thinkers I can turn to when I struggle to find my place in a society that, want it, want it, has molded me. They frighten me and comfort me at the same time.
” So much the better ! Daphne B. threw at me when I confessed to her that she was one of the authors who, in the tradition of Arcan, stirred my cage.
“I didn’t write this book for nothing! [En tant que femme qui aime le maquillage] I confronted the judgments of my friends… Patriarchy is everyone. Even I internalized a lot of things. »
She talks to me in particular about the figure of the punk writer who puts herself in danger:
To take a woman’s word seriously is like asking her to put her body on the line. That’s never true until the girl is on the brink.
Daphne B.
“I internalized that as proof of my literary value,” she adds. I fight every day against this image. »
It is not insignificant, moreover, that we recognize the genius of Nelly Arcan and Marie Uguay more since their deaths. And not only them: we can also think of Vickie Gendreau and Josée Yvon, who also disappeared in tragic circumstances.
“In the Quebec artistic community, we like to sanctify deceased authors, suicides. Dead, we can celebrate them without fearing them. »
This is an excerpt taken from Made up that Daphne B. has just published on Instagram, a few days ago. It got me inside.
“It comes from an old frustration,” she explained to me. I have the impression that in the Quebec literary milieu, many men extol these dead women. In a sense, I think that the total woman is a dead woman who can be disposed of. She is no longer there to answer us, to talk about her work or to defend it. »
We can spend a lifetime trying to exist in the gaze of the other, then be dispossessed once gone… When we get there, what’s the point of pleasing?
“Now I want to get mean. »
Daphne B. says it with a laugh, but I don’t doubt her sincerity. She adds that fortunately, we have an example to follow: Virginie Despentes, who recently published Dear asshole at Grasset.
Another author who knows how to confront us by bluntly exposing often unspoken realities.
“Yes, she was in the man’s gaze and she did sex work, but she also became ‘unlovable’, continues Daphne B. I would like that, one day, not to be lovable. »
Getting out of the cursed imperative of being desirable… The dream, right?