In his test Joel Des Rosiers. The lyrical escape of the damned of the sea, Jean-Jacques Thomas wants to approach everything, to take head-on the various aspects of the poetic work of an author he admires, and in doing so, he repeats himself. This is indeed the greatest defect of this essay which, moreover, is penetrating and illuminates in a meticulous way the paths to be taken to decode the desire.
What the essayist emphasizes in Des Rosiers is “first of all a radical and absolute refusal of a poetry entirely dominated by the duty of lamenting memory. » This crucial starting point highlights the intrinsic project of the poet, namely: « to make an original and personal Quebec work without the weight of the deplorable pathos encrusted in the regret of the “native country”. Thus freed from the weight of ancestral fetishism, the poetry of Des Rosiers will be embodied in the new territories it discovers, will put itself in the present of emotion.
Jean-Jacques Thomas also goes on the side of an astonishing form of psychocriticism, when he recalls that the poet, the first Haitian baby born from a caesarean section, had his hands injured while holding the blade of the scalpel which delivered him. Birth in a premonitory blood in short, bruised hand that he associates with the past of the country of origin, while the galleon leading the conquerors to the island will be found ripped between the open reefs in the shape of a hand of limestone thus freeing the sailors of the stranded boat. These passages highlight in a breathtaking way the secrets carried by a creation delivered with panache. It would even be necessary to recognize the original cut in the mark of the umlaut (note it in the first name Joël) whereas it would imply a sense of cut, of rupture affirmed in the titles of the collections of Des Rosiers caiques and Guaiac. Happy and surprising vision.
In fact, “the ‘damned of the sea’ have found land…”, just as the poet renounces the past to face the present and the future, of course. Des Rosiers “explicitly values the “uprooting” […] as a chance for an evolution, for an installation in another soil. We must understand this “soil” as an extra-metropolitan territory, open to countries of passage and belonging, putting the universality of French literature forward. For Thomas, this work will therefore be “transnational”. Moreover, he will analyze at length the difficult relations maintained by Des Rosiers with, among others, the works of Césaire or Fanon.
For Des Rosiers, “poetic work is therefore first of all a ‘crime of burglary’ in the body of language”, that is to say formal research, transgressive language, adventure of the depths. And in this regard, we would have liked the essayist to linger over more in-depth literary analyzes to show us more concretely the new contribution of this writing. Nevertheless, here is a book that is sometimes arduous and scholarly, but enlightening, and which makes it possible to accompany an important work of great richness.