Writer of transgression, subversion, risk, Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam likes to evade codes, to walk as a tightrope walker on the frontier of genres, to challenge rules, theories, shackles. It is this, and much more, that the jury of the Prix Médicis rewarded, in distinguishing his latest book, The Thirteenth Hourearlier this fall.
The novel – if it can even be called that – takes up the themes, figures, processes dear to the French writer, echoes of an insubordination and irreverence present since the beginning of her career, but which the evolution and social awareness may now make it possible to recognize their true value.
Farah, a teenager, grows up in community in the Church of the Thirteenth Hour, a feminist, queer and animalist millennial church. His father, Lenny, who is the founder, brings together the faithful every day – marginal individuals, wounded, damaged by life, precariousness or violence – around poetic masses, where prayer is replaced by collective recitations of Nerval. and Rimbaud. Through these revolutionary voices of the last centuries, Lenny hopes to galvanize his troops, to give them the courage to overthrow the established order which is leading humanity to its downfall, to bring about the triumph of the deprived, the dominated, those who have all the time been silenced.
This is not the first time that Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam has set up a story in a community that evolves on the margins of the world. Arcadia (POL, 2018) his previous novel, placed his characters in an autarkic microsociety in rejection of capitalism, overconsumption, patriarchy and heteronormativity. This time, his Church of the Thirteenth Hour — a nod to the sonnet Artemis de Nerval — was greatly influenced by the global context in which writing unfolded.
“I started the novel in a rather anxiety-provoking climate, when France was confined for the second time. Then I finished it when the war in Ukraine broke out. It is therefore a book nourished by concerns, anxiety, hence this idea of a place where vulnerable people could find comfort, both with Lenny and poetry. »
Ode to poetry
The book is first and foremost a tribute to literature and poetry – particularly to the “heritage” French poets of the 19th and 20th centuries – which run through the work, both in form and in narration and narrative. . The three distinct parts that make up the story – carried alternately by the voices of Farah and her parents, Lenny and Hind – are all oriented towards a literary genre, which each of the narrators represents: the novel, poetry and song.
This homage and this narrative choice find a continuity even in the very construction of the text and the sentences, in the formal work which is rhythmed in such a way as to thwart the codes and the rhythm of the alexandrines. “I claim to write poetic novels, where the work on the language is as important as the plot, the adventures or the psychology. I play with this idea that as soon as a verse has thirteen syllables, we are no longer in the alexandrine. The thirteenth syllable is the infraction, the anomaly, the non-standard, which for me are the place of poetry and beauty”, underlines the novelist.
Always in rejection of the rules, the writer has fun quoting, without quotation marks or italics, the authors she admires, reappropriating their verses to better reactivate them, and slipping here and there more current cultural references into a great ballet. as harmonious as it is dissident. Thus, those who know how to read between the lines will come across Michel Sardou, Madame de La Fayette and HP Lovecraft, among others.
“It doesn’t matter whether the reader grasps these references or not. It’s rather a way of registering myself in a lineage. I cannot write as if nothing had been written before me. I am an author because I was first a reader. I wink, I establish playful connections to put these authors and their formulas back into circulation. »
Transidentity
Under the pen of Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, the novel thus becomes a hybrid, transgender object, carried at the same time by a sophisticated, sustained and erudite language, traversed by more grotesque, trivial, bare, almost carnal passages. She even bets on taking characters from her previous books — this is the case with Farah and Nelly, for example — to keep their soul, features and construction, and to catapult them into a completely different story and universe, which ignores everything the reader has read before.
“I feel that if I have a strength as an author, it is that of creating complex characters. Sometimes I have a feeling that a single book cannot exhaust all the richness and potential of these. By placing them in a new context, I discover new facets of them and I have to reinvent myself. It is fascinating work. »
This fluidity, this hybridity of genres, narratives and bodies reverberates in the stories of Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam, in which non-binary and trans characters have been present from the start. “In the last century, when I started publishing, no one was talking about gender dysphoria, including me, even though my characters were neither girls nor boys. I was overtaken by a conceptual and emotional baggage that I didn’t have at the time. Nobody talked to me about it, even though it interests everyone today. In some countries in the world, speech is freed up, and that is beneficial. »
From book to book, the writer assumes more and more to anchor her stories in politics, to write from her indignation and her anger. Through the character of Farah, she demonstrates all that we have to gain, as a society, from growing up in an inclusive environment, devoid of cages, classes and borders, where struggles converge to better triumph, where the possibilities of existence, like family nuclei, explode, recompose, multiply. “There have always been people who did not recognize themselves at the ends of the spectrum. If you are attentive and have grown up in a family that is not too alienating, you also understand that all children navigate between genders. Anyway, even the most cisgender people, comfortable with their birth sex, would benefit from questioning our definitions of masculinity and femininity. The boxes in which they try to put us, our education, are very violent. »
Emmanuelle Bayamack-Tam in Montreal