The new collection of short stories by Marie Hélène Poitras intrigues at first sight. There’s the cover, already — a work by Japanese artist Ai Natori — on which a young woman dressed in black, her hair and eyes a deep indigo blue, seems to oscillate between shadow and light, between solitude and community, between what is and what is still waiting to exist.
Then there is this title, Galumpfwhich, once put in the mouth, escapes us as much as it seems familiar to us, and which – we learn from reading – has a direct relationship with The book of words by Richard Scarry… as well as a walrus in pajamas wishing good night. “When we seek Galumpf in a search engine, we first come across the famous “galumph”, by Lewis Carroll, which describes a kind of joyful and inelegant gait. Although my title makes no reference to it, I like this confusion,” confides the writer, met in a café on rue Masson, in Montreal.
” For me, Galumpf reflects something of the creative act. Since it is a made-up word, people appropriate it, both in pronunciation and in interpretation. It also refers to a book that revives something very old in my relationship to language, writing and languages. »
This meta-reflection on creation runs through each of the stories in Marie Hélène Poitras’ collection — eleven nuggets of the imagination, eleven universes that captivate from the first sentence, populated by characters who move to the rhythm of emotions dictated by their relationship to the world, to others, to the territory.
fragile empathy
The author, who is also a contributor to the newspaper The duty, has thus taken up texts published since 2006 in journals, reworked, reworked, rethought them; a creative work that also gave him the impetus to write new ones to complete the work. “I would liken the development of a collection of stories a bit to that of a musician who records a lot of songs and then has to sort them out to form the coherent identity of an album. »
In The little girl who had a too big dog, we meet a neglected little girl who, by trying with the solicitude of her neighbors to train a huge dog, learns the difficult compromises that freedom demands. In Jumpers, a man and a woman love each other, desire each other and reveal themselves through a fiery stallion. Elsewhere, islanders set fire to the house of the one who corrupts the island’s youth, without knowing that they are sacrificing it in the process, and a radio presenter composes with silence for the first time.
For me, Galumpf reflects something of the creative act. Since it is a made-up word, people appropriate it, both in pronunciation and in interpretation. It also refers to a book that revives something very old in my relationship to language, writing and languages.
From one story to another, a divine gallery of characters is sketched out, united by sacrifices, wounds, self-centeredness and the triumphs of living together, and who learn, sometimes the hard way, the ability to place of his neighbour, to take care of him. Together, they prowl around a fragile occurrence, this – as the editor Catherine Leroux writes on the back cover – “exact and difficult place where the act of empathy takes shape. »
“Until recently, the collection was called Empathy exercises, says Marie Hélène Poitras. Although many of the texts were written before the pandemic, I believe they were brought together here by my post-pandemic conscience. This great upheaval has shown us the importance of the ties that unite us, in addition to raising a ton of questions about the collective impact of our individual choices. »
Inhabited by these reflections, the writer understood to what extent empathy was for her inseparable from the act of writing. “While for some, like Nelly Arcan for example, writing is a way of going down into oneself and understanding oneself, for me it is a movement towards the other, a way of slipping into the skin and the head of someone who shares a reality different from mine. »
Of men and beasts
Every news from Galumpf revives certain recurring themes and motifs in the work of Marie Hélène Poitras: the love of places, the great knowledge of Montreal, its corners, its inhabitants and their benevolence, the clash between nature and culture, between domestication, freedom and territory; friction experienced by both humans and animals in his fictions.
“We have to make several concessions to live together in a given place. These concessions, the animals also experience them when we adopt them. Here, a wolfdog never quite manages to belong in the city. There, a cat returns daily to the former home of its masters, even if they offer it a new home. In a series of stories interspersed throughout the collection, a woman walks through Montreal, and experiences different memories and emotions from the exact location where she is. “This sentimental mapping of the city reminds her of what she must leave behind to learn to relate to others and at their own pace. »
Then there are the horses — majestic beasts that vibrate to the same rhythm as the riders throughout his work — which are here at the heart of a budding love, but are also the subject of an intimate essay on the creation titled write, edit, in which the author recounts the challenges, the joys and the obstacles of these two poles which are for them complementary. “I realize in reverse that I write as I go up, that the two gestures are born from the same momentum, take their origin from a similar fury”, she writes there.
“The rider Jérôme Garcin remarks in his equestrian diary that the horses taught him the cadenced and rigorous rhythm of the French phrase. On horseback as on paper, there is a momentum that you have triggered yourself that transports you a little despite yourself. You can try to influence it or give it a direction, but you can also accept it, surrender to this instinct. There is also a sense of danger that interests me in both acts. Trying to ride a difficult and nervous horse is more interesting than riding a more reassuring mount, just as comfort is never a creative engine. »
Like the rider who is about to lead his horse on the track, we can only bow to this quest for discomfort, which each time delivers a true literary gem.