“I take care of you, I take care of everything, it goes without saying, it goes with me, I took you so far away that now I’m clogging the ocean that grew between us. Because I never knew how to be your daughter, I read mothers, and I also read daughters, fragile and strong like mothers, I swallow the consolation of the mother tongue,” writes the narrator of View Montaukthe debut book by Swiss-Canadian writer Sophie Dora Swan, in her composite “Storm Diary.”
Returned to her mother, from whom she had voluntarily distanced herself by settling on the other side of the Atlantic, the narrator has for a long time maintained a relationship tinged with guilt with her, as if she were responsible for the chronic depression from which the latter has suffered since the day of her birth.
“Unconsciously, many children of sick parents will wonder if it is their fault, believes the author, contacted in Switzerland. A person who had lost his mother at a fairly young age told me that when she was going to visit her in the hospital, she was told not to make noise because she needed quiet. This idea of responsibility for the disease can seep into children’s emotions and then crystallize. This is what I wanted to address implicitly. For the narrator, it is perhaps this guilt that she built up during childhood that makes her incapable of managing the present situation. »
Switzerland is somewhat the cradle of assisted suicide, but medical assistance in dying is very paradoxical. It is presented as an extremely gentle solution, but it is still very violent.
Wishing to understand her relationship to her mother, the narrator dives into the words of “queen daughters” and “queen mothers”, including Sarah Chiche, Catherine Mavrikakis, Martine Delvaux, Delphine de Vigan and Simone de Beauvoir.
“Very often, a book is the fruit of crossbreeding; the books are constructed in dialogues with other texts. These dialogues are invisible, we do not see the seams of the text. I wanted this literary crossbreeding to be visible. I lived for a very, very long time in Quebec, and that’s where my literary culture was really built. So there are Quebec voices, women from different generations and European voices as well. What I find interesting and what I wanted to highlight is that I sometimes had the feeling that they were addressing each other, that they were responding to each other across the ages, the oceans . »
In addition to references to Québécois literary works, Sophie Dora Swan borrows expressions and swear words from our country: “For the narrator, who has returned to Europe, the Québécois language becomes a tool for extricating herself from the place where she is taken, to distance himself from his mother’s language. The question of the places we crosses in life is extremely important and runs through the whole text. Water is also very important here. It is the first place of life of any person. This need that the mother will have to get closer to the water is perhaps a return to childhood, to the mother. »
A woman at the sea
Thus, before her hospitalization, the mother expresses to her daughter the desire to go and see the sea, more specifically Montauk, whose lighthouse evokes The walk to the lighthouse by Virginia Woolf — “There’s a little nod to Woolf in one of the poems where the narrator says she’s driving towards the lighthouse,” the author reveals. Although she does not know this place and does not know what Montauk means to her mother, the narrator still promises to take her there when she is better.
“If the mother had said she wanted to go to the cabin, nothing would have happened, there probably wouldn’t have been a book. In a way, and this is somewhat what I wanted to convey, illness has the effect of breaking the dialogue. The narrator will therefore create an image of this place from the experience she is going through. Montauk then becomes a place where she will imagine that a word begins to circulate again, a kind of peace that will be able to settle in the interstices of the chaos that she and her mother encounter. »
However, the mother will not get better and will ask for assistance in dying. After summoning the spirit of Virginia Woolf, Sophie Dora Swan will summon the specter of fellow suicide writer, Sylvia Plath, who will come to haunt See Montauk :“let’s not call a suicide / a suicide / dying // an art / like everything else”.
“Switzerland is somewhat the cradle of assisted suicide, but medical assistance in dying is very paradoxical. It is presented as an extremely gentle solution, but it is still very violent. This paradox, I wanted to highlight it. Medical assistance in dying brings a change of perspective because at the beginning, the idea of death is unbearable for the narrator, but when this idea becomes an option, it will bring a form of liberation . The idea of the possibility of having access to death generates a form of liberation for the narrator and for her mother. From the moment it becomes concretely possible, a form of letting go appears in the narrator. It’s hard, what I’m saying, but I think it’s the reality of many people who live in this situation.»
On the fence
In addition to the difficult themes that she treats with delicacy, what is striking in this first book by Sophie Dora Swan, born in 1983, is the ease with which she moves from prose to poetry, not hesitating to insert in this fragmented story, lists of all kinds, diary entries and text messages to convey the narrator’s feverishness. Halfway through the story, the word “anguish” appearing 335 times on two pages evokes the uneasiness of Jack Torrance retyping the same sentence on a typewriter in The Shiningby Stanley Kubrick, based on the work of Stephen King.
“There are things that cannot always be explained. I’ve had a relationship with writing for a long time, I’ve written a lot, but I’ve never done it in a shared way. This text arose, and when it arose, the urgency to say was stronger than dissimulation, than modesty. Maybe there was also a need to balance some things. It’s like a bomb going off. Everything is multiplied in full of fragments on the ground and there, it is necessary to collect them then to try to rebuild something. Maybe that’s how I felt and why it took so long. »
While the author navigates from one form to another, the narrator seems to be swimming underwater and only resurfacing long enough to catch her breath. “It’s something that was organic, but which imposed itself as a very rich tool to make the narrator feel two different states, the state of emergency and the state of introspection. The diversity of forms reflects the fact that the experience is multifaceted and that it passes through several temporalities. Poetry will bear the trace of urgency, it says what is being torn apart, what is brutal, what is collapsing. The prose will be part of a time when there was a form of distancing, a time of stepping back, which will give a more complex exploration of the situation. »
If Sophie Dora Swan affirms that poetry plays a big role in her life and that it is for her a good vector of emotion, her next book could take a form closer to the classic novel than that of a hybrid story. “This text did not lend itself to it, in my opinion. Anyway, that’s not how I wanted to build it in relation to the experience I wanted readers to have, but the idea of a novel is very tempting. »