Camille Readman Prud’homme would she agree to tell us who she is and where she comes from? On her side of the screen, the poet laughs. Did the journalist even read his book, to ask him such a loaded, complex question?
Posted at 9:00 a.m.
Released last May When I say nothing I still think is one of the most significant literary entries of 2021, precisely because its author manages to name the game of masks that social theater constitutes, this more or less tragic comedy under the influence of which the impression of disintegrating sometimes assails, especially when it has to be summed up in a few sentences.
Meditation around the strange archiving mechanisms on which memory is based, an invitation to hear what the silence of others broods over, an exercise in empathy intended for all those who always find the right thing to say late; Camille Readman Prud’homme’s first collection of poems overflows with these phrases that encapsulate truths as intimate as they are universal about the little shames that we accumulate like rocks in our pockets. So that When I say nothing I still think now belongs to that rare category of books that we give to friends, like a secret handshake, in order to tell them something about ourselves that we cannot tell ourselves.
It also rose to third place among the best-selling titles of the year from the influential Montreal bookstore Le Port de Tête, proof that many of us painfully experience the gap between what we would like to express and what we manage to express. ” [O]We believe that those who do not speak/think nothing/those who smile/are happy/we also believe that those who are convinced/are right/those who listen/obey”, writes Camille Readman Prud’homme.
“Often, we hear that you have to have something to say to write. And it’s the worst thing to get into your head, because it inhibits a lot”, confided during a recent visit to Quebec the 32-year-old poet, who started writing at the start of adulthood, in following a long journey as a ballerina. After a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of Quebec in Montreal, she is now studying – still literature – at New York University.
We often think that literature is all about loudmouths, but literature can also offer a counterpoint to people who speak late, or who don’t know how to speak. […] I had the desire to put my finger on things so small that it would be impossible to qualify them as adventures, but which could perhaps make poems.
Camille Readman Prud’homme
Highlightable excerpt among many others: “you find yourself with all kinds of memories which are also possible collisions, and sometimes strolling among them you think you look like a garage, you store in your head what is out of use, and your knowledge becomes as useless as Christmas decorations in March”.
See the spiral
At a time that had sanctified authenticity, Camille Readman Prud’homme thus contrasts the limpid density of an interior monologue in the face of which the word authenticity looks less like a lie than a mirage. ” [P]Sometimes I lied, I told stories to be granted a peace or not to disappoint, I said sentences that took me to where the light fell better,” she wrote.
“But I don’t think in terms of false and true, simulacrum and truth,” she says in an interview. The fact of being in front of someone, of recognizing the other, automatically makes us appear other. Faced with the other, we are in an incessant, permanent work of self-construction. »
Last December, the columnist of the Day-to-day from Saguenay Frédérick Lavoie wrote that he “instinctively knew that Camille Readman Prud’homme was not on social networks”. “I cannot explain exactly this intuition […] if not by the rhythm and the tone of his writing, which does not seem to yield to any injunction other than those coming from within. »
Camille laughs softly. “Social networks are an important space for speaking, she underlines, as if not to appear anachronistic, but it seems that social networks provide me with too much information, and afterwards, I find myself cluttered and it becomes complicated. »
Although there is absolutely nothing angry about her texts, Camille Readman Prud’homme evokes the influence of the thundering Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard, from whom she inherits a vertiginous precision in the turn that seizes the body and the heart. She also attributes part of her ability to see with such sagacity the saving dissimulations in which her contemporaries indulge to her former job as a waitress, a promontory of choice on human nature.
“Everything is centered around the sentence with Thomas Bernhard: it’s like a portrait of thought, and it inevitably becomes intimate, because it’s very intimate, how it circulates in our mind, how we make connections. We see concretely the spiral of his thought, how it moves. Only literature can allow that. »
When I say nothing I still think
Camille Readman Prud’homme
Cravan Goose
108 pages