Glancing behind her, probing the depth of a life spent somewhere between two worlds, Catherine Voyer-Léger makes Movements and of Knotted two spaces to moor memories. As a way to fix time.
“I repeatedly listen to the same song from Avec pas d’casque: “You will say… you will say that it was instinct that led you here […] And this will be your base camp. And this will be your base camp…”I don’t have that, a base camp”, states the narrator at the start of Movements, an atypical story just published by Prize de parole. Floating, she said, “between two suitcases, an armful of overdue laundry […] between cold late evening rain […] Between the desire of some, the desert of others”, this woman waltzes between beloved, astonishing, moving places, from Montfort to Ville-Marie via Le Bic, and a present from a mother that she tries to moor .
She crisscrosses her memory, her childhood, the Laurentian highway — which she knows by heart — then stops at these different “interiors” — night, red, rainbow, nostalgia, dawn — lived moments to “we”, with his daughter.
Driven by an incessant need to move, trying to convince herself that “being the movement was also what[elle] knew how to do better”, she learns to “be well between [s]are four walls”, in ” [s]a kitchen too small”. And despite the stop imposed on him by his young daughter, the road, the journey, the need for movement, as a way of finding balance, stability, remains central in this fragmented micro-narrative.
Presented in some forty tableaux, the story becomes a journey, the writing in a certain way arousing movement itself. Accompanied by photographs, like frozen moments, the only proof of memories that tend to blur, the story reveals all the fragility of a woman, a mother who, for want of turning around in circles less, “turns on another axis” in the company of his daughter and some ghosts.
Between the stitches
In Knottedautofiction, therapeutic story just published by Quebec America, the author remains in the intimacy of a flayed woman, fragile and overwhelmed by a feeling of guilt, that of being too much or not enough, of carrying a weight, no not on her shoulders, but deep inside her.
Since childhood, where, listening Small Santashe thinks he’s cold because of her, until this episode where her four-year-old “is convinced that she should take better care [de sa mère] », guilt inhabits Catherine. A feeling that haunts her and that she delivers in three stages with gentleness and transparency.
First, this beginning of the world, the one that will make her a mother. Then, 1984, memory of her own childhood in the Laurentians, of her mother in rehab. And, finally, 2001, tipping point. Brilliant academic, “balanced in front of the gap of the new century”, she “comes close” to committing suicide. The three stories follow each other, cling to each other in this desire to unravel the complexes to better grasp the meshes, the intersections, what shapes a girl, a woman, a mother, what builds her, she , in all its faults, its weaknesses and its light too.
In an intimate writing, Catherine Voyer-Léger explores the meanders of this filiation through which this monster of guilt settles and grows in a very involuntary way which upsets her balance, her confidence. “From mother to daughter, our anxieties woven together for better and for worse”, she delivers with as much apprehension as hope. An observation not of failure, but rather of an astonishing lucidity about our own inconsistencies and imperfections.
Punctuated with references to the culture and daily life of this forty-year-old woman, to those “little fellows” listened to on Saturday mornings, to Daughters of Caleb recorded Thursdays on VHS, each episode of which is ” binge-watch[é] waiting for the new”, the story of Voyer-Léger reads like listening to a TV episode. Effortlessly, but all at once, caught up in the vulnerability of this feminine voice which moves away from victimization to simply turn towards the other, to move forward in spite of everything in this beginning of the world.