Jardin radio, is the story of a voice threatened with extinction because of a tumor in the jaw. It is also the story of several voices, including those of Fanny Britt, Catherine Mavrikakis and Daphné B., listened to on the radio to fill the painful silence, to feed the desire to write.
“It would be a literary project in the form of fragments, that’s what I explain in a low voice to a friend in a beige room. I tell him in a detached way that I will talk about my operations, the operations that could have prevented me from speaking, that affected my ability to speak. »
Supporting this story of resilience are Susan Sontag’s reflections on illness, Martin Rodriguez on death through his radio installation, The offeringand Chantal Dumas, creator of a multilingual clock marking the 86,400 seconds of a day, over time.
Lecturer in literature and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Montreal, Charlotte Biron (Mavis Gallant and Gabrielle Roy, journalists, Codicille, 2016) makes radio and sound creations. Sensitive to sounds, she reveals through her surgically precise pen the importance she attaches to the choice of words.
Regretting the distance that Sontag establishes between her and the disease, her refusal to speak about herself, CharlotteBiron undertakes to describe the pain, the fear, the isolation experienced on a daily basis with accuracy and lucidity, refusing to resort to metaphor: “I would like a text that says nothing intelligent, that testifies to an experience outside the world, violent, boring, invisible. »
Beyond the bruised flesh that it evokes, the bereavements that it must tame, the transformations that it observes, what captures the attention in radio garden, it is the fight that the author leads not against the disease, but against the writing which seems to impose her will. “I reject what would give magnificent tints to desolation, to grief, to pain. I try to refuse fiction. »
As she traces the thread of the story, reunites the fragments of her life, Charlotte Biron’s voice gains confidence “one word at a time” and triumphs.