I was 25 when I wrote Kingdom scotch tape, my first collection, and 27 when it was published. A little younger, I had written another book, which I sent to all possible and imaginable houses, without positive return. I said to myself: it does not matter, nobody owes me the publication. I studied literature, I knew literary history, I knew that so many writers I admired had been little read during their lifetimes, or had been discovered long after their death. I knew that institutional recognition did not guarantee talent; I had worn out the bench enough classrooms to know.
kingdom scotch tape, I rewrote it maybe 100 times, between my classes, between my student jobs that I accumulated to pay for them. I found a publishing house because I was doing odd jobs there and they had asked me if I wrote: I had then given them my manuscript. I was edited with scrupulous care by editors who were getting their start in publishing: having worked with many other people afterwards, I know the rigor they showed at the time.
I was surrounded by the presence of my friends when the book came out. I said to myself: even if I sell 50, that’s enough for me. It was a book on abortion, on intellectual and friendly solidarity. It was also a book about reading, where I wanted the literary references to act as bricks to build a kingdom for oneself, a fragile kingdom, but one that exists. A Kingdom tape.
In the mainstream press, I got excellent reviews, unexpected for a nobody. Then came an open letter in a newspaper, signed by a good part of the Quebec poetic intelligentsia, which denounced among other things the fact that my publishing house, a publishing house with a long history, had hired ” young people” to publish collections qualified as “mercantile” – among these collections, mine. The specialized press, where the critics were also the poets who were to constitute my milieu, also denounced the work of publishing, at the same time as the inequality of language registers, as if it were not a matter of a artistic choice weighed. On the one hand, people regretted that I didn’t talk enough about my Haitian roots and, on the other hand, people wondered why I talked so much about my family — yet, from Annie Ernaux to Maggie Nelson via Saidiya Hartman, many writers have done it too. The good old trope of the writing of the intimate which would not really be literature, how could one embody it with so little critical perspective on one’s own positionality? People criticized the caesuras of the verses, the themes that I chose. A poet wrote that because I had wanted to play an intertextual game and hide literary references without quotation marks, one had to assume that the only good lines in the collection were those borrowed from others.
To reassure myself, I again recalled the literary history, the criticisms against Toni Morrison; Nelly Arcan, shunned during her lifetime, ridiculed. Not that I thought I had the same talent as her, but I managed to convince myself that those reviews weren’t a reflection of my worth. I wish I didn’t have to be so resilient. During this time, I saw my friends publishing books. If some critics were sometimes more lukewarm towards their work, I never let go of the impression of having been the subject of a demolition company without comparison.
It’s been eight years. I never really talked about it publicly. I do it today out of a desire to put words to this story. Because kingdom scotch tape is taught in several countries, has been the subject of master’s theses, which prove to me that the book is less mediocre than what was said about it. Looking back, I can attest that it is not a perfect book, but it manages to speak to both intellectuals and the general public: for this reason, it remains my greatest literary pride.
I want to tell this story because I don’t want it to happen to others who, like me, do not come from a literary, artistic or wealthy background, to others who are not predestined to publish a book and who will, however, and who we want to make believe that it is not their place. What happened to me goes far beyond the bad reviews (I don’t even blame the people who wrote them, one of whom, years later, actually apologized): what happened to me appears to me the product of a structure which does not admit difference. I’m glad I was too young and too naive at the time to call it that: that’s what allowed me to continue writing. And that, I will never regret.