Suffering from chronic, cyclical or spontaneous pain, those lying down have their posture in common. Their loneliness too, despite the addition of their voices. Themselves struggling with frequent pain, Martine Delvaux and Jennifer Bélanger pay tribute to these women, in The elongateda book about suffering and resilience.
Posted at 7:00 a.m.
When they claim to have written this elongated essay, in the depths of the pandemic, the two authors are not using a figure of speech. It is literally in their respective beds, like Frida Kahlo, lying down, but disciplined, that they wrote the sum of fragments that make up this short work.
“We have the same pace of work, which is a frantic pace, it’s paradoxical, notes Martine Delvaux, novelist and essayist. We work extremely quickly because we are always afraid of running out of time. Every day, we sent each other fragments. We wrote this book much faster than we could even imagine. Because we have too much production compared to the pain we suffer. »
In his case, it is back pain caused by disc degeneration due to a fall and diagnosed in 2012. “It’s only from the cervical to the lumbar, it’s as if my spine was 20 years older than me” , she illustrates. Sitting in the offices of her publishing house for the interview, when she had just spent two weeks in bed, was “painful” and she felt the need to get up at some point.
Jennifer Bélanger has no diagnosis. And that adds to his suffering.
I was in medical wandering for a while, then I gave up. It’s chronic fatigue, so to speak, and headaches. I think it may be migraines related to the eyes. But, I don’t have a diagnosis.
Jennifer Belanger
Together, the authors know a lot about pain. Jennifer Bélanger has made the sick female body the subject of her doctoral thesis supervised by Martine Delvaux, professor of literature at UQAM. This feminine pain was also present in her first novel, Menthol, published in 2020 and a finalist for the Governor General’s Literary Awards. As for Martine Delvaux, she submitted a grant application for a major research project on chronic pain in women in connection with the literature.
Then last year, together, they participated in the OFFTA festival to present the pain as it is approached by the American writer Anne Boyer, who was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer at the age of 41, and by African-American feminist activist and essayist Audre Lorde, who died of cancer.
Name the unnameable
In their essay, Martine Delvaux and Jennifer Bélanger surrounded themselves with these two women, as well as several others, writers, artists, filmmakers, in order to combine their personal stories with those of those who also experienced horizontal life . In their texts, they drew their way of naming pain. “What interests us, I think, from the start, is that the pain is unspeakable, it is indivisible, explains Martine Delvaux. That’s why torture exists, that is to say that an executioner can torture because he won’t feel the pain. This indivisible was at the center, consciously or not, of the writing exercise. »
Thus, the book is an amalgam of fragments of texts that are sometimes intimate, sometimes etymological, historical or inspired by significant works. The authors also explore the figure of the reclining woman in art, often seen by the man. However, this woman is not just pain, just like the woman lying down in general who, notes Jennifer Bélanger, “represents a lot of affects: ecstasy, pain, desire, the desire to seduce”. There is also this desire among the authors “to show the bed as a place where we live, adds Martine Delvaux. And maybe take away the cliché that if you’re lying down, you’re not doing anything. We are lying down. Because there is a feeling of guilt and a fear of suspicion among the lying down: are they believed?
Women certainly do not have a monopoly on pain, but often in history they have been called lazy, hysterical or crazy.
“By going there in larger strokes, we wanted to bring out something that is documented: the pain of women, it is sub-treated”, underlines Martine Delvaux. “And it becomes more complex with race, class issues, sexual orientation, continues Jennifer Bélanger. These are still blind spots in medicine. »
The voices tend to rise and Martine Delvaux cites as an example Loto-Meno, Véronique Cloutier’s documentary series on menopause and hormone therapy. “If it is not treated, if we do not take care of these women who are at the top of their productivity, basically, we exclude them from society, she denounces. What are we operating? »
For her chronic pain, the professor claims to have the support of her employer, who has agreed to adapt her task to her abilities. “The fact remains that I suspect that my career, in any case academic, will be shortened, probably because of that. »
For Jennifer Bélanger too, the horizon is “blurred”: “I am not yet established in a professional environment, but it makes me wonder what is in front of me, what are my possibilities? ? »
” […] Who decreed that the future belongs only to those who stay up after getting up early?
The elongated
Jennifer Belanger and Martine Delvaux
Heliotrope
150 pages
In bookstores October 12