“It is a work that is luminous, despite everything that may have happened to it”, confides in his soft voice the “guardian of the garden” of Marie Uguay, the one who was her lover until the very end, photographer Stéphan Kovacs. It has now been almost 40 years, on October 26, 1981, that the poet died of bone cancer at the age of 26. She left behind a brief work of barely three collections –Sign and rumor (1976), The other life(1979) and Self-portraits (1982) -, but already testifying to a vast knowledge of the world, inseparable from the many hours of patient and sensitive attention that she will have devoted to her interior life.
His Newspaper, texts of an ardent truth selected by Mr. Kovacs from his notebooks, will allow, when published in 2006, a privileged access to an intimate thought of what life is most painful, although never fatalistic.
“Luminous”, the word makes sense, but also surprises, so much the work of Marie Uguay seems constantly torn between the pain of the body or the impossibility of really coming into contact with the other, and a form of faith unalterable in that this pain finds its resolution. Illness is a very bad muse, she explained to journalist Jean Royer, in the magnificent documentary portrait, simply titled Marie Uguay, signed by Jean-Claude Labrecque in 1982. “When anxiety reaches a certain level, an almost intolerable level, it fills me with silence. It is as if there was nothing more to say. “
Certain passages of his Newspaper nevertheless show a Marie Uguay who never ceases to thirst for poems. “Heaven more ardent this morning in the intense peregrination of projects. I think about my relationship with language, writing. To this great love which transforms dreary everyday life. Only one passion grows. There is so much blue everywhere to make me happy, a profusion of fresh translucent blue that talks usefully, ”she wrote on August 8, 1980.
“I am talking about light, because she always had the hope of something better, to manage to go beyond what she was going through,” recalls Stéphan Kovacs. For me, something rigorous like his poetry, because it was very rigorous in his writing, is something luminous, because it leads to beauty. “
Desire and distress
Somewhere between fullness and suffering, love will have been the great subject of Marie Uguay. Love of poetry, love of a man, love of the landscape and what surrounds it. ” [E]Wasn’t it summer / that same long / bursting of the day / on the edge of us, ”she writes, her heart swelling, in Sign and rumor, his only book created before cancer. Then already, in the following fragment, the quest takes a more anguished turn: “in the five o’clock sun / this concordance between / each word and a part / of the dream that we seek / with diligence and distress”.
“We cannot say that in his poems, the desire for love is always surrounded by light,” observes the writer Ariane Bessette (Flood, Parallel hours), who devoted his master’s thesis to Newspaper by Marie Uguay. “The desire for love in general, her passion for her doctor in particular, stimulates her imagination, keeps her alive to a certain point, but it is really not easy. “
I speak of light, because she always had the hope of something better, to be able to go beyond what she was going through.
“My research poetry”, wrote Marie Uguay, thus summarizing her relationship to creation. “Desire is omnipresent in his poems, but it is a very broad desire to know oneself and to write,” continues Ariane Bessette. For her, the poem is an impetus. The more she advances in the writing, the less the poem is easy to find. It goes against the romantic idea of inspiration that comes naturally. The poem stands at a distance and she must go towards it. “
If Marie Uguay’s poetry is embodied in the body, it is not a completely free body. Amputated of a leg in 1977, the poet wonders, as Ariane Bessette underlines it, “if she will still be desirable, whereas she was hardly at the beginning of the twenties”.
“Before, I liked to stretch out my arms, to receive and to give,” she wrote on July 18, 1980. “I would like to rediscover the overwhelming consistency of my sensuality. Now, in my prison of flesh, in my prison of imagination, I love and dare no gesture. “
Her poetry and her diary have greatly helped the writer and trans woman Gabrielle Boulianne-Tremblay to sharpen her gaze on nature, but also on her own body, as she began her gender transition, she recalls. “She put words to the feeling that I too had to be a prisoner of my body, then to have a less desirable body. It’s like she’s thrown a buoy at me to put words to my discomfort about not fitting a beauty ideal or, in quotes, not fitting the norm. “
The author of the novel The daughter of herself is particularly recognized in what she calls “the happy melancholy” of Marie Uguay. “For me, the light in her is in her stubborn desire to see it, for light. “
Eternal youth
On the sidelines of the major poetic currents of her time – counter-culture and formalism, for example – Marie Uguay would rather have advocated the sobriety of a relatively simple language, but precise, dense, but limpid, distilling a form of wisdom. certainly specific to his illness, but also to this seriousness which sometimes accompanies youth. “Even if there was a great maturity in her, I have the impression that it is a lot thanks to her youth that we still read her. Marie Uguay’s legacy is her youth, ”thinks Stéphan Kovacs.
“It makes me very funny to talk about her, because I am heading towards old age, while she remains eternally young”, continues the artist, now 67 years old. His photographs, which accompanied the original edition of The other life, are presented until November 21 on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name, at the House of Literature in Quebec. “I was talking to you about light, but it was not easy all the time, his illness. It was difficult for the young man that I was to have someone you love and wasting away by your side. It’s always painful when I think about her again. There is a certain joy in knowing it has been read, but it is still difficult. “
Then, this confidence: “You know, we never talked about death together. We never spoke of its finiteness. Yet she was latent, she was present. But it is something that we have never addressed. They both preferred to stay on the side of life while she was there. She is still there, in a way, thanks to her books. “It was always only a question of living, what. “