On June 12, 1994, the poet Josée Yvon died of AIDS, at the age of 44. Her queer work, populated by “fairies gone bad”, “lesbian-hobos” and “transvestite-kamikaze”, is now arousing real enthusiasm in Quebec, thirty years after her death.
Born on March 31, 1950, in Montreal, Josée Yvon was in turn a bartender, a lighting designer for the theatrical troupe Le Grand Cirque Ordinaire, a writer, then a critic. A shooting star in the Quebec literary landscape, she published eleven works, starting with Bandaged commando girlsin 1976. “With a similar title, it starts very strongly,” emphasizes the poet and novelist Carole David in an interview.
“She was a star in her own little world,” continues the one who met her from the 1970s, during poetry readings. The construction of the literary character of Josée Yvon began in 1974, with the publication of a photo of her genitals in the collection The Star Fairy’s Clit of Denis Vanier, with whom she will form a couple. Like musicians from the counterculture of the time, the duo will perform their works on stage with their senses altered by drugs or alcohol.
The author France Théoret remembers attending the Solstice of Québécoise Poetry in Montreal in 1976, where Josée Yvon read her writings. “What was astonishing was the way he read. She read her hardest poems neutrally, therefore without variation or modulation. » “It was new, it was very strong counterculture,” she adds.
Long confined to the margins, her work is today taught at university and celebrated by many young poets, underlines Carole David. Her writing resonates with current concerns, she believes. “She talks a lot about those left behind, the condition of women and femininity, but not only as we understand it normatively. Among other things, she spoke about trans people. »
The protagonists of Josée Yvon’s books suffer a lot of violence inflicted by society, argues author Kevin Lambert. “This violence is also in the writing, in the way she calls her characters “female dogs”. She uses degrading vocabulary, while mixing it with a kind of great empathy. It is a work that is moving and often makes you want to cry. His love for these human beings is so great. »
Don’t apologize for writing
For Kevin Lambert, reading Josée Yvon gives him a feeling of freedom. “There is something so uninhibited about his relationship with language. This is someone who truly makes no apologies for writing. And that feels good, I think. It frees us in return. »
“It’s a language that is almost shouted, that of Josée Yvon. There is something thunderous in his writing,” he continues. She also had an undeniable sense of formula, he adds. To this end, he cites one of the passages from Bandaged commando girls : “I studied resistance in America’s schoolyard. » “It’s almost a slogan, but a slogan that does not defend conventional policies,” he said.
The author allowed herself to step outside the literary framework of her time, by giving life to a hybrid work between poetry, story and theater, notes Carole David. “At the moment, there is a lot of talk about formal hybridity in literature. But when Josée Yvon was published, this idea was not really accepted. We were still very much in the compartmentalization of genres. »
Inventive, she also used the collage technique in her books, inserting photos taken from newspapers like Photo Police. According to Carole David, the presence of these news items in her works allowed her to address a subject that remains taboo: female crime. “She was interested in that world, and she also lived close to it. Through her writing, she provides access to a world which, ultimately, still today, is a parallel world. »
The question of the relationship with truth also runs through the work of Josée Yvon, indicates Roxane Desjardins, general director of Les Herbesrouges. She cites as an example the highlighted sentence of Transvestites-kamikaze, first published in 1980: “All situations and characters described in this book are in no way fiction and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, or places is intended and written to represent them. Anyone who recognizes themselves in one of the following passages is right to believe so. »
A statement that she would repeat in her following writings. ” In The ugly hostages (1990), she says about her characters: “They are real society, just as bad, just as sick, just as vulnerable,” notes the editor.
A thirst for reading Josée Yvon
Before the reissue of Josée Yvon’s five fiction books at Herbes Rouges, which took place from 2019 to 2023, it was difficult to get your hands on them, underlines Roxane Desjardins. “There was, however, a thirst to read it. There were pirate versions of his works which circulated somewhat under the radar. Even library copies were hard to find. There was really an appetite,” she relates.
Kevin Lambert, aged 31, says that several people of his generation knew Josée Yvon like him, about ten years ago, through graffiti in the bathrooms of the Bistro de Paris, on Le Plateau. -Mont Royal. “My love, I will never heal / if you stick me in my wound,” a follower of the poet wrote on the walls of these toilets.
A sentence which has become “mythical”, due to the large number of people who read it there, he raises. “It is also a passage which is very ambiguous. Is she saying she doesn’t want to heal and needs to get stuffed into her wound? Or is it more of a way of denouncing and saying: “Stop digging into my wound, I want to heal”? Both meanings are possible and I think that’s what’s both beautiful and disturbing about it. »
Josée Yvon’s work is more alive than ever, says Roxane Desjardins. The desire of readers to recite his verses is proof of this, believes the editor.
The latter also ended up transforming into an open microphone a tribute to the writer held on May 31, as part of the Montreal Poetry Festival. “After the four guest poets read, I felt that there was excitement in the assembly. At the end, three people came to read additional excerpts. We bought ourselves an extra ten minutes as a group. People want to appropriate his words, to put them in their own mouths,” she concludes.