Long stigmatized, stereotyped, feared and shunned, the witch has transformed, becoming a feminist icon, a source of inspiration, power and agency. From the evil woman with the hooked nose, muttering incantations, locking youth in a bottle and making a pact with the devil, she became the wife of nature, a free, passionate, liberated woman, a symbol of discursive and societal revolutions.
This positive and emancipatory magic takes different forms, slipping into characters, myths, identity affirmations and discourses. In his test The witch word. Literature, magic, emancipation, Eve Martin Jalbert is interested in unknowing witchcraft, that which exists through speech, writing, the imagination of writers, essayists, poets and revolutionaries who have been able to imagine a different world , and thus outlines a singular constellation, that of the witch word.
“If I had to attach a silhouette to it, I would like it to be both joyful and fierce, passionate and quirky, that of the Euguélionne, the incredible extraterrestrial imagined by Louky Bersianik […] Like the reduced version of the Big Dipper, this “literary witchcraft” is the contribution of literary productions to an even broader asterism: the “witchcraft of emancipation”, able to counter another witchcraft, the “witchcraft of dominations” “, writes.
In this exhaustive analysis, Eve Martin Jalbert examines more than fifty heterogeneous literary works – stories, plays, essays, poems, songs – as witch words, words that give or liberate life, clear passages to across the borders of dominations, release the vital space necessary for the existence of diversity, the multiplicity of communities, identities, bodies and dreams.
The extremely personal essay reflects the literary encounters that allowed the writer to reclaim his voice and his ability to act in the world, to make his sufferings and fears exist in order to better welcome them, to liberate its potential and to reclaim the space to be, to become and to invent.
From Maya Angelou to Yvon Deschamps, via Gérald Godin, Anne Sylvestre and James Baldwin, they become a transmission belt, unearthing the beginnings of resistance, offering new paradigms for understanding, taming and inhabiting the world,
The result is both dense and luminous, with an almost childish idealism to which one begins to want to adhere. Eve Martin Jalbert traces her path with instinctive meticulousness, drawing the reader into a dizzying ballet which nevertheless manages to make thoughts swarm and raise the absurdity of standards. Simple esoteric fabrications? May be. But in the heart of The witch word shines a glimmer of hope, capable of guiding and uniting lives awaiting deliverance.
Excerpt from The Witch’s Word