“The first weeks were difficult. I’m not going to lie. The shoots stubbornly grew where they shouldn’t. Sometimes, she even left the room. Some days I preferred to sleep in the living room. Ignoring what was waiting for me at the end of the hallway. » Between invasive thoughts and the efforts undertaken to get out of her discomfort, a fragile young woman recounts the daily journey of a fighter.
Armed with poetic writing, anchored in an identifiable everyday life, Camille Garant-Aubry thwarts the traps of frontal and predictable narrative in This is not a garden. It addresses the subject of depression, its difficult detours, its ramifications which extend and quickly interfere through several interstices in reality. Continually playing with metaphors around plants that are harmful because they are invasive, such as giant hogweed, dandelion, phragmites and loosestrife, the narrator questions herself, asks for help and moves forward in order to get rid of her parasitic thoughts. The story thus alternates quite naturally and subtly between the moments spent by the young woman in her apartment, a false refuge in which plants, ideas multiply and grow, and the outside, where she must face the world, speak and, can -to be, to get out of it. Never formally named, the depression is nevertheless palpable, felt through all the fragility of this unbalanced character, completely invaded by thoughts which prevent him from moving forward, from taking action. During a costume party, the heroine’s choice of diver is unequivocal. She comes out, well sheltered under this false armor, a symbolic reflection of withdrawal in the face of realities, difficulties which seem impossible to overcome.
Hybridity of form
Published in the unique collection “Les fingers ont soif” – a series of titles in which the text plays with conventional form, invests the page with different visual and/or textual processes –, This is not a garden is offered in a presentation just as sparse as the heroine’s thoughts. Between prose which gives free rein to the narrator’s story, in which she recounts her tormented daily life, and poems which allow the character’s feelings to be expressed, the story continues in different forms. Some email exchanges which translate requests for help and advice to counter the invasion share space with dialogues between the young woman, friends and strangers and some labels of chemical products, herbicides useful for getting rid of plants invasive.
The author provides an evocative picture of depression and its insidious way of infiltrating the smallest thoughts, quickly monopolizing space and in a certain way suffocating the person affected. Withdrawal into oneself, the first reflex, is only a perfect incubator to let the stems take root.