Paul, Caroline Dawson’s son, was soon to be 7 years old. “And I was so upset, I was starting to freak out. I realized how very small I was, ”recalls the writer about the age she was when her family fled Chile. The author of Where I land is told to his son, in order to bequeath him something other than shame, in what are youhis first book of poetry.
It was Caroline’s husband, that Wednesday, who opened the door to their home in the Plateau Mont-Royal. The tall – very tall – gentleman is the very image of what you imagine a Swede to be. Caroline maneuvers her wheelchair to the living room.
Their cat, Jackal, climbs on the sofa, while his mistress, a big smile of light on her face, explains that this week she is on break from this chemotherapy to which she must submit in order to chase away the cancer with which she lives. since the summer of 2021. But we’re here to talk about literature and that’s what we’ll do.
Our eyes fall on the photo of his son, Paul, who on the cover of what are you, brandishes a nice big bug. For a long time, little Paul answered the question “Where are you from? that he’s from Stockholm, an answer that was not completely wrong, but which nonetheless provoked laughter and frowns from his interlocutors, the boy having the same swarthy complexion as his mother, not at all that of a Scandinavian. “Whereas my daughter, who is white like her dad, is never asked where she comes from,” our hostess hastens to clarify. Ah good.
“confusion we don’t want to know/his place of birth his language his culture/his Swedish father/the people he loves/the forests that inhabit him and the words/that he makes his own//golden chrysalis does not suspect not/pointing to his melanin/child/they ask/what is your race”, writes Caroline Dawson.
No shortcut
But one day, in the alley, Paul replies to a passer-by who asked him about his origins that his mother is Chilean. “The little one understood, perhaps unconsciously, what the real question was,” recalls the tender mother. “But ‘My mother is Chilean’, what does that mean? There’s a story that goes with it.”
A story that Caroline Dawson had hitherto silenced, leaving her husband all the ground of transmission. ” My boyfriend, who comes from the nobility, easily talks about their family tree to the children, he tells them things like “You know, you are related to Charlemagne”, which makes the children have a very strong feeling of being Swedish, while I shut my mouth. »
PHOTO ALAIN ROBERGE, THE PRESS
Caroline Dawson
It’s as if my history was shameful. By leaving them nothing, I left them shame.
Caroline Dawson
But how to tell the dictatorship, “the fachos, the tear gas, the guanacos, the venom of the scorpions, the torture, the assassins, the disappeared” to a 7 year old kid?
“I was trying to tell him things he didn’t have questions about yet, but he had peripheral questions about. He used to say things to me like: “Mom, when you were little, you were poor, but not poor-poor, huh?” And it happened in the middle of a dinner, because with children, you can’t choose to live a magical moment, there is no shortcut. It just happens. »
The necessary weeding
Written alongside Where I landher first novel Cinderella published in 2020, what are you is both the sequel and the prequel. Composed of long narrative poems, the collection interweaves snapshots of Hochelague and meditations on the legacy, goes back in time to the alleys where the young Caroline had to circumvent the soiled syringes, while being imbued with the joy of a mother who, at through the eyes of his son, reconnects with the invigorating act of marveling.
“Do you see me my heart of apple / weeding / the territory in me”, she writes about this intimate process of sorting – of her pains, her anger, her memories – which is essential when we ‘we want to express ourselves as authentically as possible to someone we love.
When you are an immigrant and people ask you certain questions, there is a tape that goes off. We’re going to give them the same agreed answers, not too shocking, and it works every time. But it’s not the same when you have a little guy watching you. I really had to dig and remove the weeds.
Caroline Dawson
As a child, the writer and sociologist already knew intimately that the poverty of several of her friends was not the same as that of her family, where we shared the same meal every evening, while at the neighbors’ house, we had supper with snacks.
In one of the most moving passages of the collection, Caroline meets with her little Paul a friend from another era, who has become itinerant, a “man in rubble” who does not recognize her at all. Although destitute, Caroline’s parents, by hammering at her the importance of education, will have allowed her to project herself into a horizon. “I was aware that it was not the same at home, that we were lucky. To his son, it was also necessary to convey indignation in the face of injustice, awareness of his privileges.
“Spring / in my skin / looks at me without crying / we talk about what we will become / tomorrow already lives in me”: these are the last lines of the collection, because what are you is first and foremost a book of hope, the one that grows in us through contact with children.
“I have the impression that they are much less confined than us, that they are going to get rid of a lot of structures which may have already been useful, but which have become oppressive, observes Caroline. When I see at my son’s school how they talk about the gender issue, it’s obvious that there are things that for them are settled. It may be putting a lot on their shoulders, but I think they are the ones who will save the day. »
In bookstores February 15
what are you
Caroline Dawson
Triptych
96 pages