Since Dawn to the seasonhis first poems published in 1965, until his reflections on the translation in And here I am suddenly remaking the world (Mémoire d’encrier, 2015), via lovers (1980) or The air letter (1985), poet, author and activist Nicole Brossard has shown remarkable consistency and integrity throughout her literary career. She received the Gilles-Corbeil prize on Monday for all of her work.
The jury also salutes Nicole Brossard’s “energy. A desire. A radicality. A sense of duration too, in a rootedness that never ignores the world around him”, as Jean-François Nadeau, president of the jury, also a journalist at the To have to.
Unclassifiable because in constant exploration, perhaps difficult to grasp also for this reason, the work of Nicole Brossard navigates, over thirty books, between poetry, essays, journal, theory, novel, anti-novel. Lyrical, formalist, feminist, her writing crosses several waves: formal inventiveness is a compass.
“It’s hard to think of Nicole Brossard as anything other than a poet,” says literature professor at Queen’s University Chloé Savoie-Bernard. Mme Brossard was indeed part of the generation of the 1970s who breathed new life into poetry, and that she was part of the famous Nuit de la poetry of March 27, 1970. “However, the boundaries of genres do not work for her . His essays respond to his poetry, and vice versa. »
“Nicole Brossard has developed an architectural thought, with many drawers and ramifications; an immense work, on which one is afraid to look, “continues Mme Savoie-Bernard, herself a poet. “I have the impression that it is difficult to conceive of feminist thinkers as being philosophers. Nicole Brossard is a philosopher. »
Her philosophy, the professor believes, leads her to think about language as a fake, non-neutral place. “An expression she uses is ‘weaving the language’: how we can weave language, weave it, and think in spirals to bring out something new. »
think together
Radical before fashion sang it, lesbian and queer assumed before the social openness to these choices, Mme Brossard is “always on the lookout for its time [et] seems able to precede it rather than follow it, which is an unusual accomplishment,” continues Mr. Nadeau.
The way of living the literature of Nicole Brossard passes, in addition to the writing, by the bonds and by the relations. In 1965, she co-founded the literary review The bar of the day, then directs poetry anthologies. She is present throughout her career to read new women writers, for queer activities, for projects woven with other disciplines, such as the visual arts or cinema. She was seen recently attending a performance of Symon Henry’s contemporary opera on his first novel, The purple desert (1987).
“Nicole Brossard saw this idea of thinking in common,” continues Ms.me Savoie-Bernard. She always thought with others, she dialogued. She has spent her career traveling, giving lectures. She was translated, she met people, readers. She doesn’t think in a vacuum. »
All transformations
“I’m very interested in the transformation process,” said Ms.me Brossard, 79, being interviewed at To have to early before the award ceremony, “whether in writing, in politics, in health. It fascinates me, when I see that we were there, and that we have become a bit offbeat, a bit elsewhere. It’s a very healthy process: by taking an interest in how we got there, there is satisfaction; we can understand “.
His writing is still being explored. Still today. She laughs it off. “I don’t think I’ll write my memoirs. I always want to find out. His pace slowed: “I have two lives. An emotional life in the morning, where I take care of my companion, and an intellectual life in the afternoon. »
Still, in recent years, she has written a lot, “but not in the same way. There, I was accompanied by foliage, insects, nature, my reading, which is a different accompaniment than usual when I am on my terrace, in the city. It makes my writing more peaceful, or maybe it’s me who has become. But the questions remain just as frontal, just as political.”
And what are these questions that inhabit him today? “I wonder if, by our singular behavior, we could manage to create a real counter-power, cultural or political”, to resist, she says, this current individual impotence in the face of the great crises of the time.
The Gilles-Corbeil Prize is one of Quebec’s major literary prizes. Awarded every three years since 1990 by the Émile-Nelligan Foundation, it highlights the work of a writer as a whole. It comes with a $100,000 scholarship. Nicole Brossard is the third woman to receive it, after Anne Hébert and Marie-Claire Blais.
Every day we go out with two dimensions of our being: our body and our language, native or second. Everyone lives in thought in their language in an intimate way, a little like everyone does in their room what they like: sleeps, cries, caresses themselves, reads, draws, perfumes themselves, observes themselves in the mirror. Everyone lives in society in a story of crossed languages.