2023-05-29 12:13:34
Every week, a look at the poetic news. Find all the articles of this meeting ici.
Everything around her collapsed. Literally. In 1989, after the devastating passage of Hurricane Hugo in Sainte-Croix in the US Virgin Islands, Audre Lorde foraged in the remains of what had been her office. “Our house, our library and our whole way of life had been destroyed in the space of one night”, she writes. In the midst of the desolation, however, the exhausted poet stops on one of her old collections, sodden but among the few that are still more or less readable. She leafs through it with the eyes of experience, sees their strength as well as their weaknesses. “In the three months that followed of kerosene lamps and generators, hauling water and cooking over log fires, I held myself daily to a brief discipline of re-feeling, re-living and revise these poems.” For that, he needs to “to transport back to the original process of the creation of the poem and to become again the poet who wrote it”. In the end, it is a matter of strengthening these texts, of “find their song”, but also to overcome the ruins by rebuilding over them.
A work that gave a personal anthology, published just before his death, in 1992, at only 58 years old. And which has just appeared for the first time in French under the title backing, on the initiative of the young low-alpine feminist publishing house Les Prouesses, already spotted for its publication of short stories by Alexandra Kollontaï. The whole is translated by the Cételle collective, a meeting of researchers from the University of Nice around the literature of Audre Lorde. This book is a journey through the work in all its diversity – militant, joyful, erotic – of that which defined itself as plural – “poet, black, feminist, lesbian, mother, warrior, teacher and cancer survivor”. An always welcome re-lighting of this essential figure of American literature, two years after the bilingual edition at l’Arche of the collection the black unicorn. Everything is finely illustrated by Maya Mihindou, who must have asked herself the thorny question: “How to draw her when her poetry is already full of images?”
Audre Lorde, Countersinging. poetry anthologytranslated from the American by the Cételle collective, illustrations by Maya Mihindou, Les Prouesses, 224 pp., €18.
blood birth
what’s inside me
and shout
and knock to enter or exit
name the wind
seek the power of the wind
look for the voice of the wind
it’s not my heart
and I try to speak
no art or frills
with bits of me flying in all directions
cries memories old fragments of pain
torn like dry bark
of a resistant cut tree
or releasing retaining or delivering
a child or a demon
Is it a birth or an exorcism
or the first cogs of a me
sketching recalling
my father’s business
what awaits me
my own business
thinking.
Will I break or fall down
by the color of a word
or lack thereof
and where
the opening will be made
who will expose my true face to me
exposed in one whole
my children your children
their children
all committed
in the combination of our business.
#Audre #Lorde #Contrechant #battles #Liberation