2023-05-08 16:01:00
Every week, a look at the poetic news. Find all the articles of this meeting ici.
Rébecca Chaillon has the meaning of the title. After Black card named desire, et Where the goat is tethered it must graze, two of her last shows, the director has published a collection of poetry named Boudin Biguine Best of Banane. This title takes us directly to the hollow of our sleepless nights, populated by this game that Patti Smith described in her book M Train : to try to trap his brain, starting from a letter of the alphabet and breaking it down into words until exhaustion – of the letters and of the body, of its resistances. This is what we necessarily say to ourselves, when on the first page are scattered like this words that nothing connects except their author and their initial: “Banana barbie barbecue best of bible beer bile curler beguine brothel mouth braised pudding.”
At l’Arche, Rébecca Chaillon was already part of the group of collective works Letters to Young Poets et Let’s decolonize the arts. This collection alone contains the raw orality of the performer’s language (“Who has hands large enough to model lumpy bodies, slit bodies that intertwine, mixed-race bodies that melt?”), the “need to say what bothers, what gnaws, what itches” and also in disorder all her obsessions, feminism, black body, norms, colonization, friends, cats, football – she is part of the Dégommeuses, a team of LGBT footballers and activists to which she dedicated her last show. A whole program that wanders between insomnia and nightmares, whose contours are porous and merge with those of real life (the poem “A paw always falls on her pussies”, with its cascading feline deaths, reads for example without breathing and with dread). Note that, it is rare enough to be underlined, one of the poems of the book is adapted in Creole, by the Martinican poetess Simone Lagrand, which gives it a whole new amplitude.
Boudin Biguine Best of Banane by Rebecca Chaillon. The Ark, 122 pp., €15.50.
The extract
OFF
I was not warned, I was left naked in front of the unknown,
I haven’t been touched enough to know that I can’t be touched so much,
No one explained to me what was coming out of me, anger before the blood, shame before the hair, disgust before the pus, fear for so long.
Who put the wolf under my bed, the bearded old white man in my presents, the mouse in my mouth, the sandman in my bed?
Who needs me to hate myself so much, to be so disgusted, to be so petrified, to be so stupid, to obey so much, to forget so much, to be silent all the time?
Who cares to lose half their population in their snot?
Who prefers me tired, weary, sick, disgusting?
Who has the need to get used to a tasteless world, to cut my engine?
I move forward so slowly.
I reset, I turn off, I turn on, I hope it will work better tomorrow.
I unplug and have no image for the moment.
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