NICOLE BROSSARD
FIGURE
FIGURATION
She breaks the contract binding her to figuration. In the theatre of the past full of countless nostalgias, she alone, along with all women, creates the entire body of impressions. Not mythical like the double bodies sacrificed during scenes. The body-shock or nerve-impulse that prepares for action without alibi, a body where one is alone, in this case. The body of one cut off from retreat. Girl's body manifested in the precise sense of conflict. Arch, rising delirium: did anybody notice that during the scene passion riddled the eyes like the insertion of a woman into an inverted context. That's because in her interpretation of figuration, of apparent form, visibly, she modified the dream.
DISFIGURE
Tracks to de-face or make unrecognizable. Because after remoteness or open-mouthed privation how can you undertake a word-by-word within the figure: meaning: in the state of nature civilized like a deviation or multiple marginals. In transforming laughter. It must be written down that hate cannot be written or death like a political anxiety: in children's stories, the ogre's life explodes breaking food, bodies into pieces; girls come out of the houses as from the context. In the forest, heads will be bounced on pensive knees. The abyss or into the gulf thrusting them aside. Distancing as for a fiction.
TAKEN FIGURATIVELY
In the flow to deliver meaning or to utter with concision--who is she depicted manners and propitious as presumed victim, who is she, knows it, ellipsis or sometimes when she bears, that displaces the shadow and the effect of long nights begins to make itself felt on the surface or intensely. Her thirst like playing tricks on the desert, inevitably: grasping the figurative and proliferation. When the profiles move getting ready to speak. It's the shivering or perhaps the rustling of paper. Is an apple on the work bench enough to make sense? Or to turn the stomach?
HAS FIGURE(D)
Say what: reality--collar halter stall--we've seen them, tied down, bound daily or white bitches in the morning. Reality doesn't exist. Go see five o'clock come. It doesn't exist, it's still light. It's somewhere else. Don't talk to me about reality. Nor appearance. It remains to be foreseen. But to have access. Or to begin again. That doesn't exist. Where is your Utopia in the drawer in Mummy's room? Reality, that's life and it's an illusion. White arms in the snow. For sure that doesn't exist. Long before I tremble. Great fear that it doesn't exist. Or else on the sea the wave inside the hollows, softness. In fact all it is is the intense body far from his eyes well positioned to know. That has nothing to do with it. But know the alert figure, stature and history. In hereality.
FREE FIGURE
Constrained, remember: there is a clandestine space where every law is subordinate to the imaginary or if infiltrating it like a reality they make them rescind themselves. Cloudy water in appearance but interior tissues knowing the only way to go. All in all, it's a question of practice. The slope of that other passion. The same. Or it could be said when imagination catches fire, it ends up a fuse and political. One fecund and suffering trajectory of the body. One last ghostly vision in reality. No belly, no breast with no head lying attached to it, to remember.
(excerpted from
These Our Mothers, or: The Disintegrating Chapter,
Coach House Quebec Translations)
Nicole Brossard is an active center of Quebec post-modernist and feminist writing. She co-founded and edited the journals La Barre du Jour and Les Tetes de Pioche. She has published eleven books of poetry and six volumes of prose. go to Laura Chester, Jeanne Lance, Margy Sloan, Carla Harryman go to this issue's table of contents
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