Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Books in Review
by Mukherjee's emphasis that the collection
deliberately seeks to range across national
boundaries, to avoid the tired arguments
about "how 'Americans' are different from
'Canadians.'" There is no doubt that North
America, with its common history as settler
colonies, its systemic racisms, its integrated
economies and culture industries, can take
on the appearance of a monolithic unity. I
cannot help wondering, however, if the
modalities of specific situations, not grasped
as essentialized national identities, but as
markers of particular and different histories,
are not at work in the experiences of
immigrant South Asian women. Does, for
instance, the presence in the history of the
United States of a strong and ongoing black
civil rights movement construct different
oppositional stategies to racism and afford
different possibilities of alliances? To ask
such a question is not to deny the overlapping
histories of the North American continent;
rather, it is to seek to locate the
particularities of the situations in which the
cultural politics of writing intervene. This
is only one example of the important questions
raised by the stories collected in Her
Mother's Ashes, a book which readers will
find challenging and rewarding.
Dream Roads
Marcel Bélanger
D'où surgi. L'Hexagone $14.95
Gilles Cyr
Songe queje bouge. L'Hexagone $14.95
Reviewed by Constantina Mitchell
Readers of the latest offerings of Marcel
Bélanger and Gilles Cyr will undoubtedly
be struck by a common element that pervades
both works: haunting, ever probing,
often hermetic meanders tracing obscure
paths briefly glimpsed by the poetic eye.
More than views of the poet's quest for selfrealization,
these are renderings of the
poem's journey, its unending search for
embodiment, its impossible dream of
definitiveness.
The nine segments that make up
Bélanger's D'où surgi are like so many
inroads, each leading not to a fixed destination
but rather to the recognition of the
precariousness of all destinations. It is
immediately apparent that the mention of a
distinct time and place in the opening lines
of the first segment, entitled L'esprit du lieu,
paradoxically serves to undermine the
authoritativeness of such markings since it
is coupled with a sense of puzzlement and
uncertainty that will persist throughout the
entire collection: "toi / mais d'où viens-tu
et où / tes pas / de Berthier à Karnak /
quelle voie s'invente / est-elle même /
depuis ce 5 juin 1943." This equivocality is
echoed in the final segment, aptly entitled
opus incertum, where it is transferred from
the external tu to the internal je, the
wound of evanescence to be borne secretly,
indelibly: "il y a—mais comme n'y étant—
l'espace d'un manque pas un vide cependant
mais l'envers d'une présence comme
un appel d'air et s'y formulant longuement
la question: de quoi demain serai-je composé
de quelles cellules en laquelle séjournerai-je
pour combien de temps." As the title
of the fifth segment suggests, all is at once
"même et autre."
Oneiric moods overlay the markedly
architectural, geographic and anatomical
imagery dominating Bélanger 's circumnavigation
of the written and spoken word. In
Ici même, the sensual beauty of a reclining
adolescent embodies the poem itself, the
bed (lit is here an artful play on the verb
lire) providing "amoureusement les
marges." One of the most powerful constellations
of this affective-thematic blending
appears in the penultimate segment, the
stylistically varied ainsi: "le pas à pas ne se
superpose plus au mot à mot d'un texte
que les chevilles rédigent / un journal de
voyage où l'on parle de ravins franchis d'un
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