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Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau, anger and hope

“To write helped me to breathe, to translate for me alone this need to go beyond the sometimes heavy and dense everyday life”, explained Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau in the prologue to her collection. Red and white (Inkwell memory, 2012). She then remembered the relief that had accompanied her learning French, after months spent in the small school, in the darkness of the incomprehension of the words of the teacher.

Creation has therefore been an act of healing for a long time for one whose “black torments burst out in the color of fire on the canvas and on the page” (according to her friend Jeanne-Mance Delisle). Born in 1951 to a Métis father and an Eeyou mother, the painter, novelist and poet in 2020 is celebrating forty years of artistic practice and, if her pictorial work has often been celebrated, its literary counterpart would benefit from being more so. “Around noon, / open wounds / flow. / I dip my brushes in it / that define the black shadows / on the white fiber ”, she writes, still in Red and white.

“Sure – it’s obvious! – what to create, it allows to heal! »Says Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau from her home in Rouyn-Noranda. His tone is both affable and straightforward, generous and categorical. Like his books. “In the act of creating, there is the refusal to give up life. Creating is a way of saying: “I am alive! Here are my colors, here are my words, here are my songs. ” “

While her first paintings took shape in the early 1980s, it was not until 2007 that the painter signed her first novel, Bear blue (Éditions de la Pleine Lune), story of the quest for origins taking place on the shores of James Bay, but also at the edge of the visible and invisible worlds. A novel that she had submitted to several “well-rated” publishing houses, only to be rejected.

“They didn’t say it like that, but I felt when I was being told ‘This is not the kind of stuff we publish’ that there was a kind of prejudice. But these publishers are surely a little sorry now for having refused the native manuscripts given the success we are experiencing today. And she laughs, because she has to.

Pain knot

“Yes, what causes the irresistible urge to launch myself into a story is a painful knot from which I want to relieve myself”, reveals Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau in The benevolence of bears, a collection of correspondence with the writer (and journalist at Duty) François Lévesque who, like his letter partner, grew up in Senneterre. Woven with reflections on their otherness, on childhood, on Abitibi and on creation, their letters are also an invitation to (re) discover the work of the one who launched this exchange, a work located at the border between the physical and the spiritual, the political and the intimate, life and death.

It is at the Salon du livre de l’Outaouais that the friends now meet during a round table during which François Lévesque presented his detective novel. Red snows (Alire, 2018), which tackles the drama of murdered or missing Indigenous women with a touch that is rare for this genre. His eldest presented there Poetry on the move for Sindy (Éditions du Quartz, 2018), collection imagined to always remember Sindy Ruperhouse, a woman from the Abitibiwinni First Nation of Pikogan, who disappeared in April 2014.

Sure – it’s obvious! – what to create, it allows to heal!

In 2017, at the invitation of the Exhibition Center and the Native Friendship Center of Val-d’Or, Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau organized urban strolls in memory of Sindy, during which she recited some of these texts. “We walked the streets / Red dresses / A torrent of blood pouring over the asphalt / And these words worn by your mother and your sister / Sindy we you will find / These words kneaded in hope / Clan intimacy. “

“Writing is always a subversive act. I read myself sometimes and I find that I had to guts », Drops the poet, remembering the anger that had invaded her the day she learned that the Val-d’Or police officers denounced by several Native women in a report byInvestigation in 2015 would face no charges.

“I have read and re-read this book and, each time, I have tears in my eyes when Virginia calls out to Sindy directly, calls her to come back”, confides Marie Noëlle Blais, literary director at Éditions du Quartz. “What moved me, upset, was this mixture of anger and hope, this desire that Sindy Ruperhouse be well where she is. “” It is both dark and luminous, “observes François Lévesque in The benevolence of bears, about The winter child (Inkwell memory, 2014), novel in the writing of which Virginia was engaged in order to survive the loss of her son Simon.

Serenity, calm and gentle

“After my son died, I said to life: ‘I can’t take any more! Take someone like that away from me again and I don’t live anymore ”, remembers Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau on the phone. I was tanned. But at the same time, it is the fact that I write that has helped me find serenity and accept that death is part of life. All these deaths that I have lived do not prevent me from being someone who loves life, who is happy, who is funny, who loves to laugh. The Aboriginals, we had to laugh to survive! Resentment, sadness, all these negative feelings make us poorer. Me, it tires me, being angry with someone. I always find a way to understand a situation and to come back to serenity, because I am well in serenity. It’s quiet, it’s sweet. “

The lake lover (Memory inkwell, 2013) remains undoubtedly his novel most proudly camped on the side of life. There is in this “story of the pleasure of the bodies in a world which has not yet known residential schools for Aboriginal people and the multiple abuses of religious on children” all the unintentional exultation of a youth who has not been despoiled. of his innocence.

“Lake Abitibi, which she talks about in The lake lover, it’s a place that I know very well, and his way of describing the swell on the lake, the sky above, is among the most beautiful descriptions I have read, says François Lévesque. It rivals Anne Hébert’s descriptions of nature in Crazy people Bassan. What lesson does he draw from his correspondence with Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau? “The beauty of total and complete openness. “

“Sometimes, at times, at various times, / I believed my heart was in agony, / dehydrated from crying, / numb with grief, / cooled by the fear of living,” writes Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau in Blue dipper – Piciskanâw mask iskwew, a retrospective of his four decades of artistic practice, where each canvas is accompanied by an unpublished poem. “I let death eat away at my strength / and loneliness nibble flesh on my bones. / Then, in this hopeless tomb, / the fossil began to throb again. “

The benevolence of the bears // Blue bear – Piciskanâw mask iskwew

François Lévesque and Virginia Pesemapeo Bordeleau, Éditions du Quartz, Rouyn-Noranda, 2020, 146 pages // Virginia Pésémapeo Bordeleau, Éditions du Quartz et MA, art museum, Rouyn-Noranda, 2020, 120 pages. In bookstores on August 27.

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