Poet and You Didn’t Even Know It

photo|speaking with hands exhibit – guggenheim, bilbao
lit|la vie devant soi – émile ajar (romain gary)
tv|arrested development (with french subtitles)

The past week has been, quite simply, a week of firsts. For the first time I, petit a – visited Lyon, petit b – wrote my first poem in French, an alexandrine nonetheless, and petit c – finished reading my first French novel in French (le petit prince I’ve decided, though still brilliant and one of my favourites, doesn’t count).

Let’s start with Lyon. Seeing as Hélène had a week of vacation and that my life is a vacation, we decided to spend the past weekend in Lyon (where the hell is that?). Now don’t be fooled, though for a Canadian mind that looks like a miniscule distance from Clermont, for a French mind which centres on Paris (and therefore has no high speed trains going east to west) that journey takes 2.5 hours plus. No shits.

It was worth it though, Lyon has a reputation as being France’s most beautiful city-besides-Paris, and they weren’t fooling. With a wicked cool basilica on top of huge hill that overlooks the entire city (and right next to a 1/3 reproduction of the Eiffel tower, which I thought was an eyesore), Roman ruins, the best silks in France (I’d say Europe, but I don’t know that), bragging rights as the birthplace of Antoine St. Exupery (and his airport), and even a nightlife centred on barges that’re docked along the Rhône, one of the three rivers that run through Lyon, it just seemed to have everything going for it. One awesome city, and if I can land an exchange there sometime in the future I definitely will. I’ve included photos of everything on that list, and I would make it a must stop for anyone pulling any X-Europe travels sometime soon.

I’m going to go on to petit c next, if only to indulge in frustrating form and reader expectation. I finished reading La Vie Devant Soi for my 20^th Century Literature class the other day, and have to say I was really impressed – first with the book, and secondly with my ability to actually understand the book. A great story about a young Arab named Momo, a son of a whore, who is raised by an old Jewish lady in Belleville (district in Paris), in which I was happy to see all my favourite postmodern devices at work. What was most interesting though, was the history of the author himself, a man whose very life is probably the epitome of the shattering of identity. What’s recently come out, after his suicide in 1980, is that this man lived a triple life. Publicly he was Roman Gary, a celebrated Gaullist, Résistant, and ambassador who in the 60s was viewed as an old fart, a simple relic of de Gaulle’s lies, despite having had great success in both literature and Hollywood (he won the prix Goncourt and had several films made from his works in the States), not to mention that he was married to Jean Seberg. Essentially, he wasn’t being read or respected by the baby boomer public at the time. So he created Émile Ajar, a Frenchman living in Brazil, gone into exile for having practiced abortion in France before it’s legalization in ’74 (I’ll also mention that Frenchwoman get reimbursed by the government for their abortions, which my prof jokes has made it a fairly common form of contraception – he has a friend who has had 7! This was extremely shocking and disquieting for the plethora of fairly religious Polacks in my class, hear you me) who also happened to be a writer. And without surprise, Émile Ajar was very successful with the leftist populous, and even won le prix Goncourt for La Vie Devant Soi (an author is actually supposed to only be allowed to win the prize once a lifetime). So Romain was actually forced to hire his cousin to pretend to be Émile Ajar for interviews, photo ops, and the public at large (since he was getting too big to be only imaginary anymore). His cousin however was a man who, rather than become a creation of Gary, just told his whole boring life story as that of Ajar whenever interacting with the media and intellectual community (imagine a country bumpkin telling his life story as if it was that of Victor Hugo, lol).

But this wasn’t the first time he’d pluralized/fractured himself either. Before he came to France he was actually Roman Kacew, a young Jewish Polack who during WWI, was uprooted and moved all through Russia in his childhood (thanks to Russian policies towards Jews), during which time his mother was forced to whore herself to survive. They then returned to Poland at the end of the war and Roman was reunited with his soldier father, but ended up moving to France after his father left him and his mother (after relentless beatings) for his mistress. Gary never mentioned any of this while in the public eye in France, not even that he was Jewish, and he in fact created an entire backstory of his “real” childhood, complete with aristocratic relatives in the employed in the arts etc. etc. When you really get into his history, you see that this was a man so fractured that he had no real sense of his own identity. And the book I read, La Vie Devant Soi, is now being read as Gary trying to finally tell the story of his childhood, which he had suppressed, in the then current setting. Fascinating stuff, and there’re even more crazy stories from his life, like how his mother wrote a whole bunch of letters to be mailed to Gary each week after her death, so that he wouldn’t know she was dead until after WWII (kinda creepy eh?). If you’d like to learn more (it may seem like I overindulged here, but I haven’t even scratched the surface) here you go.

Finally, petit c. In my French writing class, we learned what an Alexandrine was, an old form of poetry used by every French poet right up until Baudelaire (who’s poetry really showed why, after the decline of Romanticism, poems couldn’t be written that way anymore) and then was finally destroyed by Rimbaud. The Alexandrine is full of silly rules about the sounds that’re allowed at certain places, number of syllables etc., but I won’t bore you with that. However, we were forced to write a quatrain in Alexandrine to help us first to understand how it operates, but also to understand how ridiculously hard it is to write that way. Our possible topics were an orange, our beds, or the effects of drinking a bottle of vodka. I chose the lattermost.

So needless to say, this was über-hard for me, but I toiled on it and finally cranked it out by the end of the week, and came in to class all proud of my new creation … only to discover that he didn’t want to collect them, but only wanted us to learn from the damn experience! So rather than let it go to waste, I present to you the glory that is my French poetry (I apologize if there’re any mistakes, there definitely could be).

De Vodka et Amour, ou, Deux Choses Qui Peuvent Vous Rendre Mal Au Cœur
Mes jambs s’enffondent, comme pâtes mouillées,
J’ai envie de parler … je me trouve muet!
Ma tête tourne sans un signe d’arrêter.
C’est l’amour? Hein, non! Je suis juste bourré.

Brilliant, I know. For those of you who might’ve missed it, mal au cœur is how the French say they need to throw up. Clever title, eh? Yeah, I thought so too, lol.

Finally, I was looking over an old poem I wrote (an honest poem, hopefully a little better than the one above) and thinking about a photography exhibit I saw in the Guggenheim in Bilbao (another must visit for everyone), and I wanted to try something, which’ll be my next post, so keep checking back for that one soon. I also have one other thing I might try having fiddled with my camera and the bathroom mirror (minds out of the gutter people), so keep your eyes peeled for that one too. Until then...