Avis sur le produitLa lettre aérienne de Brossard, Nicole

From 1975-1988: A Collection of 12 Theoretical Texts

"For me, what is important at the present time is that women write, aware that their difference must be explored in knowledge of themselves who have become subjects, and further, subjects involved in a struggle. To explore this difference is necessarily to inscribe it in a language which questions the sexism of the tongues we speak and write. By that very fact we inaugurate new places for writing and reading; by that very fact we inscribe in culture a literature of the unspoken. An unauthorized and unspoken literature"--Nicole Brossard ("La Femme et l'ecriture," Liberte'. 106-107 [July-October, 1976], p. 13).

During the same time (the 1970's) that Cixous, Irigaray & Kristeva were literally inscribing themselves in such ways that French gender roles were socially changed so that women became empowered in a massive wave of empassioned energy, Quebec's most prolific franchophone poet & novelist, Brossard, was responding to their calls to Feminist social action. Brossard blazed a new trail, where no tracks had ever gone before her in Canada, toward a space that would become a new place for women to express themselves.

Perhaps the most succint prose line Brossard has written was this: "To write 'I am a Woman' has consequences." Brossard proposes that there are at least 4 rites of writing for a feminist:

1) I Exist
2) I Affirm
3) I Texturize Reality With New Sense
4) I Breathe a Sonorous Field of Vision

Now from "The Aerial Letter, ". . . I will have to make text of my body . . ."
(P 103).

Brossard's pages deliberately violate linear pagination; do not necessarily use capitalization at the beginning of what seem like new pages; nor are pages full of text! Take for instance, my favorite page, 56:

"spent the night together. Once in bed we're on our guard, because men are on the prowl all over the neighborhood, and we are, we know this, the very pulse of their prey. Space, for us, is a sign of resistance: to keep our distance. Not only to protect each one's vital space, but to make sure daily that the enemy (the one that can seize you at any moment) doesn't come by night as well as by day to divert your attention, catch hold of your body, capture thus your proud bearing.

we have never had enough space. And on finding it it's like convergence; you know full well, in the happy posture of hands on hips, a sexual tenderness that covers all urban distance."

That is the textual content of the page--the rest, of course, is open space.

If Brossard's "Aerial Letter," doesn't raze preconceived notions of linearity, I don't know what else could. After reading her entire text, a different sense of knowing emerges, not as a vertical line; but, rather, as a spiral of eliptical leaps & bounds~Lire l'avis complet...