Attention!
La Lettre aérienne de Nicole Brossard
critique de Keith Louise Fulton

Nicole Brossard fait partie de ces écrivains féministes qui "montent la garde" pour les femmes et les prévient des dangers qu'il y a à exprimer des pensées féministes dans un langage patriarcal. Selon elle, la vie réelle des femmes, soit les grossesses, le viol, la prostitution, la violence, est présentée comme un roman, comme des histoires publiées dans les journaux, Nicole Brossard vise à transformer l'existence des femmes en transformant le langage dont on se sert pour conceptualiser ces réalités. Les douze textes théoriques rassemblés dans La Lettre aérienne ont été écrits entre 1975 et 1985. L'auteure y force les lectrices à lire, penser, conceptualiser, relire et réfléchir à nouveau. Elle arrive ainsi à faire naître un malaise par le biais du langage. La Lettre aérienne met en garde les femmes qui osent franchir les frontières du langage patriarcal, mais les pousse en même temps à le faire. Ce livre nous apprend à avoir recours à ce langage pour exprimer nos propres réalités.

Keith Louise Fulton est professeure féministe et auteure. À l'heure actuelle, elle occupe le poste de coprésidente des Études sur la femme de Prairie Regional pour les universités du Manitoba et de Winnipeg.

Look Out
The Aerial Letter

by Nicole Brossard
trans. Marlene Wildeman,
Toronto: The Women's Press, 1988. 168pp.; $10.95
Review by Keith Louise Fulton

patience and ardor we must constantly renew in order to make it across the opaque city of the fathers, always on a tightrope, having to keep our balance, and on all sides, the abyss. For we work without nets. (57)

I read Nicole Brossard's The Aerial Letter in the June sun, sitting in a small backyard built and gardened by women in a city we didn't make. I found the book difficult, disconcerting, challenging and yes, encouraging. The twelve theoretical texts collected here were written over ten years (1975-1985); they are crystalline forms of thought, condensed and brilliant. I was grateful for Marlene Wildeman's translation and for her acknowledged struggle with accessibility, "for Brossard's work is not by nature accessible ..." (29). Of course the point of much of Brossard's theory is that "woman" is not by nature accessible either, if we understand woman and nature in the way patriarchy has trained us.

Reading this work, I remembered the fall I entered university and drove on my first freeway. What stays in my mind are the signs at the exit ramps warning drivers: NO ENTRY and beyond that GO BACK YOU ARE GOING THE WRONG WAY. Even if those signs had been posted at the entrance to the university, I would have gone on ... but I would have been warned: LOOK OUT. And some care for my danger would have been welcome, would have felt welcoming to me.

Nicole Brossard is among the feminist writers who are Look Outs for women. Nevertheless, the remoteness of the text is painful, hovering between what I can just reach and what is tantalizing to me.

Brossard remarks that we're learning how difficult it is to move from a patriarchal system to feminist thought. The words, patterns, argument, syntax have been formally developed to express patriarchal thought. The perspectives of our education come from within that thought. Not so with The Aerial Letter:

I believe there's only one explanation for all of these texts: my desire and my will to understand patriarchal reality and how it works, not for its own sake, but for its tragic consequences in the lives of women, in the life of the spirit (35)

The question is how to write that understanding when the language we have learned excludes the self-definitions of women.

Brossard notes that "until now reality has been for most women a fiction, that is, the fruit of an imagination which is not their own and to which they do not actually succeed in adapting" (75). And yet, women's own reality-"maternity, rape, prostitution, chronic fatigue, verbal, physical, and mental violence"-is presented as fiction, as stories in the newspaper, not as fact Perhaps here is reason for what Brossard called in the NFB Studio D film Firewords her "resistance to anecdote: I imagine it as a refusal of the inner workings of daily life."

To transform the conditions of women's lives, Brossard transforms the language we use to conceptualize these realities and these fictions, for "we can rethink the world only through words" (136). The language she creates reads to me like a foreign tongue. I must read, think, reconceptualize, reread, and then think again. Creating this unease, this disturbance, is her strategy and her accomplishment. In "Turning-Platform" she asks what will happen if she follows the knowledge of her body's ecstasy: "Further exists when I say I want to go further" (48). In this text alone, I was astonished at her act of concentrated, focused, creative hope-her refusal of patriarchal limits.

That refusal is grounded in the amazon and the lesbian, the images of woman absent from patriarchal imagination. And her reality is imperative: "a lesbian who does not reinvent the world is a lesbian in the process of disappearing" (136). The lesbian is not all women, but "a mental energy which gives breath and meaning to the most positive of images a woman can have of herself" (121) .

What does characterize "women as a group is our colonized status" where our thoughts and emotions are not put to work on behalf of the self, but in the service of the other (134). To confront that condition where artistic production is impossible, Brossard writes, we "literally" create ourselves in the world, and she means that literally:

Literal means "that which is represented by letter." Taken literally. Taken to the letter. For we do take our bodies, our skin, our sweat, pleasure, sensuality, sexual bliss to the letter. From the letters forming these words emerge the beginnings of our texts. (135)

The abstract codes in these texts of The Aerial Letter both warn and welcome the daring woman who transverses patriarchal language. For we must use that language. Our choices come only as we identify its realities and create our own.

Keith Louise Fulton is a feminist teacher and writer and currently holds the position of Prairie Regional Joint Chair in Women's Studies for the Universities of Manitoba and Winnipeg.


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