MARTINE DELVAUX’S HIDDEN AGENDA
Bitter Rose, largely a memoir, looks at absent fathers and missing girls
“I came into a world where no one spoke of men,” begins Martine Delvaux’s short, haunting new novel. It’s a fair indication of what’s to come. Absence and disappearance hover over Bitter Rose (Linda Leith Publishing, 105 pages, $14.95, translated by David Homel) from the very first sentence. A mother has given birth, the father has vanished, and in a community well accustomed to the keeping of secrets, “a story had to be invented to conceal the banality of seeds carelessly sown.”
The novel’s first-person voice, looking back from adulthood, recounts a zigzag journey. The pregnant mother is shifted first from Montreal to Quebec City and then, when the daughter narrator is born, to Anjou, a Franco-Ontarian Catholic community based on the author’s old hometown of Limoges. “Something like a suburb, but too far from the big city to be a real suburb, and too ugly to be a real village,” poor Anjou doesn’t come out of this novel looking very appealing. To the narrator it was a “cursed” village, a place to be escaped — which she eventually does, although that’s far from the end of her troubles.
Bitter Rose, described by Delvaux as “80 per cent memoir,” is a vivid sensory re-creation of a working-class 1970s and ’80s childhood and adolescence. For non-francophone readers, a good part of the fascination probably will lie in the book’s cultural specificity. This is a familiar-yet-different world, a place where the death of Elvis Presley is a defining event, but no more so than the death of Joe Dassin.
Everyone who was near a TV in the summer of 1976 recalls Nadia Comaneci scoring perfect 10s at the Montreal Olympics, but Delvaux takes that shared memory past easy nostalgia and into the dark flip side of vicarious idolatry: “Soon people were saying she was anorexic, her life was miserable, her trainer had abused her. She was stripped bare in public and burned for sorcery.”
The example of Comaneci gets us close to the heart of Bitter Rose. It’s a novel that, for all its period flavour, child’s-eye perspective and even occasional dashes of humour, carries implications that ripple outward into the broader subject of how society performs acts of erasure on girls and women — what Delvaux calls “the little disappearances” that happen every day. Talking in her apartment in the Portuguese neighbourhood near The Main last week, the 46-year-old, who teaches women’s studies at UQÀM, recalled that she didn’t have far to look for the novel’s seed: It came from her daughter, then four years old, now 12.
“She was lying in bed one night and asked me, out of the blue, ‘Tell me, is it true that some people hurt little children?’ I thought, ‘What is she tapping into?’ I went back and started thinking about my own childhood. I was haunted very young by stories of girls who were disappearing, and I couldn’t always remember where those stories came from. ‘Did my mother tell me that?’”
For Delvaux, such questions fed youthful fascinations with absence, death, telepathy and the afterworld.
“I was always a very curious child and teenager,” she said. “Things I couldn’t quite understand — enigmas, things that weren’t resolved — grabbed me. In hindsight, I think that was about coming from this strange background, where I didn’t know who my natural father was and things were very hidden. As a girl, I was a huge fan of any kind of female detective — Charlie’s Angels, The Bionic Woman, Wonder Woman. They were feminist icons. I watched some old Bionic Woman episodes recently and I couldn’t believe how feminist the texts were. It wasn’t just that she was strong and doing things a man would do; she actually defies men who try to put her back in her place. Charlie’s Angels, too. There was a second degree to it all. They weren’t just Barbie dolls.”
A natural outgrowth of the preoccupations Delvaux writes of in Bitter Rose is her self-described obsession with the disappearance of 1,300 native Canadian women since 1980. The lack of an official national inquiry, said Delvaux, is symptomatic of a bigger pattern observable in everyday life and in the halls of academe.
“Philosophy classes that don’t have any women in them, syllabuses that don’t have any texts written by women, little sexist comments that make women shut up in the public realm — they’re all connected to the acceptance that these 1,300 women have gone missing, and that this apparently is not a systemic elimination of women. That’s what Stephen Harper is refusing to look at. He’s not asking the question, ‘Is this systemic?’ If it is addressed, it’s in terms of ‘Well, they’re native (Canadians). The problem is on the reserves.’ People keep connecting these women to prostitution, they keep slut-shaming them. It makes me very angry. We need to interrogate all this.”
A couple of times in our conversation, Delvaux uses the striking phrase “ghost father”; her next novel, already finished and set for publication in French this fall, deals further with the figure whose ongoing absence has been so much a part of her life.
“The next one is all about that,” she said. “A friend asked me recently, ‘Do you think you’re done with this topic now?’ I said ‘I don’t think I ever will be.’ But it’s not something that prevents me from living and breathing. What I write in the next novel is, ‘Il est parti pour que j’écrive.’ He left for me to write. This is what I was given, this story or lack thereof, but that is a big part of what motivates me to write. It’s not about solving it. It’s about doing something with it.”