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Words of love

Author Nicole Brossard looks to lesbian desire for inspiration

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

“Loving a woman is always political,” Nicole Brossard said in 1988. The feminist lesbian experimental author and poet was discussing women, identity and politics prior to her tenure as honorary president of the third International Feminist Book Fair. In the June 10, 1988, Mirror cover story by Anna Assimakopoulos and Carla Gruodis, Brossard also talked about her relation to language, literature and life—heady topics, but not unexpected when speaking to a woman who won two Governor General awards for poetry and was nominated for four others. She’s also been awarded the 1989 Quebec Prix de poésie, the Prix Athanase-David, the 1991 Prix du Quebec and the 1991 Harbourfront Festival Prize.

These days, Brossard continues to write and is currently editing an anthology on gay and lesbian poetry, to be published next year by Quebec publishing house Les éditions de l’Hexagone. And while she says she isn’t politically active in the modern gay rights movements, she still identifies herself as a lesbian, a woman and a writer.

The state of feminism

Writing from a lesbian and/or feminist perspective is easier today than it was 30 years ago, Brossard says, thanks in large part to the sustained work of women activists and by growing mass acceptance of their arguments. “Many of our demands were eventually taken up by the state in the form of institutions,” says Brossard. The progressive nature of Quebec’s various governments, in effect, took up the fight on the activists’ behalf. The result, Brossard says, was a deflation of the stridency and righteousness that had fuelled the movement for 20 years. “The level of anger and revolt and solidarity is not the same today as it was in the ’70s or ’80s,” she says.

That change is, Brossard feels, carried over to the lesbian social scene. “In the ’70s, going to a lesbian bar was like stepping out of reality into fiction,” she says. “Today, you don’t have that trembling of fear and desire outside, that sense of excitement and adventure. Now, it’s like going to the grocery store.”

But the radical scene’s loss was our cultural gain. Progressive women played increasingly important roles in Quiet Revolution Quebec, one that left an indelible mark on its contemporary culture. “I would say that the feminist movement and modern Quebec grew up together,” says Brossard. “Today, you see a lot of Quebec women writers and poets—you could even argue that literature in Quebec wouldn’t exist without women.”

There’s no denying the contribution women made to the Quebec literary scene, with Brossard leading the way. She was one of the first to write about lesbianism, and in an unorthodox, formalist manner. Her lesbian trilogy of 1977’s L’Amer (translated as These Our Mothers), Amantes (Lovhers) and Le sens apparent (Surfaces of Sense), both published in 1980, explored lesbian desire and sexuality while breaking literary conventions. Amantes was nominated for a Governor General’s Award.

With her trilogy and with 1982’s Picture Theory, her most experimental novel, Brossard says she was trying to “translate what the love of another woman means. I wanted to explore what she means as something symbolic, that she was something symbolically and positively charged.”

Formal English

Brossard believes that exploring and effecting change in the use of words, and challenging existing paradigms, is actually easier to do in English (this from a woman who demonstrated for Quebec independence with her then-husband in the 1960s). “Having a sense of openness is easier in English because French is more resistant to formalism and feminism,” she says. “When you are creating in a field of exploration of the unknown, you have to be rational, but remain rebellious and explorative…. Feminism remained prosaic to some, but to others, feminist poetry tried to open the imagination and language, which can in many ways be sexist. We want to transform the marginalization and inferiorization that had been done to women.”

Brossard never apologized for making her novels difficult—in fact, she set out to make them so deliberately. In 1988, she told the Mirror that “I think my writing makes trouble for the reader,” and it does not seem that approach will change.

“In each of my works, but especially in the novels, I want the reader to be questioning, to be troubled, to look at the world in a different way—I want the reader to be self-interrogating,” she says.