The researcher has published a first collection on the healing of trauma on the cusp of poetry and science fiction.
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How can we write about systemic violence, that which crushes us, is inscribed in our flesh and is transmitted between generations? To this question, many contemporary writers, novelists and poets have responded with frontal testimony with a sociological vocation or autofiction at its most trashy or surgical. Héloïse Brézillon, researcher in literary creation and instigator since 2018 with Margot Ferrera of the Parisian open scene Eat your words, offers a sensitive approach, on the edge of poetry and anticipation narrative, thanks to “a utopian science fiction device”. This gives T3M, a first collection “hybrid” published by Le Commun, which aims to dissect and deconstruct (destroy?) the roots of violence as it is exercised in homes and on children.
T3M (for «traumatic memory mapping model»in English in the text) is in fact a kind of artificial intelligence, imagined by the author, which promises to cure the consequences following a long mapping of the cortex (hence the word cortégraphy ) where memory (perceptual, sensory, etc.) is preserved. Basically, writes the poet, “she draws lines, she measures things in her head, she draws red dots, she finds the roads that make you sad and she creates deviations.” And the protocol takes on as much the trappings of an archaeological excavation site as a game of Russian dolls to open. It is in this context that poetry intervenes, a prospective language form – like a metaphorical scanner of memories – which probes the layers of traumatic memory one by one.
First by identifying the places, then the senses, its deep roots, the emotions – the weather! – which are associated with it, or even its overall landscape. Examples: “the bricks of saliva / cemented to raw fear” or even “my violence is a climate / of cooking in spring / it is the epicenter of a palm / which is intended to overlook / but not to fall”. This pictorial prose, based on a brilliantly mobilized lexicon of the body and sciences, is enriched with a declamatory vocation, like the transcription of the little music of an interior monologue. A powerfully convincing and life-saving neuro-poetic journey.
T3MHéloïse Brézillon, ed. du Commun, 120 pages, 14 euros.
The extract
a glow catches my stomach. I want to understand. the cortegraphers explain, with supporting diagrams. When you were born, your memory was nothing more than a bit of gas in the back of your eyes. to constitute itself, to become material, memory aggregates around itself all the dust present in its environment: dust coming from the mouths of parents, from the mouths of grandparents, from the mouths of the rest of the family, from the mouths of neighbors, from mouths of the presenters, the 8 p.m. news, the mouths of the adorable pigs in the storybooks before falling asleep, the mouths of the boyfriends, the squeals, the idols… yes, all the mouths make dust to make up the planet which will serve as your memory throughout your life. its soil is made up of the grains of all the voices you heard until you were 7 years old. after that, well, it remains stable. This is also when the memories stop fleeing.
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