In 1982, Chantal Thomas, then a French professor, left to teach 18th century literature at the University of Tucson, in the United States. Captivated by the beauty of the place, the writer records her emotions, the encounters and her thirst for freedom in her “Arizona Journal” which she reopens today.
Sometimes all it takes is a coincidence, a refusal, for an ice floe to transform into a desert, for Alaska to become Arizona. In 1981, Chantal Thomas was in New York. But her need for adventure pushed her to apply to teach for a semester elsewhere in the United States. She loves the cold, dreams of white, snow and sled dogs; it is found in the bottle green of the candle cacti, the purple of the mountains and the red of the desert flowers.
From this trip in the spring of 1982 in the footsteps of Jack Kerouac, Georges Simenon, Antonin Artaud, the author expects nothing, except this need to explore a freedom of living. A city dweller parachuted into the land of cars, she explores this territory on foot, then by bike, adapts, playfully, observes, builds friendships, and dreams a lot.
Story of a life choice between roots and wings
Conceived like a logbook, peppered with reminiscences, becoming a botanical sketch and an opening of hopes, Chantal Thomas slips into this intimate story words, observations, sometimes quotes from the authors she reads or teaches. It is a work of fragments, of piles where memories have variable sizes.
It is the characteristic of journal notations to be in the moment itself and therefore not to develop into a great narrative, except at moments.
But these vivid notations are also due to the place, to her very solitary lifestyle which puts her in a sort of particular receptive state. Here she is sensitive to the ordinary which becomes poetry. She sees strangeness in it, often attenuated by the pen of the authors, Jack Kerouac in the lead, who prepared her Arizona for her.
I had already crossed from New York to San Francisco twice, I knew these landscapes, but what was new was living there and I think that made me more sensitive to singularity, to relativity also what I taught then.
Measurements, distances, the horizon, nature, drought, almost everything pleases him. In her Arizona, Chantal Thomas wants to be free, choosing this freshness, the singularity of the place, the clarity of the air which is unlike anything else and which can only be found in the desert. “We drink this refreshing air and we have this feeling of clarity,” underlines the author who, as a young woman, made the choice to be a body and a mind in a particular space. “Journal d’Arizona” is the story of an anchoring in another geographical reality, so spectacular that it allows us to inhabit the void and bear witness to it.
Catherine Fattebert/ld
Chantal Thomas, “Journal d’Arizona”, ed. du Seuil/Fiction & Cie, May 2024.
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