The Sealy Challenge
#𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗦𝗲𝗮𝗹𝘆𝗖𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗗𝗮𝘆 8:
N’entre pas dans mon âme avec tes chaussures (Don’t enter my soul with your shoes) by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine ✒️
Don’t enter my soul with your shoes is a Tzigane proverb, which according to a cursory search on Google is a Romani person, especially someone from Hungary. The Romani people have been persecuted throughout history, and Kanapé-Fontaine is an Indigenous Innu poet who starts off the chapbook with a powerful prologue. One sentence stood out to me because I could relate:
“L’exile devient un héritage”
(Exile becomes heritage)
This is what happens when you systematically oppress a people, especially through forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure. The exile becomes part of your culture. The links between displaced people around the globe are so similar. As a Palestinian who literally can’t return to her ancestral homeland, I totally understand and feel this deeply.
Kanapé-Fontaine goes back to the idea that everything is a circle quite often. History, especially. She alludes to the human body a lot, mentioning bones and vertebrae and nerves to allude to the passage of time, the meaning behind being from somewhere.
As I was going through this chapbook, I could feel the pain in Kanapé-Fontaine’s words. But the way she expressed that pain, through stories of her ancestors and her romantic relationships and her relationship with nature, reminded me of a saying I read in The Poet’s Companion:
“Poetry is an emotion recollected in tranquillity.”
The author manages to be both very concise and very abstract in her work, usually an oxymoron, but coupled with her evocative language makes for quite an interesting read.
I must admit, this short book made me question my French comprehension because I had a hard time truly understanding a few of the poems. The vocabulary is rich and layered, and unlike the relatively easy-to-understand word choices from my previous reads, the poems here utilize some beautifully complicated vocabulary.
In the end, Kanapé-Fontaine questions the very concept of a homeland, and asks: If she returns back to the land of her ancestors, will she then be in exile again? From the home she was forced to build while in exile? This is the circle Kanapé-Fontaine explores, and by the end, she doesn’t offer an easy answer. We might even be doomed to repeat the cycle again, and because of it, we must carry on having to forge our own identity.
𝗠𝘆 𝗳𝗮𝘃𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗲 𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀/𝗽𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘀/𝗽𝗼𝗲𝗺𝘀:
Un lit d’automne, j’ai lié nos deux corps
nos peoples en désaccord
entravés
dans le même plaisir.
(An autumn bed, I linked our two bodies
our peoples at odds
fettered
in the same pleasure.)Tout est un cercle en achevant les page
de l’histoire pour la repeindre
(Everything is a circle by rushing the pages
of the story to repaint it)voir sans regarder,
regarder sans voir,
tu as les mains pleines d’histoires.
(seeing without looking
looking without seeing
your hands are full of stories)
Follow me on Instagram @samaapoetry for more and check out what The Sealy Challenge is here. Yesterday’s selection is right here.
Tomorrow’s book will be a night without armor by Jewel
