Accordéon

Kaie Kellough

Description

Set against a backdrop of the 2012 student protests, Accordéon is an experimental novel, a piercing deconstruction of Québécois culture, and an ode to Montréal—a city where everything happens at once and all realities exist simultaneously. Against a satirical Ministry of Culture set on quotas, preservation, and containment according to its own cultural code, Kaie Kellough weaves voices and images from the margins to probe collective fantasies of Québec old and new.

Informations

• Publié par: Arbeiter Ring Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 10
• EAN13: 9781927886007
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright 2016 Kaie Kellough
ARP Books (Arbeiter Ring Publishing)
201E-121 Osborne Street
Winnipeg, Manitoba
Canada R3L 1Y4
arpbooks.org
Book design and layout by LOKI.
Printed and bound in Canada by Friesens on paper made from 100% recycled post-consumer waste.
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
This book is fully protected under the copyright laws of Canada and all other countries of the Copyright Union and is subject to royalty.

ARP Books acknowledges the generous support of the Manitoba Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Province of Manitoba through the Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Book Publisher Marketing Assistance Program of Manitoba Culture, Heritage, and Tourism.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Kellough, Kaie, 1975-, author
Accord on / Kaie Kellough.
ISBN 978-1-894037-83-9 (paperback) ISBN 978-1-927886-00-7 (epub)
I. Accord on.
PS8571.E58643A64 2016 C813 .6 C2016-905009-2
ARP Books, LOKI, Margaret Christakos, Stefan Christoff, friends and family: Merci .
CONTRIBUTORS
NARRATOR
M IN ED
MC
MC 2
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
ANONYMOUS TESTIMONIAL 1.00
ANONYMOUS TESTIMONIAL 2.00
AFTERWORD
FOREWORD
8
The flying canoe is a folkloric entity. It appears in literature for children and young adults, and in popular imagery from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the canoe is not central to today s culture, its flight continues to be interpreted in two opposing ways. On one hand, it is understood as novelty entertainment. On the other, it is viewed as a symbolic decolonial event, emphasizing the ascent of the colonized over the highest steeples of the colonial establishment.
During the sovereignty referendums of 1980 and 1995, the Oka Crisis of 1990 and the Student Strike of 2012 - moments when the social hierarchy was contested - canoe sightings were reported, although none were substantiated.
Outside of local folklore from past centuries, this document contains the most detailed known accounts of the flying canoe. Neither this document nor the sightings that inform it constitute evidence of the existence of the canoe.
M IN ED
Montr al
ANONYMOUS TESTIMONIAL 1.00
12
ANOT. 1.01
I am inside the Ministry. Everything I say is my confession, which I give of my own volition.
I don t know how long I ll be here. Time collapses and expands, so I am also outside the pharmacy watching you exit with your Lanc me facial moisturizer, which includes a natural toning ingredient. I am equally in Berri metro watching as a man dressed like a wizard, with Celtic patterns embroidered around the wide cuffs of his shirt, practices karate on the platform. The crowd flows around him and everyone s mind wanders. One hundred people re-enact the battle of the Plains of Abraham on Mont-Royal mountain, and I am here in front of the Jean Coutu pharmacy thinking of General Montcalm and of how he died, with a hot lead musket ball lodged in his stomach, burning a hole through him as he contorted himself and begged for water and maybe death. At the same time, snow is falling in another century and Laurier is pleading Riel s case in Parliament. As he pleads, women sit in class in the cole Polytechnique, and they do not know that Marc L pine will enter and separate them from the men, before he starts shooting. Today the winners are inheriting their history as the losers are crushed by their own, struggling to cope by selling contraband cigarettes. Joseph L gar is standing in his studio, imagining a wilderness and painting The Martyrdom of Fathers Br beuf and Lalemant. The Huron have the two fathers tied naked to stakes and are boiling water with which to scald their flesh, while the sky soars above them and the trees stand indifferent. The buildings downtown stand indifferent as the Arab boy is pinned to the floor of the metro by security officers. Two Qu b cois students hover and record the incident on their phones. They shout that the officers will become stars on YouTube. A beaver is trapped. People in France will wear its fur around their shoulders and heads, and wealthy traders will dig wine cellars under the soil of the Old Port. All of this happens at once, as night falls and the students march. In defiance, one hundred thousand pots are struck by spoons, and the flying canoe materializes on the churning water of the St-Laurent, right under the iron bridge. A woman sits alone in the middle of the canoe. She plugs a violin into a string of effects pedals. The pedals blink in the darkened hull. As she plays, her notes distort, multiply, reverberate, bounce off the water and push the canoe upward. The water drips and lengthens into strings and those translucent strings are played by the moonlight and the wind. The canoe rises higher, in a slow spiral with its bow tilted upward, and the strings tremble as the canoe hovers over the moon.
1.01.A
If you re wondering why I m speaking English it isn t because I m fond of the language. I also speak French. I prefer to speak French. French is the language to which I default when the world enters me. I have to translate myself. This act of translation is fraught. It is risky. A good translator is like a Mathieu d Acosta, a navigator who can find their way by looking at the natural signs, like the treetops or the stars, or by sticking out their tongue and tasting the direction the wind blows, and this indicates the direction their thought ought to travel. Which word goes which way? What if a word going the wrong way gets taken? Where do things go when they get lost in translation? One possibility is that they become graffiti. Nobody ever sees graffiti being painted. It simply appears and is, to most people, illegible. If a French thought is lost in translation in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve it may appear, just after midnight, on the side of a brick building in Mile End, in Portuguese. Nobody understands how to read it, and there it stays, on the side of the building, baffling, until it is either scrubbed off or redirected from loss into clear translation.
1.01.B
Wednesday night walking through Berri metro, switching from the green line to the orange, I see the author Dany Laferri re. He is tall and wearing a navy trenchcoat, spectacles, a pork-pie hat and he is holding a notebook in front of his face. He writes as he walks. I don t know how he sees in front of himself as he goes, but I wonder whether he closes his eyes and writes his way, lets the words guide his steps . I realize that he isn t taking steps at all, rather he is drifting along six inches above the ground. He drifts past the orange line platform, then up two flights of stairs without looking away from his notebook. I follow his drift out of the station and into the street.

MC Each individual letter constitutes a step, while the accumulation of letters creates a drift or a passage. Laferri re writes his own passage.
MC 2 Possibly, although instead of writing his drift, we can think of Laferri re observing, studiously avoiding, and re-writing the passage that has been written for him. His notebook may be in front of his face, but he is not proceeding blindly.
MC The notion of studious avoidance seems more fitting, and I prefer to think of him avoiding the overlap of steps that is inevitable in the metro, and consequently avoiding losing his way.
MC 2 Perhaps he is studiously recording his steps so that he, and others, can retrace them. Recording things allows us to double back and revisit, even as we advance.
1.01.U
By Berri square in the rain I saw a teenage boy. He was too young to have any stubble. He had orange hair, stringy and long. He was wearing pajama pants and a torn hoodie. He was skinny. He was wandering about the square crying. When he passed me I noticed that his fingernails were blackened and that he smelled like he hadn t bathed in a few weeks. He asked a group of teenagers for money, and they rebuked him and laughed at him.
18
ANOT. 1.02
My parents were university professors. Their minds sprawled across academic disciplines. They were indentured servants whose lives spanned the Atlantic. They were harried scatterbrains with itchy scalps. They were mercenaries who fired primitive rifles on the Plains of Abraham. They were M tis traders who crisscrossed the prairies and finally settled here. They were traveling booksellers who raised me in a house of information. I don t need to tell you this, but I do need to tell you. I need to tell you because it s related to me. My parents are related to me, so they exist inside and outside of me. I m part of the city, which exists inside and outside this monologue. I am in my monologue and outside of it. Everything is inside and outside of everything, and that is the moral of this story. My monologue has no moral. It is an uninhabitable house of information. It is the most expensive property in the exploded squalor of the imagination, which is the neighbourhood in which I grew up. I want you to live in this house in this neighbourhood until your mind collapses into footnotes. The house is really a metropolis, not a house. It is a vast, broken, glittering jigsaw stretching out in every direction. Competition and worry keep the lights burning.
I do not mention my parents as a way of raising my profile. Such mention might link me to the achievements of a previous generation, and therefore increase my status and polish my respectability. I do not want to raise myself. I have zero aims toward respectability. My parents were not respectable. I am not trying to distinguish myself from anyone else you might see on