The car, the fear, the revolver, the reality, a casting

January 1, 1987 – April 27, 2017

Mélanie :
I was driving avidly. Choosing the night the desert to thus expose myself to the violence of the moment which propels consciousness. I was fifteen and before me space, space far off tapering me down like a civilization in reverse, city lost in the trembling air. In my mother’s Meteor I was exemplary solitude with, at the tip of my toes, a brake to avoid all disasters and to remind me of the insignificance of despair amid snakes and cacti in the bluest night of all ravings.

Simon, 7 mars 2016

Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m thinking it was just the word “Meteor” that you liked – that out of all the cars around you, you chose this one because you liked its name. I only say this because at first glance, this car doesn’t match your description of the speed and performance of the race car that Mélanie drives. The car – just like science, for that matter – interests you more as a concept or a symbol than as a subject. Besides, in Mauve Desert, when Lorna’s “hands found their way among the pistons, cylinders and greasy cables,” it’s clear that you know nothing about mechanics (it’s impossible to make your way between pistons and cylinders – not without dismantling the engine head, anyway). That isn’t so important. You have nonetheless contributed, alongside other writers, to elevating the Mercury Meteor to the rank of literary vehicles. In Québec, at least. The first mention of this car was probably by Jacques Geoffroy who, in his own book La catoche orange, published by Parti pris in 1970, speaks of it eloquently.

Pierre-Paul Geoffroy, Jacques’ brother, a member of the FLQ and known as such well before the October Crisis, had been arrested in March 1969 for successfully detonating a bomb at the Montréal Exchange on February 13 of the same year. He was condemned to 124 life sentences, getting off after only twelve years. His brother Jacques had never participated in these kinds of plots against the Commonwealth – Jacques was a poet activist – but his friend Pierre Harel made nothing short of a run for it from the first news of arbitrary arrests. He had good reason to do it, since the police paid a visit to his house and roughed up a poet who was staying there in his absence. An unfortunate case of mistaken identity: it was indeed Harel that they were targeting, as he was friends with Jacques, himself the brother of an FLQ member. Harel slipped between the cracks, but Jacques was not so lucky, and on November 5, 1970, he was accused of being a “member of an unlawful association.” Like a good number of poets of that era, he would be imprisoned while waiting for a trial that would never come. The War Measures Act remained in effect for sixty-six days. Enough to make Jacques dream of liberty. A topic that is raised in his only book, although the twenty-seven poems it contains were written several weeks before the Crisis. Although many of them critique the poet’s contemporary society – such as the poem entitled “Une famille unie est une famille qui boit du Papsie” – the one that I found most charming is a dream of escape and love. “Ma raison de vivre: Rita mon petit lapin en nanane” starts like this:

I have a 1963 Meteor for you
vast like my dreams
fiery like my passion
superb like the pride of the greats of this world
shining like the afternoon sun at lunchtime
burning like three dozen ‘lil weston breads
for you my dear my only reason for living
wa-ta-ta-tow

I wonder whether you knew the characters in this story. Well, for me, they’re characters. For you, they’re probably memories … whatever they are, when Claire Côté, humanities professor at CEGEP Lévis-Lauzon, dropped this poem into my hands – I was a student, I was maybe eighteen years old – I did not yet know the name Nicole Brossard, and I had no idea what a Mercury Meteor looked like. But even then, the name alone suggested the possibility of speed, leaving a trail of luminescent dust behind you.

Later, the Meteor resurfaced in my life with your Mélanie on board, the one from Mauve Desert. Mélanie is young, on the cusp of adulthood. She pushes hard on the gas, “wild with the damned energy of [her] fifteen years,” she “[leans] into [her] thoughts to make them slant reality toward the light.” For a long time, she stayed with me, and the questioning look she cast upon reality stays with me. Other than Mélanie, objects with well-defined outlines, with decided function, concrete and material objects serve as a vector for these questions that concern both adolescence and poetry: the revolver, the television set, the dancefloor and, of course, the automobile. A Mercury Meteor that I would find in the works of another writer, the novelist Deni Y. Béchard, whom I met at the Salon du livre de Montréal some time ago. I was reading his first novel Cures for Hunger published by Alto. It talks about his relationship with his father and his fascination with his troubled past as a bank robber. On the title page, we see the latter in his early twenties, leaning against the hood of a gorgeous convertible against a backdrop of mountains that could be in British Columbia. I asked the author what model the car was, and he replied that it was a Mercury Meteor. I objected:

“No, it can’t be a Meteor. It just so happens that I have one and it doesn’t look like that.”
“Well,” he replied, “since the book was published, many people have confirmed that it was indeed a Meteor. I even have testimonials: someone’s father had one, someone’s brother had one. Everyone says it’s a Meteor.”

I acquiesced, but I was not convinced. Subsequent research confirmed that it was a Meteor 1961. Mine is two years younger. However, in 1962, the car was redesigned. It pains me to say that the ’61 model is way cooler. Especially with a bank robber posing in front of it.

I wrote poems about the Meteor, three years before I even got one. Naturally, it was Mélanie that steered me towards the car. In fact, this character is the real subject of a book that bears her name and that was published in 2013 by L’Hexagone. I wrote this book in Mexico, where I picked up seven copies of El desierto malva, the Mexican translation of Mauve Desert. I got a group of women together to read the novel and to do some writing exercises. Out of the seven, two accepted the task, but they all kept the novel that I lent them. I promised you I’d bring you back at least one copy; I failed. However, the efforts were not in vain: Lyliana Chavez and Mariela Oliva agreed to immerse themselves in the universe of Mauve Desert. Their texts, freely translated by myself, are found in Mélanie, my book of poetry that some have described as a bastard novel and others as a UFO – in both cases, the descriptions give me great pleasure. As such, I made my mark on the Mercury Meteor’s literary legacy. After Jacques Geoffroy, you, and Deni Y. Béchard, I added a few lines to it.

But who remembers the Meteor? It’s not included in the Automobile Pantheon alongside the Pontiac Parisienne, Chevrolet Impala, Dodge Charger, Ford Thunderbird (which Susan Sarandon drives with Geena Davis in Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise). And I am convinced that it has not had the same impact on the imagination of American writers. And for good reason – the Meteor barely existed in the United States. While over there, it was only manufactured between 1961 and 1963. Ford had already commercialized it in Canada beginning in 1949. In 1960, the name Meteor became Mercury and remained as such until 1976.

Mercury is the entry-level subsidiary of Ford Motors. A digression: isn’t it interesting to see that while the mother brand has a man’s name, its cheaper subsidiary is named after an ancient Roman deity? Pride and prejudice? Just a thought.

If there are two things I’ve learned behind the wheel of a 1963 marine blue Mercury Meteor assembled in Oakville, Ontario, they are:

1) In the 60s and 70s, this model was widespread across Canada. In fact, it had been created specifically for this market. It was presented as a quintessentially Canadian car. To support this affirmation, different models of the Meteor were given names that have reverberated in the collective imagination: Rideau, Niagara, Montcalm.

2) It drives like an old pickup. Under the hood, of course, I have a V8, but it’s the smallest one Ford made – that is to say, 260 cubic inches. The transmission is manual, three-speed. The first serves to kick the heavy iron mass out of inertia, the second gives it the necessary momentum to shift into third gear, and the last is for rolling at comfortable speeds between 50 and 100 km/h. Yet, if Mélanie is driving at high speeds in the desert in a Meteor, that could mean that she is either driving at 110 km/h in my model (at over 100, I essentially feel like I’m putting my life at risk, especially since I don’t have seatbelts in my car) or that she is driving another model. It’s true that there were Meteor “sports” models with a beefier cylinder capacity. This is the case with the Montcalm S33, for example. These models are nevertheless pretty rare. I mean, why buy a high-end Mercury when you can get the Ford Galaxy 500 literally from the same dealer? Even my little V8 is pretty rare: it’s the six-cylinder model that was sold the most. I base these statements on my various encounters: at gas stations, red lights, parking lots, everywhere – people ask me “What year is it from?”, and that often leads to anecdotes – “My brother-in-law had one, but in burgundy” – then they ask “Is it a straight-six? My brother had a straight-six …,” etc. Almost all the father, uncle, grandparent Meteor owners that talked to me had a 170 cubic inch inline-six engine under the hood, the engine offered with the base model.

In any case, the Meteor Montcalm S33 simply did not exist in the United States. In its place, the Monterrey could hide a huge cylinder displacement under its iron dress.

Finally, the reason I’m telling you this – all this anecdotal and technical information – is because, in fact, I want to get closer to Mélanie or, better yet, bring her closer to me. That is to say, that this translation that we want to facilitate from literary language to cinematic language and then towards theatrical language is also a transposition in time. Mélanie is from a world stuck at the tail end of the Cold War, where the spectre of the nuclear menace always lingered. In her world – that belongs to a fictionalized past – the Meteor is an old jalopy, not a collector’s automobile. No one stops Mélanie to ask her about the year of the model or the size of the motor. No one notices her car. She drives, anonymously and quickly, slicing through the desert like a hot knife in butter.

Mélanie drives an invisible old piece of junk. The modern equivalent could maybe be the Mercury Topaz. My mother had a Ford Tempo 1989. White with burgundy interior. For me, it was certainly the most anonymous car made in the last quarter century. Its design is entirely devoid of personality. Having said that, I don’t discredit the person who designed it, as the wind decided the Ford Tempo’s contours. In 450 hours of aerodynamic testing, the course of its lines were modified more than 900 times. Although from an engineering perspective it’s a revolutionary car, from the aesthetic standpoint – and in saying this, I am fully conscious of my subjectivity – it is certainly one of the ugliest cars in the history of the automobile industry. To preserve a link with the Meteor, then, I propose the Tempo’s twin: the Mercury Topaz. Essentially, from the early 80s on, Ford no longer made any effort to distinguish Fords from Mercurys. As such, the Thunderbird is identical to the Cougar, the Taurus is the same as the Sable, Tempo and Topaz are perfectly interchangeable. The only distinction: the symbol in the centre of the grille, as well as the grille itself.

So that solves the problem of the car’s anonymity. But, as the American automobile myth has diminished along with the size of the automobiles, the Topaz is completely emasculated. We must find another analogy for machismo. In fact, hats off to you: in Mauve Desert, you distilled the underlying and constant menace so well without explicitly saying that it’s nestled within and found in all objects, in the relationship between objects, the relationship between people and objects. The confusion between the end of the world, patriarchy and everyday life is perfect. This forms a continuum against which you oppose an anthology of strong women coming to restore equilibrium to the world, at least in fiction.

Today, few Mercury Topaz remain. If we consider the fact that it has not been produced for over twenty years, that’s probably to be expected. I said that I wanted to bring Mélanie closer to me, but I don’t think that it’s possible, or even desirable, to bring her towards us. I mean, here and now. It’s good to maintain a healthy distance from our fiction, to organize this space from which we can inject our own point of view. I can turn around and look back at the end of the 80s while maintaining a link with my positioning, but I can’t go back as far as the 60s. Placing myself back in this era puts me in a different relationship with the past – a historical past – a relationship that I should document, project myself into as one does into fiction. On the other hand, Mélanie belongs resolutely to the 20th century, and it’s certain that things fade gradually into this new millennium. Family motels are definitely part of this.

Finally, if I cast doubt on the possibility of racing against death in a Mercury Meteor, I have to highlight that in a Ford Tempo equipped with a three-speed automatic transmission, I achieved a respectable speed of 180 km/h on the 4e Rang between Honfleur and Saint-Lazare de Bellechasse. That was in 1992, and I’m not dead.

Nicole, March 30-31, 2016:

One rightly associates the car with movement, freedom, speed, danger, excess, death.
The car is an undeniably North American symbol, it travels great expanses, often to the west or the south. The sun bathes the space, one rarely imagines an old guy at the wheel. The car is everywhere in our cinematographic images and our daily lives. In Europe, it would be the train.
Why did I choose the car, symbol par excellence of masculinity, to say nothing of virility?

Because the car is also the dream, melancholy (Rebel Without a Cause), adventure, the possibility of elsewhere (Thelma & Louise). At that time, I think I even dreamed about a bridge linking America and Europe, so that I could easily visit a desired woman. The car allows one to wander in thought. I’m thinking of the works of France Mongeau for example.
It is true that the car is a mythical object maintained as such for economic and commercial reasons, but it is also a mark of the values of the times. Some years they are beautiful, refined, elegant; other years, they are menacing like a tank, intimidating like a dictator. Five years ago, I began to appreciate cars for their form, and I confess that some of them evoked aesthetic pleasure in me.

Yes, it’s true that I chose the Meteor for its name that implies speed and adventure. It flies. An American-turned-Canadian writer, George Bowering, had written to me to tell me that the Meteor I was talking about had never really been American, that it had been sold mainly in Canada. This historical and realist fact did not affect me. Of course, the information could feed into the idea that it was a mistake, but it does not at all erode the symbolism of the Meteor: freedom, speed, excitement, danger. The same principle applies to the pistons, cylinders and oiled cables, that bespeak the manual labour inside the object, that are symbolic of innards and thoughts.

I like that you tell me the history of your connection with the Meteor and with your own, the gorgeous blue one. Moreover, our meeting in Québec, June 5, 2013, and the little drive we took in the blue Meteor behind the Musée national des beaux-arts are permanently etched into what I call my “fictional memory” – a memory that, I presume, will serve me all along our hybrid route through the Mauve Desert, and to which I will return even beyond that.

Your description of the car makes me think about the meaning that objects carry in our lives according to our tastes, desires and the zeitgeist. I look at each of the objects that I chose for the chapter “Places and Things” and I am fascinated by the idea of freedom, coolness and possible transgressions inherent in the words “pool,” “motel,” “car,” “bar,” “tattoo,” “revolver.” They incorporate the body, sexuality, speed, change or solitude, imprint-trace, death and violence in themselves.

I could also talk about my relationship with the automobile. The automobile is a reality that comes to me, I am certain, through cinema.

Simon, March 29, 2018

In Mauve Desert, I was particularly struck by two masculine “entities.” There is Longman, of course, but also those “guys who came from far away” who are mentioned briefly. Only one of which is armed. These masculine presences hover like a threat – a past or potential one – a bit like the nuclear threat during the Cold War.

In one of our first exchanges, we both discuss the varying perception a person can have of a particular time depending on whether that person has lived through it, whether it’s a matter of memory or knowledge. And yet, since I was very young when the Berlin Wall fell, the only memory I have of the Cold War comes down to a few afternoon’s worth of films dubbed into French on TV. Any understanding I have of the backdrop of Mauve Desert stems from my knowledge of history and is completely divorced from my personal experience. I would love it if you could tell me how the social context led (or did not lead) to the emergence of Longman (alias Oppenheimer) in the pages of Mauve Desert.

And where do those guys who came from far away come from?

Are you drawing a link – tenuous or circumstantial though it may be – between the emergence of feminism and the evolution of the Cold War or the nuclear arms race?

How and why does fear appear in Mauve Desert, and what is the relationship between fear, Longman and the television?

And speaking of Longman, what does he represent? What is his relationship to the collective imagination (to collective fear)? And what about propaganda?…

Nicole, April 2-6, 2018

Dear Simon,

You refer to two male figures, Longman and those “guys who came from far away” who appear early in the novel. I use the word “guys” to emphasize their anonymity. Longman bridges Antiquity, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, communism, socialism and neoliberalism. The guys come from far away from the little story, but enjoy the privilege of being “guys.”

Simon, April 4, 2018

Guys “who came from far away,” of which only one was armed and all the others blond. A poetic strangeness that relegates the masculine world to the “outside” and brings a somewhat spooky sheen to “the inside” of fiction. It feels unreal because it’s different from the reality that we know, which is – to put it bluntly – patriarchal. The great thing about this excerpt is that the poetry allows all of it – this microcosm in which power relationships between men and women are partially reversed (even though Longman will not accept it) – to go undetected, without the reader noticing it at first. Well, by “reader,” I mean me.

Nicole, March 30-31, 2016

Revolver: from the Latin revolvere = revolution

A revolver is essentially an expression of ever-present danger. The danger we carry within ourselves and the danger that surrounds us. In Mélanie’s glove compartment, it is a form of protection. In the hands of Longman, it’s a looming threat. To me, the ability to use and bear arms in the United States is abhorrent. Morally, but also because it’s an affront to my way of thinking. A firearm is dangerous for all kinds of reasons. It’s violence and death waiting to happen. How could generations of poets appropriate Breton’s phrase “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd”? No doubt literature and real life were not as intertwined then as they are today.

We come full circle: from the gleaming body of the Meteor to the shining barrel of the revolver. Two symbols of spectacular virility (as a stand-in for seduction and intimidation) that belong as much in the domain of freedom-escape-exploration as they do in the domain of destruction.

Nicole, April 2-6, 2018

“Only one of them was armed.” I admit that I was playing here with the idea of singular vs. plural: “All the others were blond.” I was thinking of the “blond” youth from the last war who (of course) have blue eyes in the translation, which make them “superior.” The words may be poetic, but my allusion isn’t. It points to sexism through the metaphor of racism.

Longman represents the history of patriarchy, which – regardless of whether it was codified by religion or law – is a history of violence, domination, exploitation and alienation.

You may be right to ponder the unexpected semantic shift between the real Cold War and the one between men and women, although there is no comparison between the methods of deterrence used. In terms of gender, war – a destructive force (death, rape, slavery) – the Cold War – a force of negotiation and endurance – and peacetime (marriage and reproduction) go together. I find it interesting that for women, religion and the law have been responsible for killing them, treating them as inferior, subjugating them and justifying “charges” against them and “sentences” imposed upon them. But it’s clear that as feminist strategies evolve with the arrival of new reproductive technologies, social media and “new” gender identities, the strategies of the current Cold War are also evolving according to the potential of new technology. For example, the dirty bomb (also known as a radiological bomb or radiological dispersal device) is an unconventional bomb surrounded my radioactive material designed to explode and disperse when it is detonated. Its only purpose is to contaminate the area surrounding the explosion, a bit like how fake news contaminates the credibility of a political candidate or politician’s party. Women have had to bear the brunt of patriarchal dirty bombs and fake news for a long time, and it has taken us a long time to understand that. In both kinds of Cold War, 21^st century-style, survival and reproduction are – in theory – made possible by technology.

Simon, April 7, 2018

I’m tempted to say, of course, like everyone who witnesses Angela Parkins’ murder and who is there in the bar as she falls to the ground in slow motion, that I didn’t see anything. Not the battle of the sexes and not even the Cold War motif, the first few times I read the novel.

Very young, I had no future like the shack on the corner which one day was set on fire by some guys who ‘came from far away,’ said my mother who had served them drinks. Only one of them was armed, she had sworn to me. Only one among them. All the others were blond. My mother always talked about men as if they had seen the day in a book. She would say no more and go back to her television set.

Right before this passage, there is the idea of reality being swallowed up by the indescribable desert. And there is the “I” that refers to being “very young” and speeding across the landscape. The mother is evoked right away through the car, the Meteor borrowed without permission.

Right after this passage, we follow this “I” who is “wild with arrogance” and who, at fifteen years of age, “driv[es] into the night with … absolutely delirious spaces edging the gaze.”

This “I” is of course Mélanie, which we will soon learn.

The burned shack and the guys who came from far away passed through the corner of my eyes and imprinted themselves onto my retinas. They stayed there like an afterglow, while I, like Mélanie (who prefers to live fast), was already moving on to other things. Between the desert and the teen’s thirst, the shack, the guys and the mother’s comment still had time to set the scene, better than the landscape would have done. The desert is not a backdrop here, but a living, “vibratory” entity, as you would say. The centre of this fictional universe is the mother. The reception, pool, clients and even the desert revolve around her. This is Mélanie’s world. And the novel depicts the energy Mélanie exerts to extricate herself from this gravity.

“Very young, I had no future.” From these first words, Mélanie is gathering momentum, heedless of the obstacles in her way. With a future to reinvent and reality giving way under her feet, Mélanie steps hard on the gas pedal to bend the light, as she says. Over her shoulder, we get a brief look at the mother in front of the television set, before once again being swept away along the mauve and orange lines that shape the landscape. We will barely have time to catch a glimpse of the fire in the night, the moonlight on the butt of the revolver and the glints of light in the blond hair of the guys gathered there. The poetic strangeness of a clashing scene that has no place in this orbital system, but is still present, like a narrative off-camera shot. In a way, the guys are relegated to the periphery of the narrative, to an exterior from which we can better situate this seemingly realist fictional universe, but in which certain power relationships are reversed.

You ask me what I understood from “only one of them was armed” and “all the others were blond.” The question caught me off guard because I’d never stopped to think about it, to be completely honest. The image just stayed with me. The shack in flames reminds me of another one that falls from the sky and smashes against a small Idaho country road in the Gus Van Sant film. Does my memory deceive me, or wasn’t River Phoenix blond as well? It’s a poetic strangeness that I like and that must have guided me through Mélanie’s cosmogony, without my being aware of it. This familiar, if somewhat outlandish, microcosm in which all the stars are women apart from Longman. And apart from those “guys,” of course, like a speck over the horizon.

Very young, there was no future and the world resembled a burned-out house like the one at the corner of the street torched by ‘strangers,’ so said my mother who had served them a drink. My mother thought only one of them was armed but no concern came over her for all the others had blue eyes. My mother often said that men were free to act as in books. She would finish her sentence then, once the uneasiness had passed, sit in front of the television set.

The paths of fear often lead to fear of the other, and then to insularity. As I reread these excerpts in order to better respond to your question, I realized that it was the words of the “original” version that I’d remembered. I think that with this version in mind, I simply overlooked this passage, superimposing my first impression onto it. I’d noticed that the translator exaggerates desire in her version, that the eroticism is more apparent in her hands. Now, I realize that all the sensations/emotions are magnified in that version.

That includes fear, which overrides the poetry in this excerpt.

The fear of a mother who is a catalyst, in a way, giving Mélanie the push she needs to leave.

A double-edged fear.

When I read it again, the thing that struck me was the association between the words “strangers,” “armed” and “blue eyes.” It’s no longer distance that’s being evoked, but difference. The kind of difference we’re suspicious of. Everything that is unfamiliar to us, our habits and our world. The mother is reassured by the eye colour of most of the “guys” in the group, but is worried about the one whose eyes are different. That one is armed. And the house will be torched.

The thing that drew my attention here is the circulation of meaning between versions. I told you that in my mind, the original and translated version blend together, so that my interpretation and the translator’s interpretation end up merging. And the poetry swells until it overwhelms the words with which it is created, colouring the entire fictional construction, Mélanie’s universe.

Nicole, April 8, 2018

In this paragraph, the mother is trying to teach her daughter about men. Her reasoning for doing so is unclear, since she doesn’t want to condemn all men. However, she uses the phrases “only one of them was armed” and “all the others had blue eyes.” Her confusion is reflected in the phrase “My mother always talked about men as if they had seen the day in a book.” There is a double constraint between “the greatness of Man” (science, philosophy, art) and the reality of the guys (everyday life). The mother is not at all reassured by “blue eyes,” but here the author feigns innocence in order to mask the discomfort with poetic metaphor. Then the mother returns to the television set, believing that she is escaping from a reality ruled by violence and fear. To a certain extent, she does the same thing we do with all the screens that distract, stimulate, enchant, lie and alienate us.

By the way, I should add that in my mind, “the shack on the corner which one day was set on fire” was set on fire by the KKK. I use the word “shack” because it was poor people who lived there and who were the victims of the fire, whose heinousness we try to forget by temporally distancing ourselves from it with the expression “one day.”

In short, the author is angry and Mélanie steps on the gas pedal.

I asked because I wanted to know what you took from these phrases and to see how meaning shifts in the vastness and encounters between words. All this to say that we’ll never be done exploring meaning and the pleasure of knowing that it is so unclear, so open, like the widespread idea that we need to stay alive.

Nicole, April 27, 2016

Your relationship with Mélanie has probably been in continual transformation for nearly fifteen years (in images, books, and projects). As for me, my relationship with Mélanie began while I was writing the book. Mélanie is an intersection, a meeting point where the adolescent space (a significant one for all human beings) unfolds, touching all aspects of who we are: intellectual, sexual, emotional, spiritual, identity-forming (who am I?), existential (what is living, life?). This is what gives her rebel wings, her vital self.

She embodies the whole “self,” pieces of which are found in us. In her, there is not only the invaluable rebellion against boredom, banality, reality, repetition, but also the potential for discovering the world + speed, which keeps her constantly alert. Mélanie is still close to me because the world belongs to her when she departs from reality. This is probably what we love about all artists on some level, this ability, this persistent wish to break through the wall, the mirror of our imaginative potential. In this sense, we always carry the potential for writing, tattooing (from the smallest sign to an invasion of the entire body by the sign, its erasure under an image – images).

Nicole, March 30-31, 2016

Tattoos: I’ve always liked tattoos. I’ve never gotten a tattoo. To me, tattoos are a symbol of rebellion and pain and are also undoubtedly a rite of passage. Tattoos are fashionable now and, since everyone gets them, they’ve lost some of their meaning. I’m still convinced that getting many tattoos, and often is a way to displace pain, to make it forever visible to oneself or to others, to bring it from the inside to the surface – in short, to never forget its presence in the skin, to remember it and to be proud of it.

Tattoos still have meaning, but they don’t fascinate me anymore as symbols of rebellion and delinquency. That being said, there are some girls’ tattoos that I won’t soon forget. Actually, they’re probably also related to sexuality. As for how, that’s more complex.

Nicole, May 15, 2016

How I imagine Mélanie, thirty years later.

Tough question. I must have been about forty when I started writing my first drafts of Mauve Desert. Mélanie: poetry, freedom, love of movement, of travel, of the horizon, sunset + the mythical tools of civilization (car, revolver, TV).

Mélanie is a concentration of vitality, of intelligence, of rebellion, of desire, of solitude, of challenge. She’s comfortable in her athletic body; her movements are quick and precise. Her plans are never explained because she lives in the present, the beauty of the moment. She wants to discover. What strikes me is that Mélanie likes to be alone. As though she were an essence rather than a person (a rebellious fifteen-year-old girl living in the Arizona desert, rebelling against the world that surrounds her – stupidity, greed, violence – a girl consumed by the cruel beauty of the desert).

Mélanie is not studious, since where she lives, nature and daily life are more important than becoming a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, an architect. There’s nothing feminine in her future except the love of another woman. Living with two mothers, she’s a misfit.

Is it really an image of Mélanie or a desire more related to film?

Casting. I have to like Mélanie’s face.
She can be athletic: a young rebel who likes to move.
She can be calm: she learns by observing. At the bar, for example.
She learns by listening.