Francky Lauret

Jeanne Brézé (b.1961-2019) was a poet who won acclaim in Réunion and beyond through her viscerally powerful verse. Her poem “La ligne bleue” (the blue line) has been made into a spoken word performance by Hélène Coré and Sophy Rotbard. Brézé, who was open about her trauma from a childhood of neglect and poverty, as well as her acute suffering from “very painful and onerous” mental health issues, turned this pain into the stuff of poetry. The poem below is a striking example of this.

Concordance

We are conjugated beyond the conjugal

Beyond tense times, in every inflection

Our pronoun is indivisible,

And invisible;

Here, for you, I exhale this breath

Held too long, too secret

Oh, these Dead Letters

That we try to reanimate;

They bore and bother us!

In this, here, we feel a life

Of greater beauty

Of words we tremble to write

And to read

We write when we don’t see each other

What happiness not to write to you

More often.

You, my pronominal other half,

Verb of my periphrases,

Music of my rhythm.