Le chat couleur par Salah Stétié, and: L’être par Salah Stétié (review)

Reviews 283 STÉTIÉ, SALAH. Le chat couleur. Saint-Clément: Fata Morgana, 2014. ISBN 978-285194 -901-1. Pp. 62. 13 a. . L’être. Saint-Clément: Fata Morgana, 2014. ISBN 978-2-85194-900-4. Pp. 86. 17 a. Much in these works is poetry in a deep sense, exploring world, other, and self with a keen eye, apt yet always imaginative turns of phrase, and a certain weightlessness born of the perceptual acuity that aging brings the author. He looks back on life and loved ones, recounting by turns richly mythical and relatively ordinary scenes, but also looks forward, with an appealing mix of fear and childlike curiosity as he glimpses spiritual and corporal metamorphoses that death seemingly brings, described for example in poetry as a metaphorical breaking through beyond walls into the life of an insect, of a dog, of silence as definitive song with its own array of unendingly fascinating characteristics. With a fluid, elegantly expressed, intensely felt and somewhat personal ache, Stétié carves out here a distinctive lyrical space. He lends words a rhythm and an élan, while also sharing the trove of wisdom and experience that his eventful background and French-Arabic roots bring him. L’être first hints at youth and age relative to war-torn Lebanon, then shifts toward death, carnality, and presence in and to the world as broader themes, and finally meditates with singular intensity on ties between life and death, paradises lost and found, and poetic vision and a perhaps paradoxically empty world, via a clutch of intriguing images, abstractions, and references to antiquity. Part one,“Les feuilles les plus vertes” (7–22), with its thirteen one-page poems that tend toward free verse within couplet, tercet, and quatrain forms, introduces a tale of disarray and human loss in a past that feels present, through lines that evoke a worldview and set a tone at once mysterious and urgent, personal and eternal: “[Leurs lettres] disaient l’enfance appauvrie / Et le pays aux lampes retirées / / Elles disaient le mal des écritures / Le silence et les mots / Pour féconder les signes et les songes”(9);“Et la longue journée / Avec la cuisse longue / Pauvre en divinité”(13). There are tangible shared torments, for instance seas that separate lovers and the“noir dahlia de vivre”(11) that masks reunion as an eventually illuminating joy. Both despite and because of “le désespoir de la parole” (16), intimations of carnal love—as well as of spiritual closeness later rediscovered—take on added fervency. Part two, “L’être” (23–67), retains the reader’s interest by hewing to similar images and themes but adding still more intriguingly enigmatic statements and declarative boldness:“JE n’est pas matière [...] / / Je caresse ma mort / (Et celle-ci mystérieusement me caresse)”(31); “Toi, tu ne fus, me dit l’Esprit, que poussière. / Je dis: Sauvez-moi des insectes, sauvez mon nom / Confiez-le, arbres, au remuement de vos feuilles” (59). Though “le fruit dans la parole” (41) can be savored here, one might occasionally question the “fioritures” (65) as the speaker does. Nonetheless, part three,“L’Uræus” (69–79), first published separately in early 2014, touches powerfully on human yearning since Biblical times, emptiness in the world as a presence,“le Bouddha”(79), and sacredness including as it relates to female goddess figures. The six short stories of Le chat couleur, meanwhile, favor effortlessly clear prose and a lucid, self-aware, inquisitive tone, qualities that make them endearing even as they scrutinize uncertainties such as, in“Le chat couleur” (51–56), the impossibility of remembering a loved one’s eye color and, in a calming twist, the glint in a cat’s eyes having“la couleur de l’éternité”(56) that the cat coyly says must be deciphered.“La grande barque”(7–20) speaks with warmth and adroitness—and awareness of “la parole ensemencée par le désert si proche” (19)— about Noah just before the flood, keen to reinvent“le Paradis terrestre [...] qui précède l’intrusion de l’homme dans l’univers”(14).“La mer de Koan”(21–29) tells intrepidly of art as a...