SOURCE: "From Lesbos to Montreal: Nicole Brossard's Urban Fictions," in Yale French Studies, No. 90, 1996, pp. 95-114.

[In the following essay, Huffer asserts that "Brossard's oeuvre distinguishes itself from an entire Sapphic tradition of lesbian writing by demystifying nostalgia rather than celebrating it."]

Helen, my grandmother, is one hundred-and-one years old. Having never remarried since her husband died over thirty-five years ago, she dines and plays bridge with the other elderly residents of the group facility where she lives in Toledo, Ohio. It's funny how women endure. Like a lesbian enclave, the place is virtually without men. I think of this as some strange connection between us, a certain similarity between her home and mine, but one that will never be spoken. My grandmother will never know about me, unless, perhaps, she reads these lines. She will never know about the woman, my mother, who married her son, and who later came out as a lesbian, long before I did, when the going was rough and the stakes were high. Now, among the aunts and uncles and distant cousins, some know about us and whisper discreetly. Others, to be fair, are sympathetic. A few embrace us. But when you become a lesbian, you automatically get written out of someone's history. There is no branch there, for mother and daughter and the women we love, on the precious family tree.

Sometimes details, like trees and cousins, can bring you through detours to the heart of a matter. In one branch of the family we recently discovered the captain of a ship: a distant cousin, I believe. Not long ago my uncle found this cousin's log-book in my grandmother's safe. The travel log, dated 1811, recorded his movements, his thoughts, the food he ate, the weather he encountered, as he crossed the Atlantic. When my uncle sat down and plotted out the ship's course from Dublin to New York he found, not surprisingly, that sailing ships never travel in straight lines. Although journeying from east to west, most days the boat traveled northeast to southwest or southeast to northwest. Some days it sailed backwards or scarcely changed its position at all. It moved erratically, like the lightning flare of a heart, pumping, flashing across an EKG monitor.

After more than a century of life, my grandmother's heart is still beating. I would like her rhythm to be recorded, just as the zigzagging motion of a ship was given pulse and flare again through my uncle's diligent tracings. But there are other journeys within those lines: the hidden lives that will not be recorded on my uncle's map or the family tree. These are the journeys I want to record.

We can conceive of a life lived, like we can a journey, as a game of connect-the-dots. Moments in experience, like points on a map, can be linked to reveal a pattern. The result is a network of beginnings, destinations, and bridges that only make sense when they are plotted against other visible cultural patterns. So, if meanings assemble like flags on a map or letters on a page, how might a cartographer of the invisible proceed? In particular, how might a cartographer of lesbian history and culture plot the unrecorded movements of lesbian lives?

Let's look again at Winterson's parable about the Greek letter. She gives us a recipe for writing and reading the hidden life: one part milk, one part coal-dust sprinkled, of course, by someone who knows what she's doing. Reading Winterson's description of the coded letter, I want the "life flaring up" to be subversive, lesbian, refusing invisibility and silence. But is it? Is lesbian writing like a secret message written in milk and made visible by those who know better? I can see it now:

Lesbian #1: Ah hah! Look what I found! An ancient letter!

Lesbian #2: Yeah, and it's sticky! I think I'll sprinkle it with coal-dust! What do you think?

Lesbian #1: Go for it, babe. I have a good feeling about this one …

Lesbian #2: Hmmm, let's see…. Yep, just as I suspected! A message from Sappho …

Lesbian #1: It takes one to know one …

Is secret communication the way of liberation? It's true that oppression forces people to be creative in finding alternative forms of expression. But, pace Cixous, I cringe at the thought of snapping a cartridge filled with milk into my fountain pen. I'd rather work at changing the conditions of our lives: we all deserve a pen, lots of paper, and a lifetime supply of ink. Besides, these days coal-dust is hard to come by.

Still, I'm attracted to cultural myths, like the Sapphic one, about hushed secrets finding voice. Some days, for example, I dream of sailing away, like a good lesbian, to Lesbos. I'd bring my mother along, and together we'd plot our course back through some other history, some other time, to an alternative family origin. Gathering like sibyls to read the crumpled leaves strewn beneath the family tree, we'd map shapes and scenes of passion from the censored thoughts and silent scribblings lying there like unmailed letters. Casting off, we'd say goodbye to patriarchy and oppression:

farewell black continent of misery and suffering farewell ancient cities we are embarking for the shining radiant isles for the green Cytheras for the dark and gilded Lesbos.

Of course, this kind of escapist vision in which I sometimes indulge is hardly new, as a whole lesbian separatist tradition can attest, to say nothing of a long line of lesbian and nonlesbian writers who celebrate some version of a Sapphic heritage. Leaving the continent for the island is a frequently plotted route for those who find in Lesbos a symbol of political and cultural origins. As Judy Grahn puts it:

Sappho wrote to us from (this) island … to those of us holding Sappho in our mind's eye as the historic example both of Lesbianism and of Lesbian poetry, everything she represents lies on an island.

If, for Grahn and others, Sappho is the historic example of lesbian life and lesbian writing, the move from the continent to the island is hardly surprising. However, isn't this pilgrimage to a Greek Island another version of the secret milk-writing described by Winterson? Isn't this just a lesbian form of nostalgia? Finding a lost island is like finding the lost lines of a letter: both function to constitute an exclusive community around the revelation of a secret. Again, we can ask this question: is this hidden, insular, coded communication the way of liberation? Do lesbians just need to get back to the island, to the source of our desire, to the milky place of our Sapphic mother?

If we answer, "no! that's not it," and "no, again, that's still not it!" the problem becomes: so now what? If we agree that "every journey conceals another journey within its lines," how do we trace that other journey without falling into the nostalgic trap of coded letters and secret islands? How do we map invisibility and silence? What is revealed, and what disappears in that mapping? The question is complex, as Adrienne Rich reminds us in her poem "Cartographies of Silence":

     Silence can be a plan
     rigorously executed
 
     the blueprint to a life
     It is a presence
     it has a history a form
 
     Do not confuse it
     with any kind of absence

History and form go together: a game of connect-the-dots. Just as bits of family history are brought to light as a branch on a verdant tree, so too a certain version of lesbian history can assemble itself into a deceptively singular shape—a Greek letter, an island—that gives it cultural meaning. To ignore the island and the sticky letter would be to do what Rich warns us not to do: to erase the blueprint, to confuse silence with absence. But to remain stuck there isn't the answer either. Most crucially, many lesbians will never find their way with that milky map. What do Sappho, Lesbos, and Greek culture represent, for example, for a lesbian of African descent? For the native people of North America? Indeed, the plotting of that journey back to ancient Greece not only fails to acknowledge other histories and other maps, but it has effaced the paths and cultural symbols through which those stories can be traced. Liberation means more than making maps from silence and giving shape to the invisible. What flares up as a flag on the map, and what is erased by that marker?

Rich's poem suggests that lesbian writing, like silence, has a history and a form, but its shape is dynamic, multilayered, and changing. Here I'm reminded of my uncle's discovery: sailing ships never travel in straight lines. Recording "the unrecorded" can only be an erratic and complex undertaking; like history itself, lesbian lives might be seen as layers of journeys superimposed on a map thick with time. Lesbian writing cannot be a straight shot home to some Sapphic paradise: check the turn of the compass needle and watch the change of sails as the ship shifts direction to find the wind. There it is: another "path not taken," another "forgotten angle."

"Every journey conceals another journey within its lines": grandmothers hide log-books and ships and sailors; lesbian daughters hide lesbian mothers; continents hide islands; silence hides the blueprint to a life, someone writing. Like every journey, every writing conceals another writing: behind Homer lies Sappho; behind Proust lies Colette; behind France and its literary canon lie Sénégal and Senghor, Martinique and Césaire, Guadeloupe and Condé, Québec and Hébert. Conversely, writing, flaring up, can make other writings disappear, just as new cities can violently efface old ones, as the conquest of continents makes abundantly clear. The flight of sailors into the uncharted azure may be the stuff of poems as well as family lore, but those expansive journeys are hardly innocent: pouf! and there goes a city, a civilization, an island. I remember the light through the window, splashing the table, taking shape at the heart of writing…. After my conversation with Nicole Brossard, I met up with my friend Serene. We were there in Montreal and we loved the image of girls in the city with diaphanous wings and combat boots: "an urban radical," "a fairy in combat in the city of men." This translation of Brossard's metaphor was a mistake on my part, I was later to learn. She had said "fille en combat," not "fée en combat." Oh well, I thought, French is a language that is never mastered. I was embarrassed by my linguistic ineptitude; but to be honest, I was also … disappointed. I have to admit, I still want them to be fairies: urban fairies, in combat, in the city of men, "in this dark adored adorned gehenna."

So I've been looking for a place for my fairy to live, and I think I've found it, right here in the city, in the pages of Brossard's French Kiss. As in kissing, so in speaking: it's never certain where those lips and swirling tongues will take you. Her lips pronounced fille and I heard fée, a fairy in "a forest smelling pungently of brick, cool green forest painted on a wall of brick." I remember Brossard saying: "if each woman could project the best that she senses in herself onto other women, we would already have accomplished a lot." So that's how I became an urban fairy, projected by her, coming out into a forest painted cool and green. I was still myself, but I was also just a bit more than myself: braver, slightly larger, more expansive.

She was a sight to behold, this urban fairy I became, unfolding beyond the mirror Brossard was holding. She belonged to another dimension: magnified and armed to the hilt, not with milk and parchment, but with spray paint, a wand, and wings to take her spiralling up and down those walls. What a dyke! I perceived her clearly, moving "under the surface with wins-like texture to confront reality," writing her aerial letter for all to see.

Graffiti-writing fairies may seem a long way off from secret letters and sailing ships, to say nothing of my grandmother in Toledo, Ohio. I can't help but see the connections, though: family trees become urban forests, coal-sprinkled letters become graffiti-marked walls. How do we remember and record what is lost? Who is writing, and who is reading?

I'm still moving through the glass that Brossard holds before me: there, beneath the surface, where wings and wand turn to arc and spiral, people stand on platforms waiting for the trains to come. Their daily travels across the city reveal the writing on the walls, the places beneath the surface where meanings appear, like fairies coming out into an urban forest.

Which realities do we remember and choose to record? Brossard has written: "I am an urban woman on the graffiti side of the wall, on the sleepless side of night, on the free side of speech, on the side of writing where the skin is a fervent collector of dawns." And she continues: "I guess it is difficult for me to stay on the island because I am a woman of the written word." I keep imagining her, like my urban fairy, finding her home among the paint-scribbled walls of the city.

In leaving the island behind, Brossard's urban radical also leaves behind the milk-writers and coal-dust-readers whose privilege allows them to construct for themselves an exclusionary world difficult to access, one that begins and ends with Greek culture. Unlike that private world of coded letters, Brossard's work should be imagined as "publicly fiction," kaleidoscopic layers of graffiti that illuminate an opening space of lesbian writing. Further, this contrast between Brossard's public urban fictions and a private Sapphic island represents more than just a difference in decor or geographical predilections. Unlike Brossard's Montreal, Lesbos functions symbolically both as a Utopian escape and as a space of origins. In that sense, Brossard's oeuvre distinguishes itself from an entire Sapphic tradition of lesbian writing by demystifying nostalgia rather than celebrating it. In fact, most of Brossard's writing, in one way or another, uncovers and subverts the nostalgic structures through which a concept of origins is produced.

What is a nostalgic structure, and how is it connected to lesbians, maps, and origins? A nostalgic structure is a system of thought that begins with the idea of return, from the Greek nostos: "the return home." This movement of return takes many different forms, depending on who is thinking nostalgically and what the context of that thinking might be. Most crucially, while the Greeks with their nostos might hold out the promise that, yes, you can return whence you came, nostalgia happens because you can't go home again. What looked like home is an illusion of home, the mirage of a content that disguises a blank.

Let's look at the way feminist theory analyzes gender and patriarchy in the context of a nostalgic structure. In addition to producing economic, sexual, social, and cultural forms of male domination, patriarchy also privileges men over women as thinkers, knowers, and speakers. That unequal dyad of man over woman produces a logic of analogous pairings such as thought over body and spirit over matter. Because women bear children, in a male-dominated system women are symbolically reduced to their corporeal, material form as reproductive bodies. As a result, to be a woman is, symbolically, to be a mother.

The privileging of man over woman as a thinking subject connects the logic of gender described above with the search for origins that lies at the heart of a nostalgic structure. Because thought involves a quest for knowledge, thinking is an activity of seeking that is motivated by desire. As patriarchy's privileged seeker of knowledge, man must construct an other-to-be-known as the object of his desire. And since gender inequality creates man as subject and woman as object and silent other, the object of man's search becomes, metaphorically, the lost mother. As a result, this form of nostalgia becomes a dominant structure of thought in a system that privileges men over women.

However, man's nostalgic quest is a sham because the son can never return to the mother; in fact, patriarchy requires the repeated failure of the son to unite with his lost other. By repeatedly missing her, the son sustains himself as an endlessly desiring subject. In this way, the object of desire—the ever-disappearing woman-as-mother—guarantees the existence of the subject of that desire—the ever-questing son. Man thus comes to exist by differentiating himself from that which he is not: the blank space, the unreachable mother, his silent and invisible other.

Feminist theory shows how a nostalgic structure works to perpetuate patriarchal oppression, but nostalgia also functions within oppressed groups struggling for liberation. For example, some feminist critics have noted the nostalgic structure underlying the desire to retrieve a lost canon of literary foremothers to counter the male-dominated tradition. Similarly, scholars in African-American studies have pointed to a nostalgic longing for "mother Africa" among African-Americans struggling in the context of a white racist culture. Finally, the Sapphic myth highlights the lesbian nostalgia for a Greek source of woman-loving art and culture that would challenge traditional heterosexist models.

While nostalgia has been harnessed for both oppressive and liberatory aims, the structure underlying nostalgic thinking ultimately reinforces a conservative social system. Because nostalgia requires the construction of a blank space, a lost origin to be rediscovered and claimed, it necessarily produces a dynamic of inequality in the opposition between a desiring subject and an invisible other. Further, in a nostalgic structure, an immutable lost past functions as a blueprint for the future, cutting off any possibility for uncertainty, difference, or fundamental change. Because nostalgia is necessarily static and unchanging in its attempt to retrieve a lost utopian space, its structure upholds the status quo.

Focusing on the workings of nostalgia allows me to map Brossard's journey as a lesbian writer in relation to the concept of an originary blank space and, ultimately, to ask political questions about the subversive potential of her writing. From her earliest days as a poet, Brossard has rejected the nostalgic thinking that constructs an empty origin as the lost object of the poet's desire. As Karen Gould points out, for Brossard and others at the avant-garde journal La barre du jour during the late 1960s, "to be modern meant to 'look lucidly into the hole' and to refuse to fill it, rejecting the lure of myth, ideology, and nostalgia." Brossard's early work explores the space of that unfilled hole by inscribing, within literature, literature's own dissolution. Confronted with a blank origin that refuses to hold a content, the poetic subject disappears into the movement of the work itself; both subject and object disappear, and all that remains is the pure desire that brings the work into being.

By the mid-1980s, Brossard's critique of nostalgic thinking had moved from fundamentally aesthetic questions to more explicitly political concerns related to her identity as a woman and as a feminist. Commenting on the influence of Blanchot, on his concept of neutrality, and on the notion of literature as a subjectless space of dissolution, Brossard explains this shift in her thinking:

Blanchot was very important to me. What was involved in the question of neutrality was the white space, which was linked to the question of ecstasy, to the present, the place where the "I" is dispersed to make room for the science of being, its contemplation. Neutrality also meant putting a halt to lyricism and to romanticism, to inspiration, in the ways in which I of course understood these words. Needless to say, neutrality was undoubtedly a fine displacement allowing me to forget that I was a woman, that is to say that I belonged to that category of non-thinkers. Feminist consciousness would de-neutralize me.

Just as Brossard found she could no longer forget she was a woman, so too the identity politics of writing as a lesbian became increasingly important. That recognition gives birth to the "girl in combat in the city," the "urban radical," and the "fabular subject." Brossard rejects the structure of origins that produces "woman" and, in so doing, also questions the nostalgic thinking that produces Lesbos as home of the True Lesbian. As Brossard puts it in reference to the girl in combat in the city:

She is the product of a choice that I make which is to stay in the polis in order to confront patriarchal meaning instead of retiring to the mythic island of the Amazons, whose subtext to me is peace and harmony, while the subject for la cité is the law (not harmony), the written word (not the song), and constant change. The mythic island is in me, in books, and in the women with whom I surround myself.

So while Brossard's "urban radical" doesn't explicitly reject Lesbos and Sappho as empowering cultural symbols, she isn't about to catch the next boat to lesbian paradise either. "I am a woman of the here and now," she says. Brossard begins where she finds herself: in Montreal, on the North American continent, in the material world. That world is plagued with misery and pain, "the silence of bodies elongated by hunger, fire, dogs, the bite of densities of torture" (Brossard's italics); but, that same world also offers hope, possibility, and the creative desire that brings an affirmation of life, "like the ultimate vitality and wisdom."

Brossard not only anchors herself in a city, on a continent, and in a world heavy with the baggage of history and tradition; through her writing she continually creates another city, another continent, and another world as well. Grounded in the reality of the everyday, Brossard's project is also visionary, virtual, aerial. "I am a woman of the here and now, fascinated with the virtual that exists in the species." Thus, while she grounds herself in her own identity—"I am still Nicole Brossard, born in Montreal, with a sense of the history of Quebec and of belonging in that French part of the North American continent"—she also creates the virtual figure of "MA continent," an intuitive dream of a lesbian body as light, lucidity, and transformation. But even in that projection of an opening lesbian space—"(mâ) it's a space / an hypothesis"—the lesbian continent is still grounded in the gravity and the weight of the everyday world:

     my continent woman of all the spaces
     cortex and flood; a sense of gravity
     bringing me into the world

Similarly, in French Kiss, the protagonists are both anchored in Montreal and, to a large extent, part of an infinitely layered, virtual Montreal, "glowing volatile in darkness" among the "illuminated cities issued from the method of writing." Like the characteristically Brossardian hologram, the surface of the city contains other pictures, exposes deeper three-dimensional realities within itself. The city contains the multiplicity of the memories of its inhabitants:

Memory makes itself plural, essential, like the vertigo that foreshadows an aerial vision…. I thus come to imagine myself hologram, real, virtual, three-dimensional in the imperative of coherent light.

Just as a three-dimensional image allows multiple surfaces to appear, so too memory can become plural, synchronic, holographic. One reality doesn't replace the other; rather, they coexist: Homer and Sappho; the French and British empires and the province of Quebec; the lives of Montreal and those of Caughnawaga.

"What's left for our story is to break up and be lost. Caughnawaga's underbrush. Expenditure for a sign." Holographic writing reveals not only the virtual possibilities of future stories and future paths, but also uncovers the breakup and loss of stories that form the fabric of past identities and histories. In the holographic image, both memory and possible futures are pluralized. This Brossardian logic of the hologram exposes a political aspect of nostalgic origin myths. The nostalgic gesture—to create an empty originary place and give it a content—falsely and imperialistically starts from the premise that the space for that content was in fact empty to begin with.

On the surface, the hologram may seem similar to the nostalgic myth. When the holographic picture comes into focus, something flares up but something else slips out of sight, just as the identity of the nostalgic son makes the mother disappear. However, unlike the complementary parts—subject and object, son and mother—of a nostalgic structure, every part of a holographic plate also contains an image of the whole; thus each fragment contains what is real, already there, or in the background, as well as what is virtual, possible, and waiting to be seen. When something flares up and something else disappears, that shift occurs because of a change in focus. So unlike the binary logic of presence and absence underlying the nostalgic gesture, the hologram allows for a synthesis of the multiple layers of realities and fictions contained within it.

Let's take the urban radical again as an example. Grounded in the city, she is a potential victim of rape, injustice, discrimination, and violence. But she is also, simultaneously, projected toward the realm of invented possibilities: another mythic figure, she is the lucid lesbian, "ma continent femme," coming into expression. Similarly, the city she inhabits and reconfigures is not just the reality of modern-day Montreal. The urban landscape that appears is a present-day Montreal thick with histories to be uncovered and, simultaneously, a virtual Montreal to be imagined and created. Brossard's metaphor of holographic writing points to the layered meanings, like the textured surfaces of graffiti on city walls, inscribed in the trace of pen on paper: that trace is both the mark that says "someone was here" and, at the same time, the opening path toward an "unrecorded thought" waiting to be imagined, waiting to be written.

How can the grounding mark and the virtual path coexist in writing? Comparing writing to holograms, Brossard imagines that "sentences," like holographic fragments, "might also contain the whole of what is at stake in a novel." So what is at stake in Brossard's writing? Again, to begin with, what is at stake for me (I want to say us, but my friend Carla won't let me) is the undoing of nostalgic structures. This core of Brossard's work can be examined not just conceptually, but also, more fundamentally, in the particular textured surfaces of the writing itself. In nostalgic writing, when something flares up something else is covered over; when the Greek letter is sprinkled with coal-dust, the blank of its milky origin disappears. In contrast, Brossard's holographic metaphor suggests that a single sentence of her writing would contain, simultaneously: first, the visible lines of the original letter; second, the lines in between, in their manifestation both as milk and coal; and, third, a plurality of other lines tracing other lives lived and other potential lives. It would open up multiple origins and multiple futures. It would invite inclusive communities of readers and writers instead of shutting out all but an educated, Eurocentric elite. So the question remains: does she pull it off? And if so, what does this have to do with lesbian writing?

To begin answering these questions, let's take Montreal in French Kiss as an example: "What's left for our story is to break up and be lost. Caughnawaga's underbrush. Expenditure for a sign." The final page of French Kiss suggests that writing requires an "expenditure": "expenditure for a sign." That expenditure of writing both uncovers a reality by naming what is there and, at the same time, creates a layered vision of a past and future city. But in addition to naming and creating a fictional reality called Montreal, the expenditure of writing also produces a reserve, an excess called Caughnawaga that the name "Montreal" cannot contain:

Leaving the city, now, by Route 2, heading for the Mercier Bridge. Its rusty old steel and worn white lines. Out of line. The blackness of the blue. The river and the Caughnawaga Reserve. [Brossard's emphasis]

So how does Caughnawaga function as the excess and reserve of the writing of Montreal in French Kiss? On a historical level, when Brossard alludes to Caughnawaga, she exposes the "reserve" of native peoples on which a "North American of French descent" identity depends. When that identity was "founded" in 1535 with Jacques Cartier's arrival at the Saint Lawrence River, the blank space on which that founding was inscribed, in fact, wasn't blank at all. Someone was already there:

Montreal surface and totems: "And in the middest of those fieldes is the sayd citie of Hochelaga, placed neere, and as it were ioyed to a great mountaine that is tilled round about, very fertill, on the toppe of which you may see very farre."

Brossard's quotation of Carrier's journal exposes a deeper reality beneath the surface of Montreal. Hochelaga was the city Cartier "discovered" when he traveled up the river in search of a mythical land of gold and jewels called the Kingdom of Saguenay. Standing at the site of modern-day Montreal, Hochelaga was home to over a thousand people who were part of an extensive group of tribes known as the Saint Lawrence Iroquoians. What we know of the Hochelagans comes from Cartier's notebooks and the speculations of scholars who have gathered evidence and unearthed artifacts, thereby mapping their own versions of the history of the Saint Lawrence valley. Most agree that Hochelaga was probably a walled city, that its inhabitants lived and worked in longhouses, and that they subsisted primarily on the planting and harvesting of corn. The arrival of the French most likely drew them into the economy of the fur trade, as it did other native tribes such as the Algonquin, the Montagnais, the Mahican, the Abenaki, the Sokoki, and the Iroquois. Exactly what happened to Hochelaga after the beginning of the European invasion in the sixteenth century will probably never be known with certainty. But by the turn of seventeenth century, the Hochelagans had disappeared.

So "what's left … for our story," for history? What's left is Montreal and Caughnawaga: a French-founded city, and a space outside it designated for the descendants of the native people who survived that founding. What's left for the writing of reality and fiction is the break-up, loss, and symbolic reconstruction of lives lived, of "villages scrambled in the ink of history." In the nostalgic model, the map of French history and culture needs the blank page of its writing: Hochelaga "disappears" and French history moves on. Nostalgic memory would therefore found Montreal on an originary blank, an empty space to be conquered and inscribed with a French identity. In contrast, Brossard's holographic, graffiti memory exposes the real and symbolic violence that produces the illusion of that originary blank. Reading French Kiss is like deciphering the many coats of scrawl that collect as graffiti on subway walls. That graffiti becomes holographic: layers of paint simultaneously come into focus as the many faces of Montreal-Hochelaga. To ignore those layers is to repeat the violence that both replaced Hochelaga with Montreal, and produced the "reserve" called Caughnawaga. "For your whole life," Brossard writes, "you will remember the graffiti in the subway, my only daughter." That uniquely Brossardian graffiti contains the "frescoes, multiple in the prism" that trace the invisible: mapping, as Rich puts it, "the blueprint to a life."

Does Brossard succeed in dismantling the logic of presence and absence at the heart of nostalgia and writing? I would like to think of her work as another kind of lesbian writing that is not just by a lesbian or about lesbians, but which explores the very processes through which people and their stories are made invisible. Such a writing would think about Hochelagans as well as lesbians; and it would tell a story, as in French Kiss, not just of woman-loving tongues swirling in mouths, but also of the genocidal "kiss" of death that is the legacy of the map-makers, fur-trappers, conquerors, and colonizers of this planet. In addition, such a writing would not just replace one story with another, but would restructure the very logic of replacement, reconfiguring the relation between the writing subject and the reserve on which the writing depends. In that sense, this other kind of "lesbian" writing might come to name a thick, holographic, urban poetry in which reality, fiction, and utopia would coexist.

But what would it look like, exactly? Ah, there she would be: "The generic body would become the expression of woman and woman would have wings above all, she'd make (a) sign." Yes, she might disappear for a while, but then I would see her, my urban fairy, tracing spirals of graffiti up and down the walls. A holographic projection—"woman and woman would have wings above all"—there she (and I) would be:

Plunged into the centre of the city, I would dream of raising my eves. FEMME SKIN TRAJECTOIRE. Donna lesbiana dome of knowledge and helix, already I'd have entered into a spiral and my being of air aerial urban would reproduce itself in the glass city like an origin.

There she, and I, would be. We would find each other through the words in their reading, and there we would be: "being of air aerial urban," reproducing ourselves "like an origin," but already changing, spiralling elsewhere.

This reading can only happen, at least for me, in the form of a conditional: it would tell a story … and it would look like this … and there, can't you see? we (or perhaps just I) would be…. That conditional reading, like the hologram, is always there, waiting to be read, waiting to flare up like a flag on a map. But beyond that conditional, more explicitly political questions remain.

What does Brossard's writing say or do for lesbian politics? How does her urban radical work for feminism? Where is the link between the memory of Hochelaga and the contemporary struggles of native peoples in North America? Does the writing itself function as the kind of public fiction that the theory proclaims? Indeed, one of the most commonly heard complaints about Brossard's writing is that it is opaque and inaccessible, that it speaks to an audience of educated elites who share a common practice and way of thinking. Who is reading her, and to whom is she writing? Do her complex urban fictions really speak like graffiti on a subway wall?

What is at stake in her writing? Perhaps that question, more than any other, contains the seeds of my impatience at the difficulty of Brossard's writing. We all live in one world, but privilege allows some of us to choose a room of our own from among many possible worlds. Brossard lives in an urban room filled with fractals, holograms, and virtual realities. And I know that she from her room, as I from mine, wants the world to heal. But who among us can hear her? Some of us need narrative and the prose of preachers, not translucent letters in a metaphorical cyberspace. To be sure, I deeply respect and admire Brossard's holographic writings. But I long for stories that my mother and grandmother might hear.

"And now," says Winterson, stepping out from the wings backstage, "swarming over the earth with our tiny insect bodies and putting up flags and building houses, it seems that all the journeys are done." Alas, we long for stories, but it seems that there are no more earthly places to travel. The world is mapped: there are no more journeys and no more stories to tell. "Not so," I hear, and it's Winterson speaking again. But it could just as easily be Brossard, saying, "Not so! Not so! See, here's another layer of graffiti, another aerial letter!" Okay, I think, so let's look again.

Something's happening beneath the surface, waiting to be noted and marked. It could be my mother, proud, with her lover, on a wide leafy branch of the family tree. It could be my grandmother's century-old heart, beating to the rhythm of my cousin's ship, or measuring time across my uncle's chart. It could be other rhythms and other lives uncovered. stories whose lines on my particular map might only be obvious to me. Who knows what patterns I'll end up tracing? Who knows what I'll end up saying?

More important, who knows what we'll choose to say and do? As Brossard puts it, "I speak to an I to ensure the permanence of the we. If I don't take on that which says we in me, the essence of what I am will have no longevity but the time of one life, mine, and that's too short for us" (translation modified). I think Brossard is one of those cartographers of an invisible I who speaks from the heart of an invisible we. The line of that we runs parallel with mine, for a moment; perhaps, but it also stretches away behind and before me. Of course, we have to constantly ask the question: who are we? For Brossard that asking is part of the struggle. Nothing is given from the start, especially not the origin of an identity. The we can only find itself in the effort and the struggle of the searching.

In that sense Brossard is a map-maker, working for liberation, who can help us pull ourselves together and find our way when we're lost in the forest or adrift at sea. And if it's true that all the journeys aren't done, perhaps it's also true that new maps and new discoveries don't have to efface old ones. "Round and flat," Winterson says, "only a very little has been discovered." So perhaps Brossard can help us to make different maps and different journeys "toward the idea of a future, another shore." And perhaps that future will bring healing to the places erased in violence, uncovering sedimented histories and shifting forms in the spaces on the map where there was never absence, just a "rigorously executed" silence.