"What kind of message is this?" was one feminist response during a CBC round table (aired on "Prime Time Magazine" in prereferendum October 1995) in reaction to propagandist remarks made by Lucien Bouchard in a recent "yes"-side campaign linking reproduction and the sovereignty project in Quebec. While Bouchard's alienating comments exemplify a centuries-old validation of women through their reproductive function, their assigned use-value in Western tradition, my purpose here is to trace how the patriarchal impetus of the Quebec separatist movement circumscribes feminist aims and to suggest, through the movement from the regional to the international in the fiction of Nicole Brossard, the incompatibility of feminist and Quebec nationalism as discursive constructions. While both separatist and feminist ideologies are interested in issues of sameness and difference, of language/shared cultural experience/history, Brossard's evolving awareness of the incompatibility in definition of the "us/them" dichotomy can be traced throughout her oeuvre, in which physical place (Quebec) becomes supplanted, displaced, by the international feminist body as site for political resistance. For Brossard, ultimately, the linguistic signifier "separatism" spirals into an "other" direction, signalling a process not toward an autonomous, segregated discursive region identified as Quebec but toward an independently cooperative, transnational community of women, a lesbian separatism.

The factious relationship between feminist and sovereigntist interests in 1970s Quebec was not a natural, not an essential, one. It would be a form of imperialism itself to suggest that women inherently cannot engage in political activism as both feminists and nationalists: to argue that women must choose, as Trinh T. Minh-ha says, between ethnicity and womanhood is to participate in the patriarchal system of "dualistic reasoning and its age-old divide-and-conquer tactics." In fact, for many early female separatists, the nationalist movement—with its distrust of the status quo and its discourse of decolonization—seemed to be a forum through which women could challenge their double marginalization as Québécoise; they shared with the male population, as Paula Gilbert Lewis contends, feelings of impotency, inferiority, and alienation (a colonized existence) under the economic and linguistic dominance of English Canada and the powerful hegemony of the Catholic Church. But the 1970 FLF(Q) slogan, "Pas de libération du Québec sans libération des femmes," already signified the tension between feminist and nationalist discourses in Quebec, since the freedom of women was not inherent in the vision of a free Quebec.

Certainly a patriarchal impetus is locatable in some of the major separatist texts of the era, reflecting the kinds of patriarchal inscription exploded in Brossard's oeuvre. In the mid-1960s, texts such as Claude Jasmin's Pleure pas, Germaine and Jacques Ferron's La Nuit portrayed women, like the romans de terre before them, as representations of the earth, of the mother, as terre Québec, as interchangeable entities of imprinted function. In perhaps the most acclaimed separatist text of the era, Hubert Aquin's Prochaine épisode, the narrator's mistress, K., blends indistinguishably into the picture of Venus the first time the protagonist sees her, and throughout the text her identity is mysteriously conflated with that of H. de Heutz's treacherous blonde. (Repeated emphasis on the colour of [both?] women's hair imprints the suggestion of connection. Also, the reiterated wordplay in the original, "ma blonde," used to identify K., suggests that possession/definition is linked to attribute, to woman's objectification in the male gaze.) Furthermore, K. stands as a metaphor for Quebec, la terre that is "le pays qui te ressemble, mon vrai pays natal et secret…." Aquin posits K.'s body in geographically physical terms—but K. is like Quebec not because both are colonized but because of a centuries-old identification (the lay of the land) in which the text seems complicit: "Sur ton lit de sables calcaires et sur tes muqueuses alpestres, je descends à toute allure, je m'étends comme une nappe phréatique, j'occupe tout; je pénètre, terroriste absolu, dans tous les pores de ton lac parlé …" (emphasis added). The text does not seem to explode this violent deposing of woman, her colonization, but to engage in it to serve its nationalist proclivities: "Les noms impurs de nos villes redisent l'infinie conquête que j'ai réapprise en te conquérant,mon amour…. Ton pays natal m'engendre révolutionnaire: sur ton étendue lyrique, je me couche et je vis."

It was in fact this phallocratic law of the father under which the nationalist movement, like patriarchy generally, was largely impelled that induced many female nationalists to distinguish between their oppression as Québécois(es) and as women, to choose to break from the Marxist-Leninist groups that identified the women's movement as secondary to the liberation of working classes and the creation of a sovereign Quebec. As Claude Lizé has said, "les femmes ont compris qu'elles ne pourraient pas participer à la 'joute oratoire' sans renoncer à leur propre discours."

Such difference/différence experienced by women in the movement is articulated early in Brossard's fiction, if authorially absent from her theory. Brossard has stated in an interview her collective involvement with Roger Soublière: "nous avons lu Parti Pris et nous avons compris. Il n'y avait pas à discuter: les positions critiques de cette revue ajoutées à notre expérience quotidienne du Québec … achevèrent de transformer notre impatience en un naturel contestaire." Engaged in the political struggles of Quebec, she shared the goal of the Parti Pris (the journal-organ of the nationalist movement that she helped to found)—that of an independent and socialist Quebec liberated from the political influence of the Catholic Church. Yet in her earliest novel, Un livre, published in 1970, the sexist blindsiding of women in the separatist movement is already manifest in the book's tension between patriarchal nationalism and feminist impulses, a tension not yet theoretically evident in the rhetoric she espoused. In an interview, Brossard has said that "Un livre a été écrit à l'époque où j'avais des préoccupations politiques en rapport avec toute la question nationale, alors que French Kiss est arrivé à un moment où j'étais imbibée … d'informations que touchaient la biologie, l'écologie, le corps [la féminisme]…." The fairly facile split between feminist and nationalist proclivities espoused here is not borne out in the fiction. Although Un livre evinces solidarity with the nationalist movement, a vision of political collectivity imaged throughout in the interchangeability of the text's male and female actors, this interchangeability is exploded by the text. It is not a neutral but a politically loaded representation: the text begs attention to the minutia, invites interpretation of its gaps and interstices, its system of signs in small letters:

Lire O. R., c'est aussi lire Dominique et Mathieu car tous trois s'inscrivent identiques dans le livre…. La lecture … de O. R., Dominique et Mathieu doit être envisagée comme une démarche essentiellement ludique: l'oeil répond aux moindres stimulations AVIS…. Lire: ou faire le tri dans la masse noire des mots…. O. R., assise par terre, jambes croisées, un livres sur les genoux. Un livre qu'elle ne lit pas. Mais qu'elle louche. Dominique et Mathieu, l'un devant l'autre, penchès sur un damier de go, impatients de créer chacun pour soit l'espace vainqueur.

The particulars enumerated are not gratuitous ("l'oeil répond aux moindres stimulations"): the characters are not identical. O. R. is scripted differently from the men around her (all are vaguely identified with the FLQ) despite the text's literal assertion otherwise; she is excluded from the male competition, from the male quest for product. The men are "anxious" not in the pleasure, the ecstasy of the jeu, but in the single desire to master the game; her activity, however, is not end-goal oriented. She delays/defers even the pleasurable act of reading in the process of touching the book.

The women are further unlike the male separatists in the group since O. R. and Dominique C. are scripted, whereas the others are not, in silence: O. R. "n'a rien à dire et c'est Dominique qui parle." Again, although the text tries to suggest on an open level the notion that all the five "variables" in the text are anonymously similar, it is only the women, O. R. and Dominique C., who are identified by initial, by the truncation of a proper name. (The male Dominique needs no other identifying mark.) O. R. identifies her lack of a name with her exclusion from the male realm, the symbolic: "O. R.: initiales. Des lettres à l'origine d'un nom que personne jusqu'ici n'a prononcé." Nameless, she is ever in the service of her use-value: "Garder l'anonymat: être la personne qui écrit au nom de plusieurs autres." Her body is commodified, a unit of exchange, manipulated by Dominique as payment to Mathieu for his debts without her consent.

Thus, for O. R., as for Dominique C., the glass must always be empty—there is little room for female freedom in a movement in which many of the male leaders remain patriarchs, in which women's autonomy is not implied in emancipated discourse. Rarely unfettered, the women are caught instead in the specular vision of the same (this is the explosion of the representation of the indistinguishability of identities represented in the text), which negates difference reflected back against itself: "Dominique la regarde et ne se souvient de rien. La devine dans la distance: une jeune femme parmi les autres." Woman is invisible in the male gaze except as the same (an inferior model of the same, o.r. as conflations of an other, a nothing to see) in a male-dominated movement. That it is only woman who is equated with the subaltern other is evident in the power relations that constitute the text: O. R. is Dominique's visible "cible," the object of his desire, his control: "D'une seule main Dominique couche O. R. à ses côtés. Violemment pourquoi? Parce que selon les règles d'un vieux jeu." Dominique is part of a collective movement organizing for sociopolitical change—but clearly the imperial patriarchy that he seeks to overthrow will be replaced, simply, by a more nationalist (sovereign) one. The conquest here challenged by Brossard is that of the female body, its history of exploitation, abuse, colonization, by men.

Yet the text offers space beyond such containment: O. R.'s desires exceed the command of Dominique's hand. O. R. is liberated from his control of her body, from the societal inscription of its market value, when naked and free on the balcony. Liberated in her nudity, freed from society's clothing/coding of her body, her celebration becomes "le scandale de la liberté" (emphasis added); her act is scandalous because it is transgressive. Phallocratic law cannot read such female jouissance except in signs of denigration. Yet when she/her body is decried "Trop belle, laide, vulgaire, putain," the narrative voice intervenes, overwrites the paternal ownership of meaning in language, for "Etrangement les mots s'accumulent mais ne font guère que s'accumuler." Sings in the phallocratic system can only accrue hollowly upon each other because O. R. exceeds the phatic, swells beyond the conventional agreement/conspiracy between patriarchal society and language: "[elle] vit déjà autre chose. Dominique le sait." Even her shadow (woman's image often mistaken for her self and overwritten by the male gaze into the dream of the same) is, ultimately, "étrangère au regard de Dominique qui entrouve les paupières." She is not the same, she exceeds the same: there is "quelque chose de plus dans le regard de O. R." There is, suggests the text, an ever-increasing "plus" in women's vision, a comprehension of the scripted lack juxtaposed with a growing awareness of plenitude. Thus, in Un livre, already in 1970, the tension between male interests in the nationalist cause and women's role and subjugation by men in the movement is being interrogated, and revolutionary fervour for an independent Quebec is slowly—but surely—yielding presence to feminist concerns:

O. R. troublée parce qu'il s'est agi pendant toute la soirée des autres à travers elle. Parce qu'elle fait partie d'une collectivité qui crève, lentement, le ventre offert. O. R. et Dominique C. partageant leur révolte. Qui s' apaise. Se confond doucement aux caresses qu'elles s'échangent du bout des doigts, de la langue. (emphasis added)

Similar to Un livre, Brossard's second work of fiction, Soldout (published in 1973 and translated into English as Turn of a Pang three years later), ostensibly treats a political commitment to Quebec nationalism in its interrogation of federal control over provincial affairs in its dual treatment of the 1943 conscription crisis and the 1970 invocation of the War Measures Act. As in the earlier novel, there is an articulation of male and female collectivity, a conflation of identities united in a general cause, for the text represents itself as "une histoire de je tu il nous et autres pluriels … dans le microcosme québécois; toutes les phases de la destruction d'ils d'elles…. Se poursuivent le temps de l'animation collective, les inscriptions." Bodies are "mâle et / ou femelle," again an indistinguishable blur. But here, too, the narrative contradicts itself. The masses are not uniform:

Ce qui frappe et déferle déborde la limite effrayant plus que miroir et la révision qu'il impose à l'oeil vision lutte dedans le mur reflétant graduellement image aperçue dans le cadre ovale /quel secret? / on y voit bien d'autres choses mais que les foules ne se ressemblent pas toutes pan toute quand elles produisent des événements HISTORIQUES (hiéroglyphes quand on y songe sur quelle surface? à déterminer en cours de cheminement (les surfaces s'imposent tout autant que les compas qui les pénètrent)).

In Sold-out, the surfaces carved, the sites of inscription, are the texts of women's bodies, phallically overwritten, used/abused in the market exchange, scars that need to be read and interpreted. The textual graffiti is a writing on the wall for women:

     ailleurs que sur le mur cela se dessine au pinceau
     large entamant la bouche de l'homme politique
 
              LE QUÉBEC AUX QUÉBÉCOIS
     sue l'oeil TRAÎTRE, entre les dents, le I phallique
     Indépendance retroussant (une impression) le noir
          de la moustache fraîchement peinturée.

That the liberation sought "le Québec aux québécois" is a phallically constructed independence as spelled out in the writing on the wall.

For Brossard, to break the code, to shatter the phallocentric law of the same, gender interests must supersede those of Quebec culture and language in the development of her fiction. Whereas separatists work for the preservation of the French language (a sensitivity to language, cultural identity, collective autonomy born out of the English conquest of Quebec in 1769), feminists struggle against the even older oppressive power of this language and attempt to alter this language into new rather than preserved forms. As Luce Irigaray has queried, "Si nous continuons à nous parler le même langage, nous allons reproduire la même histoire." For Brossard, too, language must be r/evolutionized: "comment la femme qui utilise quotidiennement les mots (comédienne, journaliste, écrivain(e), professeur(e)), peut-elle utiliser un language qui, phallocratique, jour au départ contre elle?" As Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin contend, control over language is one of the main features of imperial oppression: "Language becomes the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated, and the medium through which conceptions of 'truth,' 'order,' and 'reality' become established. Such power is rejected in the emergence of an effective post-colonial voice." Marginalized voices must wrest language and writing—with its "signification of authority"—from the dominant culture. "Nous n'avons d'autre repère que nous. Nous sommes entourées de signes qui invalident notre présence," says Lorna Myher (My/her) in Le Désert mauve. Such silence must be shattered, silent e shouted forward: "Il faut que j'apprenne à parler," says one of Brossard's voices; "S'il ne consent, toute ma vie je l'attendrai ce mot de lui. Il parlera à ma place. Toute une vie."

So Brossard breaks the code of silence in order to challenge the hegemony of male discourse; her (de)constructive strategies attempt to outmanoeuvre language, its relegation of women to death, the e muet mutant to explode the breach (birth) between sign and object. In L'Amer ou le chapître effrité, the signifier "I'amèr" (la mére, amére, la mer, l'aimer), for example, suspends the monoreferential in its endless freeplay of meanings: mother, bitter, sea, (to) love. For Brossard,

When a woman invests a word with all her anger, energy, determination, imagination, this word crashes violently into the same word, the one invested with masculine experience. The shock that follows has the effect of making the word burst: certain words lose a letter, others see their letters reform in a different order.

What she wants is writing at degree zero, an écriture blanche emptied into new significations, for "language does not know anything about women—or we should say, rather, that it only knows the clamorous lies that generations of misogynous, sexist phallocrats have repeated to it. In fact, we know that patriarchal language discredits, marginalizes, constitutes the feminine as inferior…." Brossard, however, develops women's desire in language: she places tongue in women's mouths, a sexual/textual French kiss.

This is, for Brossard, the link between textuality and corporeality: the body speaks forth from its ruptured excess, from the space of its traditional erasure. The only access to the symbolic that phallocentrism has historically allowed women is by absence, proxy, exchanged body (real estate), to (re)produce only as mother and to be muffled/muzzled otherwise: "l'homme s'est assuré par là mainmise sur tous les modes de production énergétiques du corps féminin (cerveau, utérus, vagin, bras, jambes, bouche, langue). Dans la mesure où il est fragmenté, le corps de la femme, la femme, ne peut entamer la vision globale de l'homme." But the body bodies forth, overwrites the scarred female cortext (cortext as sign disperses through the notions corps and texte—the body is written in/by language); it becomes the site of political and textual resistance, an other coding to phallocentric inscription. Brossard's work is reactionary, revolutionary; it produces, rather than reproduces, by writing against traditional literary forms and by challenging the representational systems of society (where the representable is male). Plurality, polyvocality,of women's sexual morphology (always already coded in language) breaks the phallocratic law of the same, for woman has sex organs more or less everywhere. To represent this proliferation, this body spiralling, Brossard plays with the gyre as configuration of the mobility and multiplicity, indeterminacy, of the lesbian text; the multiple female body (of the text), its doubleness, deferral, multiple female intertexts, the convulsions of the circle, of the gyre, disrupt the univocal, phallic patrilinearity of patriarchal writing. Ellipses and parentheses like multiple genitalia flower to confound the phallacies of the paternal text, to dissociate the alter/native from the unifying authority of the phallus: "Mais le corps a ses raisons, le mien, sa peau lesbienne, sa place dans un contexte historique, son aire et son contentu politique. Sous mes yeux, les lignes s'arrondissent: linéarité et fragments de linéarité (vous savez les ruptures) se transforment en spirale."

Multiple women's voices also delegitimize monologic origin in male discourse (Brossard's polyphony is a rêve polysémique, a border crossing of textual blank spaces across which touch women's bodies and regard[e]s). For the nationalist movement, solidarity must be internal, not international (the history of Quebec is one of subjection to three imperialisms, French, English, and American, which separatist discourse endeavours to resist), but Brossard's writing exceeds boundaries demarcated by a measurable physical space or territorialization. The textual inscription of her feminism, as for Quebec feminism generally, owes much, as critics have shown, to a cross-fertilization of three distinct cultural perspectives: Québécois, French, and American. Solidarity is bound not by place but by body: territory is that of the imaginary suffused by female subjectivity and feminist consciousness. For Brossard, American feminism is a desirable influence: "le discours des femmes américaines, des féministes m'est extrêmement important, celui de Millet, de Firestone, de Rita May Brown, de Ti-Grace Atkinson. Je me sens beaucoup plus, au niveau des discours d'exploration théoriques, près d'elles." There is sameness in difference not (simply) because "us" is distinct from "them" but because "us" is itself a diverse and polysemous group: "Les écritures de femmes me stimulent énormément parce qu'elles sont aussi très variées, que ce soit celle de France Théoret ou de Virginia Woolf, celle de Wittig ou de Stein." Epigrams in L'Amèr from Luce Irigaray, Virginia Woolf, Mary Barnes, Monique Wittig, Sande Zeig, Anaïs Nin, and Flora Tristan, among others (many, but not all, lesbian women), and Sappho, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Adrienne Rich, Mary Daly, Monique Wittig, Isabel Millee, Viviane Forrester, and others in La Lettre aérienne, establish an international community of women, and these allusions build a shared language and a shared tradition of struggle beyond territorial borders.

Yet there is a distinct and desired physical space in Brossard's writing, though it remains one that serves her international poetics: it is city place, the polis. Brossard's protagonists are, as M. Jean Anderson notes, explicitly urban; the bustle of a metropolitan centre "talks back" to the discourse of la terre, which has constituted the site of a protectionist and paternalist French Canadian history, the space and the state of mind once mythologized as integral to the survival of Quebec as a separate identity, to the survival of la race française, and often imaged as the mother. With the cultural upheaval in the early 1960s and 1970s, and the break-with-the-past mentality of post-World War II urbanization in the province, new nationalist ideology desired to break from agrarian (and Catholic) values, to appropriate for Québécois interests the commercial centres then dominated by anglophone business. But for Brossard, control must be wrested back from patriarchy generally. Her argument is not an economic one for separatist progress but an engagement in the economy of transnational feminism. Her heroines reject the rural Quebec for Montreal, New York, or Florence: Adrienne's story "aurait pu tout aussi bien se passer à Montréal" as in New York. It is the theoretical concept of city, fluid in space, imaged and accessed by women everywhere, rather than an identifiable geographical locale, that is the locus in Brossard's writing.

Certainly "Where is here?" is a different question for women than for men. The "here" that Brossard seeks/speaks in her desire is a feminist utopia, positing women desiring themselves, embracing other women, a choice, an alter/native, rather than the dream of the same. For Brossard, lesbianism subverts the paternal order; like Alice going through the looking glass, she has crossed through (her opening, a birth) to the other side, where things are topsy turvy, no longer reflected back the same:

La différence a prise. S'installe comme lui dans ma vie. M'englobe comme un territoire. Sa différence s'est transformée en pouvoir systématique. Il s'assure dès lors du contrôle des différences.

Modifiant ma function, je me transforme. Travaille le creux du ventre: curetage. Le dérèglement, cataclysme des formes. (emphasis added)

Brossard, as a lesbian, murders the womb, the site of woman's silence, the locus of her use-value, again to engender productivity rather than reproductivity: "J'ai tué le ventre et je l'écris." Sexually, textually, lesbianism constitutes for Brossard "le seul relais plausible pour me sortir du ventre de ma mére patriarcale…. Traverser le symbole alors que j'écris. Une pratique de déconditionnement qui m'amène à reconnaître ma propre légitimité. Ce par quoi toute femme tente d'exister: ne plus être illégitime." To write the lesbian text is to create women's own locus of desire outside the matter of the womb.

This is radical feminism. Patriarchy as a dominantly male colonizer must be subverted, written out in the creative act: "On ne peut inscrire femmes entre elles sans avoir à mesurer l'ampleur de cette petite expression: 'se passer d'un homme,' sans se heurter à la lecture du mur patriarcal sur lequel sont inscrites toutes les lois qui nous séparent de nous-même, qui nous isolent des autres femmes." Ultimately for Brossard, the political "separatism" for which she contends is one that "stresses separation from all aspects of male culture so that women can concentrate on themselves and other women and create their own subjectivity." Her vision is of a new, transnational world order whose trajectory spirals ever outward in its embracing of women: "La solidarité des femmes est la dernière épreuve de solidarité humaine …"; "je travaille à ce que se perde la convulsive habitude d'initier les filles au mâle comme une pratique courante de lobotomie. Je veux en effet voir s'organiser la forme des femmes dans la trajectoire de l'espèce." Concerns for women's place in language and history thus supersede those of Québécois nationalism, in which the identities of the collectivity, les Québécois, are signed (linguistic hegemony) in the masculine: for women to engage in any political struggle constructed as antagonistic toward or as resistant to feminism is to remain Québécois (rather than Québécoises), to participate in the code that defines women synonymously with men. This is the in/definition, the in/difference, of patriarchally constructed nationalism (which interpolates the same)—neo(patriarchal) imperialism of maitres chez nous—that Brossard, one might say, will overturn (with a pang?) in the fluid feminist body, everywhere: mettre, m'être, chez toutes.