A woman is an Indian on “Sitaudis” by François Huglo

"A man is a woman like the others, if he is “completely different”, more different, just as on the farm of the Orwellian cowboys there are those who are more equal. Here difference makes equality. All women, all Indians: freedom, equality, sorority, even between brothers or between brother and sister. And it is good news, to scare away the scarecrow Zemmour (or other Putin), good news in the first person, that of Murièle Camac who announces it. No more squabbling between cis and trans: we slip, we surf on the Yin/Yang wave, we turn around like a glove, like the author-reader couple (“My child, my sister”, “my fellow , my brother"), we write and read double: "you are beautiful like a brother, forgetful like a son / slippery like an Indian - like a self like a double”.

“Words of a little boy / dressed as a young girl”, we are (born or not) a woman like an Indian or “like a boy”, as in the song. Murièle Camac: “A woman locks her death song in her drawers, and then she goes to dance”. Léo Ferré, Twenty years old : “We often die, and then we go out / We go and smoke a cigarette”. Murièle Camac: “Several layers of clothing separate / the woman who dances from the man she is looking at”. Gainsbourg via Birkin or the opposite: “Chic underwear / It's not revealing anything at all / (…) / It's the modesty of feelings / Outrageously made up / Blood red”. Murièle Camac: “Looking at man is like hearing distant percussion / (…) / hearing for the first time the naked songs of slaves”. Jean Genet via Hélène Martin, Marc Ogeret or Étienne Daho: “O the sweetness of the impossible and distant penal colony”. Murièle Camac: “This thing that passes in the distance so low in the sky – this dust, this smoke – I will make it a song of death, I will make it a dance”. Charles Trenet, The Indians : “One Indian / Smokes, smokes / Two Indians / Wear feathers / Three Indians / Yes, I believe / Are like you and me / (…) / Ladies and my Sioux”.

 

An Indian "has never stopped singing", he who knows "that the world is coming to an end", who knows "the great epidemics, / the slaughter of animals, / the words of the language which have become corpses", he (her) “that no one listened”. He dances the moult, the metamorphosis through play: “When you have become a woman thanks to the dress, you dance the dance of women. If we take off the dress, it is for the child's dance, the animal's dance, the tree or grass dance. But we always keep a bracelet or a hairstyle on our body: we dance the dance of man” — which means “not a woman” and also “woman and man”. Sartre would add the dance of the waiter, or that of Lucien Fleurier in his pretty angel costume, at the beginning of The childhood of a chef (Indian ?). Woman and/or man, indetermination of the green paradise: “I am twelve years old / the body of a Sioux hunter / (…) / a whole life awaits me”. And later, reversibility: Ginger Rogers (or another): “I did exactly everything Fred Astaire did, but in heels and backwards.” Dance: “the body in love with its gestures”. Poem: “the body in love with its words”, the dance with the “mother” and “virile” language, material and symbolic, is also double. Only the “outfit” gives “the air” of a poet, of a woman, of an Indian. It’s a composition, a whole discipline. But it is often frowned upon.

“It's just that sometimes I was called a whore (dirty whore), but really what they meant was woman . Sometimes I have been called, — treated — like woman .” (Another song, Gainsbourg via Régine: “Women are queer”). Homer's hero, Virgil or Dante, or "pursued by the CIA", leaves and leaves. The heroine cannot do it (see “Who will look after the children?”). She “can’t be a heroine (she’s probably a dirty whore).” There is, however, "journey", "quest", "America", in Susan Howe's sentence about "her" Emily Dickinson: "The only constant is the movement and the recognition of a nothing ". Clothing makes the Indian and the Taoist monk. Emily is not a cowboy.

The road to the New World? Assuming a femininity like others a negritude, knowing that it is always a game with and against clichés, that it is always like, comedy, songs, Indian dances. “I’ll put on makeup. I will look. I will paint my nose, my forehead and my cheeks with war paint. I will leave with the first wave that will lick my stomach (…) I will escape the provincial high schools.” Se to treat of all bird names. Contrast a “list of bird names” (so many “Indian names”) with the “fighter planes” of “the largest army in the world”. Resist them: “I’m not your type, and besides, I don’t have time, I have an appointment with the hairdresser.” Take the time, stretch it out (“It’s just chewing gum”), “before changing the world”. Suggest that the filosofe Descartes sleeps “completely naked in his bed” and “moults”, an Indian too, since he says he thinks that he is dressed while he is “completely naked in (his bed)”.

 

The Heroes are sheepish, betrayed. Noah in the rain is not Gene Kelly, Samson cries over his cut hair: “We have lost summer, innocence forever, and my scalp is bare”. He will never be Beatle or Stone. Socrates does not “always understand very well”. At the Frontier, to the Indians who torture the body and to the "god of Calvin" who tortures the soul, "you will have to prove that you are men", to be marked to exist. “It is a naked body which undergoes torture”, without certainty of baptism, of salvation. Before the torture, the young body “felt desire”, its hands “had nails”, they “touched”. But the Border, an “impossible dream”, moves “ever further towards the west”. Great Religious Awakening, Wild Life, Hero in search of himself? “The only reason that will hold (…) will be Profit. (…) Others will think about it for you later.” And “there is no moral to this story.” The only constant: “I am there like a cup / less porcelain. (…) I cool down slowly (…) I notice myself, and it’s a joy.” Dickinsonian. There is trouble on the border. It is repealed – no more “cis” or “trans” – when “lives pass through me / through the tongue”. By porosity: it is when “pities chip me” that “I contain”. Emily Dickinson's America is not conquest but conversion: through the body, of the "ray in shadow", through the face, O Levinas, of the "look in recognition". Nothing. With an imperceptible sign. Availability of the lookout: “I will be the invisible and silent Indian, / I will be the eyes”. Invitation to read.

The comment from sitaudis.fr
Exopotamie éditions, February 2022
108 p.
€17"

Article published on Sitaudis on April 7, 2022:
A woman is an Indian by Murièle Camac by François Huglo, publications, poetic news on Sitaudis.fr

Buy the book online: A woman is an Indian – Éditions Exopotamie