Reviewed by Kegan McFadden
Hannah Godfrey, Oubliette (Nevermore Press, 2023), 112 pp., $22.00.
Grief is a punctuation mark. For some, it’s a period, and for others more lucky, a semi-colon… No matter what you find yourself grieving, there is a before and an after. In her recent collection, Oubliette, Winnipeg-based artist and writer Hannah Godfrey writes through the complicated and anticipatory grief of losing her mother to an unnamed ailment.
Unraveling a series of memories and personal anecdotes as a practical exercise against forgetting, Godfrey uses the metaphor of the oubliette, as described by J. Halberstam in The Queer Art of Failure (cited by Godfrey in Oubliette’s epigraph): “Small windowless cells, or oubliettes, places in medieval fortresses where prisoners were thrown and then forgotten.” Across a slim, handsomely spare volume of just over 100 pages, she opens up various-sized compartments of memory to let the reader in. Stories, in turn charming and funny, crestfallen and preposterously accurate, offer insight into the person who shaped the author most. In her introduction to Oubliette, Godfrey elucidates:
A few years ago, I read Roland Barthes’ beautiful Mourning Diary, a repository of his thoughts and feelings after his mother died. I began to make notes about my own pain as well as some of the things my mum said and the memories she shared. Things I did not want to forget.
Part elegy, part love letter, Oubliette is above all a book by a reader for other readers. In a turn that reminds me of Wayne Koestenbaum’s fugues or Christine Sharpe’s notes, Godfrey’s texts are interspersed with brief scenarios and missives from her time growing into the person she’d become, as well as quotations by other artists and writers that read almost like CliffsNotes on loss and creativity. Canonical queer intellectuals (artists and writers alike) such as James Baldwin, Dionne Brand, Derek Jarman, and the aforementioned J. Halberstam, among others, are cited throughout Oubliette. The only direct reference to another sort of prison is through Baldwin, quoted: “whoever cannot tell himself the truth about his past is trapped in it, is immobilized in the prison of his undiscovered self.” This notion of being immobilized carries double-duty when it is understood Godfrey’s mother’s illness rendered her housebound, and eventually confined to a chair.
Godfrey has the ability to welcome you into her grief without the overpowering desire to share her burden. Often I found myself enjoying the stories on one page only to be caught off guard by a sly and simple gutpunch of a phrase on the next: “A broken heart trips you like a broken heel.” (94) or “A gift of twelve pencils from her and the crow-thought—will they outlast her? Will I use them or preserve them if they do?” (34) Those of us who have experienced profound loss recognize that grief comes in waves, often without warning, rhyme, or reason.
The elegant coppery-gold-coloured dust jacket for Oubliette foregrounds a photograph heralding a single forked anecdote that collapses the story of a gifted pendant (in the shape of a desert rose) with an anecdote from an earlier time where Godfrey’s mum returned home from a trip to Tunisia with specimens of the fragile sand crystal: “No one else was looking at them but I couldn’t stop staring.” (78) The thing about desert roses is that they are made up of granular sand particles over time but easily dissolved with water or pressure; an hourglass of another sort, not not a metonym for memory.
This jumping, or oscillating, between and around imagery through disjointed memories in service of the topic of grief is a successful multifarious strategy that serves to record the minutiae the writer wanted to preserve before the forgetfulness of time sinks in (prompted by Barthes), imparts knowledge about her mother’s lived experience as well as the shared history of her family’s time together, and allows for the pathos required when engaging in mourning. A good example comes when simply listing her mum’s favourite building (Barcelona’s Sagrada Família) (71), a basilica whose construction began in 1882 though remains unfinished. And isn’t that the perfect punctuation amidst a eulogy—to call into thought the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world? What can ever feel complete when the unreliable narrator that is memory is involved?
The truncated prose here is revealing of familial exchange—equally heartbreaking as it is endearing, and dotted with pathos and humour. My favourite quip is one of the overtly queer recognitions between the women:
A bevy of maidens.
Mum’s assessment of my life. (60)
Whether pouring over these small textual offerings, or thumbing the pages wildly (and maybe a little aimlessly), the question comes to mind—Who is the protagonist? Surely it must be the author herself. But so much of the information imparted is about the subject of her mother (mum). Then again, the true main characters here are memory, and her faithful sidekick, grief. Grief is a punctuation mark, sure; but it is also an allowance, providing latitude to make up words as a way of attempting to convey such disorientation of being locked in a cell and forgotten about—“dontknowcant.” (104) Luckily, Godfrey found a way through.
Writer, publisher, curator and artist, Kegan McFadden lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Throughout the past decade, his reviews of contemporary art and writing have exclusively focused on the work of queer practitioners.
