Genesis
Myriam Allard
Lilek yasser fil frejdaire ?
* have you lived in the fridge long ?
I was reminded of the words and the tragic expression on the face of that African compatriot who I met one February day and who told me that this Montreal winter would be the last in a four-year exile that was finally coming to a close.
The North had shaken him, thrown him off balance by first troubling his senses. The cold, a chapping of the skin, the organs, and finally the spirit like a slow numbing. He no longer recognized himself and waited, resigned, for the uncertain hour of his deliverance.
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Uprooting, deprivation on a piece of an ice floe set adrift. Interior landscapes—do we traverse landscapes or are we traversed by them? Spaces that we pass through and lands that pass through us, knock us over, then inhabit us.
The virgin page, this snow bank in which the foot sinks and footprints erased from the icy ground. A great whitewashing. A passage via the pole, magnetic.
