AVANT DESIRE,THE FUTURE SHALL BE SWAYED

       An Introduction by

       Sina Queyras, Geneviève Robichaud, and Erin Wunker

      ‘I occupy space in Utopia. I can push death away like a mother and a future.’

      In the epigraph above, taken from Picture Theory, the speaker makes a statement that is both factual and futuristic: I occupy space in Utopia. It feels risky even to speak of Utopia when, at the time of this introduction, we see irrefutable evidence of the destructive forces of late capitalism, of heteropatriarchy, of racism and colonialism. None of these structures that fundamentally shape our different lives make space for Utopia, and yet Brossard writes that future into the present. The confidence and power of her speaker is both seductive and generative. Here, in Utopia, the speaker can push death away like a mother, without having to be a mother.

      Nicole Brossard’s work is both thrill and balm – and now, in Avant Desire: A Nicole Brossard Reader, readers can encounter the full range and scope of her trajectory. We have worked to curate selections that will be relevant and, we think, exhilarating to new and returning readers of Brossard’s work, and we have moved across genres and through time, not in a linear way but in a way that fits the always-aliveness of her work. If Utopia seems impossible to readers in 2020, Brossard’s work reminds us that when we gather – either on the page reading, or in rooms together – our co-presence conjures the possibility of Utopia.

      Over a fifty-year period, Nicole Brossard has published more than forty works of poetry, prose, essays, and non-fiction. She has broken through the bonds of sexual and linguistic repression, and in doing so has reached across several generations and two solitudes to enchant avant-garde, feminist, and academic readers and writers nationally and internationally, creating a radical, complex, and influential body of literature. It is work that never forgets the importance of pleasure, and that never loses hope in the possibility of Utopia. For the scholar Susan Rudy, Brossard’s writing is comparable to Virginia Woolf in being ‘uncompromising’ in its ‘critique of patriarchal reality, unrelenting in her love for women, and unequalled in [its] aesthetic experimentation.’¹ Has any other Canadian writer enjoyed the kind of feverish collaboration and translatory attention paid to Brossard? And has any other Canadian writer had the kind of attention that comes not from the established literary complex down but from the ground up? Poets, writers, and translators have taken up Brossard’s work largely as a labour of love. This is quite impressive when you consider that at the core of this fervour is a radical lesbian innovative writer who comes to English only through translation.

      Brossard’s work was initially made accessible to non-French readers through her collaboration with the late Barbara Godard. In an interview with Smaro Kamboureli, Godard noted that she, a bilingual feminist academic, was working to create ‘institutional spaces for intellectual work … and especially feminism in the 1980s when it emerged as an academic discipline.’² Godard translated Brossard’s poetry for a reading with Adrienne Rich for the Writers in Dialogue conference (1978), as well as her editorial work for Room of One’s Own (1978). Then, frustrated with the lack of conversation between feminist writers in English and French Canada, Godard held the Dialogue conference (1981), which was designed to bring together ‘people across language barriers.’³ A similar urge for connection between English Canada and Quebecois writers would push Godard and Frank Davey to create the Coach House Press Translation Series, which ran from 1974 to 1986.⁴ Brossard’s work was among the first to be published in the series. Godard largely introduced Brossard’s work to readers in English Canada, translating L’Amèr (1977) and in turn introducing her to the writing of continental French theorists such as Gilles Deleuze: ‘I recognized in particular the serial system of Brossard’s diction and its exploration of “surfaces of sense,” of making the textual body a virtual surface for the inscription of desire.’⁵ The significance of this collaborative moment is striking. Here, Godard underscores not only the labour involved in translating writers from French to English in Canada, she also acknowledges Brossard’s theoretical influence on her own feminist intellectual development beyond national borders. We see, too, the threads of connection woven between a feminist theorist translating a feminist writer-intellectual in the title of the final publication in the Quebec Translation