Postmodernist writers often gravitate toward the fragmentary, the alinear, the multilinguistic and multivalent. Mireille Gansel certainly fits this description. Her book, Soul House, is a collection of prose poems that follow a French – English bilingual format.
How should the reader situate themselves within this kind of writing? The poems plunge us into stream-of-conscious, barely punctuated, and infrequently capitalized sentences:
this light of late summer on the lake and the mountains you agree to come see this painting just this painting and you will tell me I need your childish look then we walked downhill along Collège Calvin and in your dancing steps you climbed the majestic steps of the museum …
Halfway through this postmodern pilgrimage, Gansel suggests that the promised “soul house” may not be a house at all. In “rendre un mot habitable/to make a word habitable,” she recounts a visit to a museum in an Austrian village: “Heimatsmuseum: how to translate this word? And then Heimat? The native country and the house, home, the home.”
The reader learns that this neighborhood in Austria has become a sanctuary for many refugees, for whom the museum offers creative space; several of them want to form a small orchestra together. The piece culminates with a breathtaking vision of a “Heimat-country … where one has the right to enter to speak to one another to speak without words to meet those from here and elsewhere to share a meal with the scents and flavors of so far away links of friendship are forged … ”
The concept of Heimat was deeply ingrained in Nazi ideology. But Gansel widens our understanding of this word. One reads her book as an imaginary neighbor, a cohabitant of a wondrous, multilingual, multicultural, metahistorical land, to which the poet offers multiple gateways rather than a map.
Stephanie Barbé Hammer’s is a 7‑time Pushcart Prize nominee in fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Her new novel Journey to Merveilleux City appears with Picture Show Press.
