White Pebbles in the Dark Forests

Marguerite Andersen is a professor of French studies at the University
of Guelph.

This book is striking; its voice—“a wild voice chanting resonant and
towering chants”—well translated. It is about nature, literature and
love, for the world, for (some) men, and for women. Animals abound and
the protest against animal experiments is an important theme. So is the
history of women, of lesbianism, of women aviators. Through history,
Marchessault provides her readers with positive role models. One of the
questions she asks is whether we need to have “this wrenching
alternation between highs and lows” that mark our existence. Her text
is a denial of that necessity. It asks the reader to escape from such
slave drivers as sex (especially heterosexual sex), money and ambition,
and affirms the importance of inspiration, intuition and imagination,
and of positive thinking.

To Marchessault, literature is vital energy that can be used in
constructive ways. She does not want to bury herself “in subterranean
layers of melancholy and absurdity”; she is writing about the human
soul when it stands erect, about the positive links between human
beings.

The narrator does not hesitate to take to task “diesel dykes,”
separatist lesbians, and intellectuals, female knights on high horses.
She herself has left the city and its apparent destructiveness to
withdraw into the mountains, to live in a women’s community where she
can experience friendship with her elders and love. Noria, the aviatrix
(who is in fact a shaman delivering a message of hope), and Jeanne (the
writer who views literature as an art of healing) meet lovingly, and
although Noria will die, Jeanne’s writing will continue to be one of
trust.

At a time when rifts between men and women seem to widen and violence
is on the increase, this book and its positive message are most welcome.