Elvire Jean-Jacques Maurouard. L'Alchimie des reves.

Cordova, Sarah Davies

Elvire Jean-Jacques Maurouard. L'Alchimie des reves. Paris. L'Harmattan. 2005. 50 pages. 10 [euro]. ISBN 2-7475-7990-5

SCHOLAR, PROFESSOR, JOURNALIST, AND POET, Elvire Jean-Jacques Maurouard examines representations of women in art, history, and literature. Writing in exile from her native Jeremie in Haiti, she attends to the Other and to women of African descent of the nineteenth century who have fascinated the West's painters and writers. Indeed, her texts' focus brings to mind Fabienne Pasquet's work, and especially the latter's L'Ombre de Baudelaire (1996), even though they differ in tone, style, and registers. Whereas Maurouard's essay "La Femme noire dans le roman haitien: Noires, metisses, presque blanches--penser la discrimination" (200l) draws out the politics of difference and identity in light of ideologies of race in eight twentieth-century Haitianauthored novels, Les Beautes noires de Baudelaire (2005) returns to Jeanne Duval, to Dorothee, and to the "Malabaraise" and analyses minutely (with extensive annotations) the poet's "Fleurs du mal" in terms of their sentimentality and sensuality.

Maurouard's poetry, which has been translated into English, Catalan, Bulgarian, and Italian, has been awarded the gold medal of the Academie Internationale de Lutece and the Presence des Arts prize at the Concours de l'Ile des Poetes in 2005. As with her first collection "Contes et poemes des iles savoureuses: L'hymne des heros" (2004), a signed work by the Haitian artist Jean Claude "Tiga" Garoute graces the cover of L'Alchimie des roves. His enigmatic lithograph, possibly of cupped black hands or of a tentacular plant against a blue background, gestures to the tenderness and insecurities written into L'Alchimie des roves, while Kama Kamanda's descriptive preface points to the recurrent themes of solitude and mirages present in her poetry and highlights the poems' praise of sensuality and their epicurian penchant.

With the collection's sideways glances at a French tradition of love poetry, Maurouard's forty-seven short poems express a feminine sensibility and sensuality simply yet assertively. The poems' settings (the corner of a table or a local ball) create a sense of intimacy that, together with the passage of time read upon the body and through the lovers' feelings, figure a passionate geography of the waxing and waning of emotions. Unfortunately, punctuation in the form of an obsessive presence of periods impedes the verses' rhymes and halts the rhythm of flowing descriptions and first-person monologues. The overall effect left this reader wondering whether they were typographical errors in a volume marred by indexical inconsistencies and by the unexplained repetition of the opening poem "Le Silence," which reappears as the eleventh poem of the collection. Those glitches notwithstanding, celebration of feminine subjectivity in L'Alchimie des roves succeeds with its apostrophes, imperatives, and questions in addressing, from a woman's perspective, the embodied and psychological uncertainties, nostalgia, aspirations, losses, and joys that ignite human desire and animate dreams.

Sarah Davies Cordova

Marquette University