Anne Kawala - a prose narrative continually interrupted by charts, collages, maps, and poetic fragments in various languages. An experimental epic poem or novel follows a huntress-gatheress from home in the icy north on a journey to the other side of the world

Anne Kawala, Screwball, Trans. by Kit Schluter. Canarium Books, 2018.
excerpt (pdf)




An experimental epic poem or novel, SCREWBALL (the indispensable deficit) follows a huntress-gatheress from home in the icy north on a journey to the other side of the world. Along the way it explores questions of aesthetics, gender, language, and love.

 

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“Everything is possible... but it’s a matter of knowing how to react, of knowing that everything is possible, and reacting in the best possible way,” writes French experimentalist Kawala in this, her first translation to English, a prose narrative continually interrupted by charts, collages, maps, and poetic fragments in various languages. Kawala’s style is circuitous but inquisitive; in the tension between perseverance and crisis, she spins a fascinating if unwieldy tale of a “huntress-gatheress” and her two children on an unexplained journey via ice floe from Greenland to China. When an Arctic volcanic eruption sends the small crew spiraling across the Atlantic to Nicaragua, it separates the huntress-gatheress from the children and splits the narrative between their journeys. The human systems they encounter, like the natural ones, are designed to assimilate them rather than support their particular disruptions: “Her presence, known, nothing changes in anyone’s activities.” At the narrative’s end, a notebook with notations and essays on gender difference takes its place. It’s a provocative move, destabilizing the simplicity of the fable and asking a reader to revisit the role of gender within it. That narrative, however, tends to overwhelm the fragmentary interruptions, and readers may wish that there was more here to support those interruptions’ theoretical work. - Publishers Weekly


In the work of Anne Kawala, the performative dimension is key. The written version of her texts has something of the musical score or libretto, and a different realisation in each recital. As in contemporary art installations, Kawala often writes or adapts texts specially for an event or a location. The choreography of gesture and voice, sometimes numerous voices, creates countless new meanings.
Readers of her work on paper need to find their own way among the different story lines and heterogeneous elements. Starting with Kawala's first collection, F.aire L.a F.eui||e (f.l.f) (2008) many texts initially appear to be illegible visual compositions: illustrations with text behind, through and around them; typographical experiments; and borrowed image and text fragments here and there. About this Kawala says: "I ask those who read to start with the different elements and create a context, a form of understanding, to make their own montage. There is more than one way of reading […] Linearity is not the only option."
Since Anne Kawala often crafts her work in prose or even in booklength form, it is difficult to talk about individual poems. This does not mean that the conceptual dimension of the work leaves no room for poetry: the 'Song of the hunter-gatheress' from Le déficit impensable (2016), for example, toys with the tradition of oral lyric. Half rhyme, word association and a play on words all occupy important positions in a text such as '006'. In addition, Anne Kawala investigates and questions the world, but, as she writes, "understanding is a whole, not a dichotomy. It is a basket: it has eggs inside it, but also next to it."  The performance and/or the reader dictate which pieces of the historical, social and literary mosaic finally make it into the greater whole. - Kim Andringa (Translated by Christiane Zwerner)
https://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/poet/item/28307/0/Anne-Kawala

poems:

with flame and uncertainty,
SONG OF THE HUNTRESS GATHERESS


Anne Kawala was born in 1980 in Herlincourt, a small town in northern France. She has published half a dozen works of poetry. Her writing draws on documentary writing, narrative, and autofiction, combining a range of material from the graphic arts that she translates into sound variations in her performances.


                                                                                                                                                         

Anne Kawala / Partitions Performances 02/05/2016 from Fondation d'entreprise Ricard on Vimeo.