Joyce Mansour’s first volume of verse, Cris (inarticulate expressions of pain, rage, or surprise; but also, cris de bataille, battle cries), brought her to the immediate attention of France’s literati—in particular to the attention of male surrealists who found in her poetry a stunning instance of what André Breton identified as the primary objective of art: to present revolutionary, liberating truths as experienced in the unconscious.

Mansour’s debut collection dealt the patriarchal, bourgeois culture of the 1950s a swift kick in the pants by flouting all sorts of conventions established by polite society to restrain female expression and govern female behavior. As the expression of radical feminist thought at mid-century, Mansour’s poetry—in its alternately confrontational, subversive, and swaggering postures—went miles beyond Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking The Second Sex (1947).

At the same time, this collection of Mansour’s poems is not merely bellicose; it is also a rare example of feminist existentialist philosophy rendered as a profusion of lyrical cries (not really plaintive) meant to command serious attention to the true existence (the genuine emotional lives and physical desires) of women.

Mansour’s poetry is “brazen” (as Gavronsky avers) and committed to overturning even the most admirable liberating efforts of the surrealists, primarily because, in her view, the most revolutionary artists of her day (Breton, Paul Éluard, René Char, and Louis Aragon) were constitutionally unable to recognize that their sexist upbringings and patriarchal culture were blinding them to a vast multitude of humanity: the personal (especially erotic) world of women.

The male surrealists’ depictions of the erotic lives of women were always tasteful, allusive, mythological: “a highly literary enterprise . . . audacious . . . but [ultimately] writerly” (Gavronsky, Torn Apart, 1). It was Mansour’s project to map what Gavronsky calls “the iconic topos of sex, in all its jouissance [juicy joyfulness] and grandeur” (Torn Apart, 1). Mansour would avail herself of poetic devices of all sorts but resort to no indirection, no euphemism.

Cris, in Gavronsky’s translation, is composed of 50 pages of short units, two to a page, and most of them only seven or eight lines long. Each of these units, or stanzas, is an exclamation or expostulation. Many of them rely on images that seem at first innocuous but that on closer inspection divulge a nightmarish subtext.

In one of them, for example, the first four lines say:
“Seashell drags across a deserted beach / Caressed by a
finger distracted by the sea / Leaving behind a mucous
trail / Attracting the enemy despite itself.”

The image of the moving shell and shoreline setting (evoked by the words seashell and deserted beach) establishes an odd context for the distracted, caressing finger in the second line. The third line, with its reference to “mucous trail,” suggestively blurs the signifying properties of the erotic words in the preceding lines (caressed, attracting).

The assertion that the “mucous trail” attracts the mollusc’s enemy seems factual enough, whether or not it is biologically accurate. The fifth through final lines, however, abruptly shift the topos:

“He comes closer
immobilizing her with a sneaky hand / He takes her
soul from its tender bed / And inhales her agony” (48).

Seagulls do not have “sneaky” hands. Moreover, by aggressively gendering and animating the mollusk (“her soul” . . . “her agony”) as well as the raptor (whoever “He” is), Mansour has dramatized (in phantasmagorical terms) a male’s soul-destroying seduction and consumption of a female too young or innocent (tender) to realize what was happening to her.

Mansour closes Cris with the following polysemic declaration:
“Men’s vices / are my domain / Their wounds
my sweet desserts / I love to chew on their vile thoughts
/ For their ugliness makes my beauty” (50).

In just five lines the concluding unit of Cris emphasizes what the oneiric imagery in the body of the work connotes.

Bibliography

Mansour, Joyce. Screams. Translated and with an introduction by Serge Gavronsky. Sausalito, Calif.: Post-Apollo Press, 1995.

———. Torn Apart / Déchirures. Bilingual edition. Translated and with an introduction by Serge Gavronsky. Fayetteville, Ark., and New York: Bitter Oleander Press, 1999.

Categories: French Literature, Literature

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