October

By Carolyn Marie Souaid

On October 10, 1970, at 6:30 pm, Quebec's Minister of Labour, Pierre Laporte, was kidnapped outside of his Saint-Lambert home by the Chenier Cell of a terrorist group known as the FLQ. One week later, he was found dead in the trunk of a car.

Shortlisted for the QWF A.M. Klein Poetry Award, October is a collection of poetry set in the quiet Montreal suburb of Saint Lambert, where the clash between the "two solitudes" came to a head in 1970 with the kidnapping and subsequent murder of Pierre Laporte by the FLQ. For the narrator, growing up in those days meant living through one of the darkest episodes in Canadian history, a time when army tanks, bombings and other random acts of violence became l'ordre du jour.

October spans three decades of Quebec life, chronicling one woman's attempt to forge some kind of reconciliation between the "warring" cultures, to find the common ground of the French and the English. It is a personal, unabashed look at her own marriage to a French Quebecer which finds her straddling two worlds, two cultures, two very different mentalities. From start to end, echoes of the October Crisis are carefully woven into the text, a constant reminder that the fractious past is never very far behind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781773241098

Carolyn Marie Souaid

Carolyn Marie Souaid has been writing and publishing poetry for over 20 years. The author of six books and the winner of the David McKeen Award for her first collection, Swimming into the Light, she has also been shortlisted for the A.M. Klein Prize and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Much of her work deals with the bridging of worlds; the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility of it, but the necessity of the struggle. She has toured her work across Canada and in France. Since the 1990s, she has been a key figure on the Montreal literary scene, having co-produced two major local events, Poetry in Motion (the poetry-on-the-buses project) and the Circus of Words / Cirque des mots, a multidisciplinary, multilingual cabaret focusing on the "theatre" of poetry. Souaid is a founding member and editor of Poetry Quebec, an online magazine focusing on the English language poets and poetry of Quebec.

Book preview

ARGUMENT

...most people come to know only one corner of the room, one spot near the window, one narrow strip on which they keep walking back and forth.

—Rainer Maria Rilke

1

my mother taught us things

like birdtalk and how to blow bubbles

through soapy rings

taught us Latin words for flowers

and rhymes to wake up the trees

we marched in perfect time with her, tapping

the crazed syllables with our feet—

if you step on a crack

you’ll break your mother’s back

—one kid on either side, swinging her thin white arms

until we tired her out, and

resting in the cool shade at the park

watching us belly down the slide

I wonder

did she believe in God even then

as the clouds began zeroing in on her? was she conscious

of the kind of legacy

she’d be leaving us with?

that life is nothing

if not arbitrary, that one wrong step

could literally do a person in

---

I understood the cancer:

a lone dark bug feeding

on the liver, the kidneys, the brain

soon, a whole sinister network of them

working on her, ruthlessly

deliberately ending

in a huge black shadow

sweeping through her body

like the sudden darkness a cloud makes

when it crosses the sun

---

we missed our usual outings to the market

the rosy displays of produce and the one-legged accordionist

we missed the gypsy girl mulling cider by the cheese shop

the clobbered rumps of meat, hooked

and dangling from the ceiling

we could always tell that summer was dying

by the kinds of apples farmers were hauling off their trucks

and how the colours outside always bloomed and sharpened

in their final hours

before greying-down for good

it was the first miracle we’d known—

that perfect moment of stasis

before the year turned

and let loose the rain

---

one day I found a strange woman

sleeping in the guest bed

and no sign of my mother

anywhere

somehow she had vanished

in the middle of the night

the way an earthworm slips into the raw dirt

silently, leaving nothing behind

but an empty corridor

of itself

---

one by one, the relatives came to stay with us

older Church-going aunts

with grown-up kids of their own

ladies who wore black dresses all the time, who

spent most of the day chopping onions

smaller and smaller, frying up

the bits in hot oil

our house began taking on a new smell

as though a different family lived here

and although my father came home for meals

he always just sat at the table like a ghost, never talking to us

never once looking up

the only connection we had to my mother, the only news

came through muffled talk in the next room

the words hospital and cancer

worming their way through keyholes and

under the drafty cracks of doors

like something harmful

that would spread and destroy us all

soon I felt my knees give way

and parts of my body fold underneath

as though I, too, were starting to disappear

---

she leaned against my father on the