To Be from Your Homeland – Alexis Desgagnés
Foreword to the book “Comme un murmure / Like a Whisper”
To be from your homeland means something more than politics—more than human affairs, torments, and transactions. Lower in nature and deeper in being, your homeland is where your breath wanders alone in the woods.
In a screen of grass, you search for the crouching wind that guides you—this place is home to both of you—to the wall of a forest so dense it could swallow you. A path traced long ago engulfs you. Your steps merge with those of the animal. Here, everything wooden is gnawed, drowned, dry, or still green; every branch is eager to grow, to fork, or to sink.
“In the woods, I advance like a whisper.” You plunge your hand into the first stream, full of fry, tadpoles, and alluvium. You tell yourself: “I am not elsewhere; I am a site, the beast or the genius loci.” Entanglements of burrows woven by worms in the mud beneath fluttering alders.
The ground exudes a oily sky where a killdeer, grasshopper in beak, mirrors himself. A hundred times, a thousand times, he has come here without fear. In a moment of great calm, he sings a scenery suspended between two seasons: “Summer departs, autumn arrives. Deer will leave no apples; hunters and coyotes will not deprive themselves either. A-hun-dred-times, a-thou-sand-times, I-have-come-here-with-out-fear.”
A silence resounds from the depths of the forest. Immobile in your thoughts, lying in wait in your instincts, you notice that a mountain leans over you and that now the bird is silent. Namagôtegw. Mégantic. Rivière au Saumon. La Patrie. Your footsteps in the clay. Your animal breath in the woods.
Half low, half high, the roar of the nordet, scattering around the bases of the trees a fluffy moss that time has stripped from the carcass—gaunt, withered—that blocks the way. One moment you think, then recover: “In my homeland, death has no duration. What is blown out is rekindled just as quickly by what bustles, dance of life, traces of dance, between some rotten wood and that eviscerated mound where burrowing insects live.”
Your forest, deciduous mirror of the boreal face, at each season of your age you return to it. You talk to yourself: “The path to the sugar bush, even flooded, belongs to my people. Each night, while others not far away are scrutinizing the sky, my dreams sink a little more into the silt of this country. What do a thousand stars matter if tonight the coyote remains speechless before the moon, and if tomorrow I do not cross his tracks? The infinite? If it eclipses the sound of the hollow wood of my forest, then I leave it to others. It only matters to me to scrutinize the paths of igneous sediments, gabbro and syenite, where the partridge and the woodcock—Bonasa umbellus and Scolopax minor—yesterday still left their traces.”
What it means to be from your homeland we can only feel in ourselves, or before the calm and solitary whisper of your photographs.