ACHILLE CHAVÉE, THAT OLD REDSKIN WHO WANTED TO 'DISSOLVE SILENCE'

par Alain Delaunois

December 14, 2019

Achille CHAVÉE, Written on a Burning Flag, anthological selection and postface by Gwendoline Moran Debraine, illustrated by students from ENSAV La Cambre, note by Pascal Lemaître. Les Impressions nouvelles, coll. Espace Nord, Brussels, 2019, 280 p., 10 euros. ISBN : 978-2-87568-418-9

The Espace Nord collection has the excellent idea of bringing out of the closet poems and aphorisms by "the most famous poet of Ferrer Street in La Louvière," Achille Chavée. And this at a time when a first anthology in the same collection has been out of print for quite some time, and his complete works (6 volumes published between 1977 and 1994 by the Association of Friends of Achille) can only rarely be found at good second-hand bookstores. Chavée said it knowingly, with that sometimes black, sometimes mocking humor that saved him throughout his existence from many disappointments: "Unfindable, I sometimes print a book in zero copies."

So here, in a beautiful small volume, is an almost complete treatise on Louviérois Chavéism, burning with self-mockery, and illustrated by about twenty young students from La Cambre in Brussels. The contagious enthusiasm of their teacher, illustrator Pascal Lemaître, led them to follow closely or distantly in the footsteps of this "old Redskin who will never walk in single file." Undoubtedly his most famous aphorism, but many others are worth the detour: "I end up discovering that I was ungovernable," "Being in the mood to eat an anthropophagous," "One day I won't enter the Academy," or even: "It's with good proverbs that we make bad weeds."

When it came to bad weeds, Chavée knew a thing or two. Born in 1906 into a Catholic family in La Louvière, in Belgian Hainaut, he vigorously distanced himself from it to, from his law studies at the Free University of Brussels, embrace all at once secularism, Wallonia's independence, and the defense of the most deprived social classes. In 1933, Henri Storck and Joris Ivens filmed the (still) heartbreaking Misery in the Borinage. Chavée saw in it an echo of his 1930 Ode to Wallonia, from which rose "the murmur of its men/ On the day of barricade and fraternity (...) Wallonia, oh land of work/ Miner, giant race/ Who digs into its entrails." This lyrical, nationalist, and idealizing Chavée supported insurrectional workers' movements and wildcat strikes in Hainaut. He had not yet turned his gaze toward André Breton's surrealism. This was done in 1934: with André Lorent, Marcel Parfondry, Albert Ludé, he founded the "Rupture" group, soon joined by his friend Fernand Dumont. Thus began the adventure of Hainaut surrealism, which, despite more or less regular and friendly occasional collaborations, remained quite distinct from Brussels surrealism led since the mid-1920s by Nougé, Magritte, Mesens, Scutenaire.

"Today it was a morning/with great worn slippers of clouds/at the four corners of the heart of the sky." Chavée's poetry, born from firedamp explosions and a never-extinguished revolt against the absurdity of living, invents itself in a writing that often has only the label of automatic. The history of Hainaut surrealism does not escape the ideological conflicts between Stalinists and Trotskyists, and Chavée, returned from the Spanish Civil War, found in the USSR and communist militancy A Faith for All (1938). But the poet himself will remain apart from dogmatisms. A smuggler, a disillusioned utopian, Chavée associates language with its power of insurrection. It incarnates itself in the banality of everyday life, in the simplicity of a bar conversation, in melancholic reverie or eruptive violence. Dawn is never separated from the abyss except by a few letters. Chavée excels like no one else at making graspable the stammering of all human life, as in his poem I me de de:

"I me vermin/ I me metaphysical/ I me termite/ I me albumin/... / I sweat anxiety/ I'm going to croak madam the marquise."

The selection of poems and aphorisms chosen, in a sometimes uneven work, wisely follows the chronological line. With Chavée's numerous collections and pamphlets not being readily available, we will nevertheless regret the absence of a complete bibliography, apart from the table of contents, and precise biographical landmarks, which would have benefited from being extracted from the postface. Not enough to spoil the reading pleasure: half a century after his death, the one who cut his tobacco with a snapping "Silence, Chavée, you bore me," finds new breath here. Young generations will cross paths without displeasure with the intransigent poems and apostrophes, still relevant, of this "old white elephant," obstinately untamable.