White Resin

Audrée Wilhelmy, Susan Ouriou

• Publisher: Arachnide Editions
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781487008864
• eBook ISBN: 9781487008871
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

White Resin is an ethereal love story of the almost-impossible reconciliation between the manufactured world and the haunting and feminine nature that envelops it.  

In this impassioned and wildly imagined story of creation, a girl named Dãa, is born to "twenty-four mothers," the sisters of a convent at the edge of the Quebec taiga. Nearby, at the Kohle mining company, a woman dies giving birth to Laure, a child with albinism, in the workers' canteen. What follows is a dream-like recounting of their love affair and the family they bear, a captivating magic-realist tale of origins and opposites, that would be fantastical if it did not ring so true to the boreal north. White Resin is at once a dream-like romance and an homage to gorgeous, feral, and fecund nature as it both stands against and entwined with the industrial world.

Also by Audrée Wilhelmy
(in translation)

The Body of the Beasts

Blanc résine copyright © 2019, Leméac Éditeur (Montréal, Canada)

English translation copyright © 2021 by Susan Ouriou

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First published as Blanc résine in 2019 by Leméac Éditeur Inc.

First published in English in Canada in 2021 and the USA in 2021 by House of Anansi Press Inc.

www.houseofanansi.com

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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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House of Anansi Press is a Global Certified Accessible™ (GCA by Benetech) publisher. The ebook version of this book meets stringent accessibility standards and is available to students and readers with print disabilities.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: White resin / Audrée Wilhelmy ; translated by Susan Ouriou.

Other titles: Blanc résine. English

Names: Wilhelmy, Audrée, 1985- author. | Ouriou, Susan, translator.

Description: Translation of: Blanc résine.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210222034 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210222050 | ISBN 9781487008864 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487008871 (EPUB)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS8645.I432 B5313 2021 | DDC C843/.6—dc23

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Book design: Alysia Shewchuk

Typesetting: Lucia Kim

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House of Anansi Press respectfully acknowledges that the land on which we operate is the Traditional Territory of many Nations, including the Anishinabeg, the Wendat, and the Haudenosaunee. It is also the Treaty Lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit.

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We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the National Translation Program for Book Publishing, an initiative of the Action Plan for Official Languages — 2018–2023: Investing in Our Future, for our translation activities.

To Colombe, Rose-Anne, Josée, Laurence,

Anne-Clotilde, Camille, Romy, Margot, Charlotte, Lily, the women of my blood

and to those I have chosen,

Salomé and Romane.

and a whole kingdom grows deep in your throat

between your jaws you press stones

history’s sediment the mica of anger

later dandelions and timothy grass

will sprout from the sockets of your eyes

Catherine Lalonde, Cassandre

OSTARA

I am born.

I bore through a convent’s entrails.

Twenty-four sisters push, wail, their voices pouring through the walls to mingle with the cries of osprey and rook, with barking, cackles, and growls. The forest teems with animals calving. It’s a taiga night, the moon low and round, the same at either end: twelve hours of darkness, twelve hours of light. Everywhere the equinox hollows out the wombs of pregnant females. Their dens, carpeted with dry grasses, are unlike the one sheltering forty-eight legs and forty-eight arms of naked women.

A hundred times they rip apart and come together in a chaos of entangled flesh: twenty-four heads, twenty-four sexes, forty-eight eyes that have seen the sex of other mothers rent, but never their own.

I writhe inside them, cleave them, extricate myself the best I can from their ventral organs. Outside, spring snow falls, a heavy snow that melts as it hits the ground with the same sound my body makes as it shoots out from between their thighs. The thud of a wet sponge. I am born: a slimy brown creature, with hair as abundant as a spruce tree’s, that flops onto the table, splat, screams, and then grabs onto a finger, the first one held out toward me, moistened with milk.

Over the course of the night, leverets punch a hole between the flanks of hare doe, fawns are delivered onto beds of dead boughs. I taste colostrum in the same moment a litter of lynx cubs does. Only walls separate me from my mammal siblings.

In my burrow of sacred stones, every woman watches as I nurse, a girl savant already where suckling is concerned.

Day breaks white through the windows; the wind dies down. My ears discover the harmonies of choirs. The knocking of windows, of shutters against transoms, is swallowed up by my chorister mother singing lauds.

I emerge from the womb of a convent, twenty-four women, no men, no father. His is the face of the North, of a nomadic tribe: I inherit from it my Olbak shock of hair, yet I am born of twenty-four sisters and no one else, who, beneath their veils, hide silken locks and skulls as hard as the rock of the Kohle Co.

Fingers of hands both dexterous and clumsy, knuckles gnarled, wrists plump and youthful, know how to clear air passageways and cut the cord; others learn on the spot. They wash the vernix off with the sweat of their limbs, swaddle me, embrace me, breathe me in; hands pass me into the arms of others feeling me against their belly and breasts, a warm ball. Their hair is a cape falling down their backs that billows when one or another opens the door to the refectory, that intertwines, becomes a net coiled tightly round them, the cloistered nuns of the Sainte-Sainte-Anne convent: twenty-four women’s faces, one great mother body.

Dawn glides over the snow in flesh-coloured highlights. My mother combs her hair, tucks it beneath her veil. Vernix and blood bind the strands together, as do the sweat and grime from her new mother's body. Outside, male garter snakes interlace on rocks defending their right to reproduction as inside, the hydra, having reproduced, disentangles its heads.

Their names are Sister Elli, Sister Ondine, Sister Boisseau, Sister Dénéa, Sister Grêle. During my slumber, they once again become faces with singular traits, the shape of an eye and an eyebrow the result of parents and parents before them, and yet more parents going back two-by-two through all of history.

They are scattered throughout the refectory. Sister Zéphérine buttons her collar; Sisters Betris, Lotte, and Maglia stand by the china cabinet braiding their hair; Sister Silène watches as the three caress their plaits, reminded of the Fates spinning a skein of wool. In their midst, the table has disappeared beneath dirty sheets. Sister Selma gathers them and leaves them to soak. The twenty-four chairs sit upside-down after being moved for the night so the birth could take place unhindered. Sister Alcée and Sister Nigel each bend over a dozen times to turn the chairs upright on either side of the tablecloth. Sister May sings, “Cold north winds that ravage the plains, don’t trouble the peace of the elements here.” Sister Lénie brings in day-old bread. No fresh loaves, clean plates, or eggs for breakfast.

Outside, it’s eight o’clock, which is to say full daylight. Sister Carmantine forgot to ring the Angelus bell and wake the Kohle Company’s miners. Sister Douce says, “Let them raise roosters if they’re miffed.”

Wrapped in my greige swaddling clothes, I listen to the clinking of cutlery and to voices that remind me of my aquatic life. Nearby, twenty-four women face one another in pairs down the length of the only table. The head and foot of it are empty, resist hierarchy: Sainte-Sainte-Anne is a convent without a reverend that has been turned by sin into a full-on mother.

The one rocking me sits by the fireplace. Enfolding me, hers is a body shared: nothing but heat, which is enough; a finger moistened with milk, which is enough; breath; and the cadence of a beating heart repeating from one thorax to the next as each sister takes a turn and loses her name with the transfer of the bundle.

Outside, my mammal siblings suckle and see nothing, furry heaps drawing forth the flow of maternal sap. Indoors, the forces are reversed; I am alone and my mother, plural. She has thumbs and index fingers for me to nibble; they taste of dead skin, baking, animal hides, horsehair, metal, soot.

At the same time as she feeds me, she colonizes my imagination with words that invoke:

forests

boreal females

partridge

river fish

ice

tundra

rhizomes

bonfires

white black grey veils

giant branches

wildlife free in its animal wisdom

Her voices hush the crackling of blazing pine logs, her words are threads of a miscellany of legends.

Sister Betris says — Through me, the sea flows in your veins. I have the waterworld imprinted on my flesh. The ineradicable stench of eel, skate, clam, brithyll, conch, the blood of whales gutted on the shores. Where I come from, laundry stays wet on the line, battered by rain and moisture-laden winds; women are sticky with the men who have passed through their thighs and the children who flow from between their legs. But me, I wanted to live elsewhere than Oss, far from the stink of oceanic carcasses and the young that come in bundles of twelve, forever sullied by cetaceous blood. Before my marriage, I dreamt I lodged a fishhook in my firstborn’s throat. The only possible escape was the cloister, but I also dreamed that the nun’s veil turned into rorqual’s baleen and swallowed me whole. So I left empty-handed on the only fishing boat at dock. The sardine fisherman took me, beneath him and his sex and into his net, I let him have his way till we reached the Cité and I walked free. Except that I’m like an oyster torn from the seabed: even deep in the forest, I taste the salt lingering in my mouth and retain memories of tossing waves that sicken me as I fall asleep.

The dark of night, full sunlight, grey days, aurora borealis fill the windows. The women watch the fire. When they’re not holding me, they’re knitting, throwing logs into the hearth that send up embers and ash. Some have rough, worn hands, speckled like my baby face. They rock me as all around us the convent narrates the night in a language of creaking beams.

Sister Lotte says — Through me, your sex retains the memory of trapped girls. For seven years, I was a whore at Sacré-Cœur. Red velvet drapes, a crucifix in each wardrobe; sheets, colourless, so the sperm would blend in with the fabric. Clients who paid with money from the collection plate. Lying between my breasts, priests of the higher clergy spoke of the sins of virgins, the pastoral care of savages, fortunes made through indulgences. They climaxed on my belly as I dreamed of free lands. One day, I stole the clothes of a reverend mother who liked to be spanked. I ran from the brothel under cover of the black veil of piety. In the streets, I ate on faith’s dime till I met Betris. She worked at a market stall gutting trout and vomiting after each fillet.

I’m two days old, then two weeks, soon two months. I learn by heart the refectory’s idioms, the song of its nails, the crackling of its fireplace, I distinguish above the room’s voices those of the creatures who live there, conversations between women or field mice.

Sister Maglia says — I was destined for opulence. My fiancé would have hired submissive maids for me, bought with the gold of railways. On the backs of the poor and their destitution, I would have raised my domestics as an army of little mothers to train, in turn, my children and my tigers. On my wedding day, I saw in a mirror the tyrant I could become and fled. I walked from the country to the city through forests, alleys, ports, among houses unlike any I’d seen before, makeshift castles, quarters of proletarian disarray. Through me, your feet carry the wanderings of free women.

I met Betris in a fish market where, to be fed, you had only to loosen your blouse and make eyes at passersby. She’s the one who introduced me to Lotte, who told me her dream of an unspoiled wilderness — a “sanctuary,” she called it. I took her holy habit and disguised myself as a reverend mother, visited her brothel, and convinced the bishop to fund a divine mission. I whispered, “I am Mother Mary Maglia of Great Causes” as I licked his short hairs. In exchange for my mouth, for my ass, he funded Sainte-Sainte-Anne — the iron steeple, the gardens, the greenhouses — to evangelize the Olbak an...

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