François Lemieux
All inclusive, this weft, an atoll that is also a vestige of devoration

All inclusive, this weft, an atoll that is also a vestige of devoration

You devour the memory of this future           on what was once the beach of the metaphysical valley.                 Now, it’s part of a lush archipelago, with a cosmic mirage of gleaming melamine on the horizon.               The sandy shoreline of the many warms your feet, feet that will soon walk the pier of ambiguity—which sometimes leads to the cantina of ruin, sometimes to the Frantz Fanon Cabaret, sometimes elsewhere: the shack of ecodelic redress, or the somatheque of boreal-colonial devouring. 

You pursue the jaguar within             while the campground of miraculous secession cuts through you.            Behind its lush vegetation, you recall a snack bar on finally-ceded lands, a stone’s misthrow from the local inconvenience store.           Your becoming-witch lets you improvise: now you can invent indispensable crossroads,           now you can show gratitude to place, your place.

But what of your layer-cake of dreams, of nonchalance traced out in the dew, its fragrance, your dusty footsteps, the scattered pathway through a thousand weather-battered mangroves;             your forest, your feeling together,                   this climate in flames —            some see all this in an unfavourable light…

Daucun was saying just yesterday that your forest was still the edge of their world, that its shoreline, its inn of imperial idleness were all just as good as the drive-in and speak-white-easy of yesteryear. All these haunts of the gas-powered, flag-waving hegemon, beyond the great dam that floods out those who would save us from the flood.

Sous la plage, les pavés.

Breathe, Daucun, breathe. 

For lack of movement, faced with imaginations ingrown as a toenail, other friends say: “Please! Some kind of possibility! Otherwise we’ll suffocate.”                          But how are we going to make do, here and now, no shovel, no snorkel,                   here, on the other side? How are we going to eat? What or who can be our food? How to digest disorder? How to de-destroy the earth?

In this climate of tension (body-building for the appetite of the masters), some mistake your archipelago of fine sandy beaches for fool’s gold, fool’s gold that becomes a cape, that itself becomes a shield, that in turn becomes a citadel suddenly turned inside-out,            like the mineral glove of the tropipatriarchy.            So, you decide to build a bench                  from which to admire the realms, the interweave that has been unravelled out before you. You pack up the melamine, which has now taken the form of a conspiratorial centrifuge. It can be used for other purposes.

Daucun, you know as well as we do that this pier is the culmination of all the intuitive connections you’ve been following, in a word, your return to the atoll.              You’ve let yourself be lured in, captivated by this magnificent geontology: an island in a lagoon, past the valley of unease, now far away, towards decolonization.              But for locals, it remains a refuge.

            a place where you can let yourself be devoured by a difficult sun. 

A century ago,                the island was put up for sale. Locals feared it might become yet another investment for sightseeing overlords, so they formed a bloco, a co-op, a procession of sorts.              Against all odds, they managed to drive the thieves away,   

        or to eat them, that is, to convince them to be like grass,

                   this interweaving,              all-inclusive.