Le Ortique: History and Hers
PLU’s Emily is inspired by the work of collective Le Ortique to think into the cosmos about the power one can wield over literary canon.
Following an interview with two members of the Le Ortique collective, I ask myself about the literary canon, legacy and history.
History is the ensemble of narratives we are told at a time
Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Fred Vargas, Carol Anne Duffy.
These are the women writers whose work I remember as part of my educational syllabi through school and university. Six women among the near-hundred I would be given on obligatory reading lists over the years. I imagine (and hope) that there were more whose work, for whatever reason, didn’t imprint at the time. But there certainly weren’t more than a double handful.
This was a no-women’s-land that I didn’t even recognise I was blithely wading my formative literary education through.
You’ll notice that Duffy is the only poet of the six. And, to be honest, aged 16 I found no call in her pieces we were made to study and learn by rote. “Valentine” left me loveless. And, onions or not, before you cry BARRETT BROWNING, ROSSETTI or PLATH… no, they weren’t on my reading lists.
Yet poetry, with its concise, tableau-like nature wherein every single word is of a vital nuance — not to mention punctuation, scansion and play — was always how I chose to express myself. No waffling diary entries: I have 200+ pages of verse that recount years of Emily aged 13+. I beat iambs to death throughout my adolescence. May they rest in pieces.
Elizabeth, Christina and Sylvia did, thankfully, find me out of school hours.
“Grief” still is the poem I read when it comes to the hardest of hurt. “Winter: My Secret” (originally “Nonsense”) is 19th Century very sensical sass and a joy to read aloud. Plath took me longer, and it’s only since being pregnant myself that “You’re” gets me first in the funnies and then in the womb. And these are just some of the women whose words made me work: to understand, to admire, to imitate and eventually to grow my own voice from.
So, a decade after my studies, when I heard about the Le Ortique collective, of course I wanted to know more and to make it heard…
Le Ortique: squash a woman, she can bounce
Alessandra Trevisan and Viviana Fiorentino are part of the Le Ortique collective, a team dedicated to making noise and space for women writers whose work was not only ignored in their time because #vagina but which is still relatively unheard of now. Truly exceptionally talented writers who managed to get enough of their words published that, decades later, young women hungry for a more representative canon have been able to unearth.
Le Ortique is not about making the literary canon a herstory. I’ll repeat it again because it’s important: they want to make space for writers who didn’t get credit in their time—and that reason was #vagina. This text is taken from their website, but we’ve also spoken about this personally several times (including a PLU Spotlight series) so it’s not a cheap copy-paste.
No caption necessary.
“Squashed by history, by the random course of events, by the affirmation of canons and the centralization of established powers, many women artists have failed to be truly protagonists of their time. Our group wants to rethink to them. To rethink to all those missed women protagonists – artists, writers, poets – who have failed for different reasons to live and survive their time. We are aware that their visions, their imagery, their poetics still resonate with meaning and it would be unforgivable to forget them in the silence of the archives, leaving them once again without a face and without a voice.”
Is it really “unforgiveable” to let sink voices from the past whose work just didn’t make the news at the time? It’s a strong word that merits at least a paragraph, followed by a slice of Plath.
Let’s look back at the title of this article. We’re talking about more than just canon. Groups like Le Ortique are blocks of a narrative we can choose to construct. Not to harp on again about having a baby, but I sincerely want mine to grow up with a literary base that consists of a representational rainbow of artists — as far as that is possible in his time. And for him to question the subjectivity of what is taught as history (without being an irritating shit for teachers.)
So, yes, for me it is “unforgiveable” that I not give space to women writers from the past who were not recognised. I would quite simply be failing my child who is, for the moment:
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.
(1)
Sylvia Plath.
Galaxies, telescopes and space-time
In the Le Ortique manifesto they emphasise that “We do not have labels, we do not belong, we do not have a school of reference; each of us comes from different places.”
A virtual open mic hosted by Le Ortique provides an opportunity for participants to continue to inspire and be inspired during the pandemic.
Of course, in this I heard our own PLU mantra: “Paris Lit Up does not exist. Or rather, Paris Lit Up isn’t any individual project or person. Paris Lit Up is the space between the independently run projects that trace its outline.” — a beautiful description conceived by Kate Noakes and Jason McGimsey when they first formed PLU in 2012. Like benevolent dark matter.
A large crowd gathered together to share, listen, and experience at Paris Lit Up’s weekly open mic night hosted at Culture Rapide.
PLU and Le Ortique do not exist to stoke the loins of an individual’s ego. They thrive through being an expanding hub of passion, where a name can be replaced and the mission continue.
So why then have I chosen to write this from me, Emily, and mention Viviana and Alessandra? Why make this about the first person while lauding the virtues of groups that, like galaxies, form a nebulous third-person glow from afar?
Because of what we’re turning our telescope to. I’m deliberately using my position as a woman with a platform to talk about needing to give women platforms, whichever side of the present they stand on. I have a space, and I’d like to use it, please and thank you.
History is the ensemble of narratives we are told at a time. And any narrative is by its nature subjective. It is how we process and interpret what we experience – making a “happening” exist outside of its moment — which then makes it subjective and therefore no longer objectively true. Yes, canon and syllabi are great hulking machines. But when we acknowledge this, their intrinsic subjectivity, we can see their weak parts, they are more transparent and thereby more easily changed.
If they need oil with every generation, what if we were to let old narratives rust and instead we picked up our telescopes to tell a different story?
By Emily Ruck-Keene