In the later 1930s Ford Madox Ford was asked by one of his writing students, Robert Lowell, what the one essential need was for an aspiring writer. Ford said: "Memory." Oscar Wilde is famed for averring that life copies art, not the other way round. Both these insights are lived-out and lived-up-to in acclaimed poet Pascale Petit’s first novel, My Hummingbird Father.
This is the story of the main protagonist, Dominique, a painter, and a story about the value of the imagination and its glorious inheritance. A story about how art redresses and redeems the seemingly insuperable vulnerabilities of being human. Indeed, to start: Chapter 29 of this compelling, moving book is titled "Two Dominiques," and my discussion centres on this doubleness, what Dominique thinks of at one point in the novel as "double exposure."
In the "Prologue" we start with the "forest of perpetual childhood," "painting animals none have seen." Indeed, Petit as a poet is very well-known as a writer giving life and signifying sentience to the lives of and in the natural world, the rich and feral world of her good, longstanding wilderness. In this book, though we travel, transformatively, between her heroine, Dominique’s self-professed "blank childhood," her thinking of herself as having "died at six," her "forest of sleeping birds," "memories never to be remembered," and her later reconciliation with that fraught past. For she was also the girl through these traumas with "a crayon always in her hand," with a body that as this story fleshes out, "remembers her childhood," bodily (aesthetically), a woman for whom life itself comes through her canvases, "hungry for the truth." And "hunger" is deeply apposite, in so far as it’s used both literally and figuratively in this novel, a novel replete with a rich and kaleidoscopic array of flora and fauna that act as both vehicles and tenors for how the tale is told. In short, this story is an adventure and a homecoming. A bad wilderness (Dominique’s harsh childhood) is exchanged through the process of daring to love again with a good one: she is loved and loving again in the Amazonian wilderness of the book’s final part, its "Epilogue."
Architectonic aside, the lifegiving doubleness of this tale is also apparent in its style, a style much like the (mythopoetic) "rites" of passage of the Pemón people she visits in Venezuela, in her visits to the Amazonian wilderness. For instance, "Juan," her Amazonian guide, future lover, and future replacement for her now-dead father, can speak of his people dubbing rain "saliva of the stars," and (one of innumerable examples) Dominique can see her dying, breathless father later in the Amazonian trees, "a forest holding in its breath." The sensibility of the heroine (and/or her narrator) of this tale is oceanic, meaning all the elements of felt life, wild and tame and in between, interpenetrate continuously in its telling. The literal riches of wildlife described and descried also stand for and inhabit different metaphorical levels in the novel. This gesture of (freely) translating at least two levels of world is enacted on nearly every page: the Pemón speak of the "sky-forest" and the plain one, the "spirit world" and the "visible" one (like left and right hands), and via flashbacks and instinctual moves of involuntary memory, Dominique and her guiding narrator shuttlecock between literal, contemporary worlds and mythic and spiritual or imaginative ones, rendering this book in toto a paean to the empowering freedom of the imagination, epiphanic, transformative.
Though hated by her (now-dead) mother, having a fractious relationship with her sister, Vero, bullied at school, near-suicidal later, Dominique’s primary antagonist is her father, whom she visits in the last few, dying years of his life, a man who had absconded from her childhood. The "grey" Paris (of her childhood) Dominique visits is soon to be animated with colour, though, as much as the Notre-Dame she visits (which becomes "a new zoo") repeatedly, becomes a parallel of her Venezuelan wilderness. Two poles, again, but two welded in the end as one.
Her father is her hummingbird father. Another doubleness symbolizes here, too: the hummingbirds, we read, "pierce time itself." There are the cared-for hummingbirds (37 of them, Dominique’s age) of the ornithologist Augusto Ruschi and the deadened, heartless ones she finds among her father’s remains. Her father (abused in childhood, as Dominique was herself) represents the dead-end of temporality, a vicious cycle and re-cycling of immanent abuse – Dominique’s father averring at one point (ashamed) that one cannot change the past. The better hummingbirds represent the way that art and imagination can use the past as an opportunity for the future, redressing the beeline of mortality.
The overall imaginative vision behind this rich and compelling tale is both a concrete journey of transformation and, through the riches of its lucid, dramatic, highly evocative telling, an allegory about what art is for. The wilderness of our wounds and suffering can be transcended by the loving care of the imagination – not as escape, but as the distiller and giver of the essence of flourishing human well-being.
Omar Sabbagh is a widely published poet, writer and critic. His latest books are Y Knots: Short Fictions and For Echo (Cinnamon Press 2023 & 2024). Currently he teaches at the Lebanese American University (LAU).
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