Fratrasie by Brigitte Fontaine
On June 24th 2024, Brigitte Fontaine celebrated her 85th birthday in her sacred kingdom: Paris. A year earlier, she slipped into bookstores with a new book whose enigmatic title is Fatrasie. The artist knows she is nearing the end of her life and doesn’t hesitate to write about it:
« La mort mord/ les rideaux/ la fumée/ de tabac/ qui étouffe/et qui colle /aux chicots […] » [Death bites/the curtains/the smoke/of tobacco/which suffocates/and clings/to snags]
Fatrasie (which could be translated as Fatras according to Roland Greene in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics) is an irrational and deliberately obscure piece of verse that, originating in the Middle Ages, constituted a mode of licensed regression… Each page turned in this poetry collection is an ode to everyday life, desserts, dreams, and cats. Fontaine describes her aging body, increasingly twisted, her bones pressing against her skin.
« La petite robe noire flotte en drapeau de pirate, le papier d’Arménie se mélange avec les cendres […] »
[The little black dress floats like a pirate’s flag, the Armenian paper dissolves into ashes]
This “little brown doll,” as she calls herself at the beginning of the book, is a French avant-garde singer, novelist, playwright, poet, and actress. Brigitte Fontaine, over the course of her career, has used many unusual musical styles, mixing rock and roll, folk, free jazz, electronica, spoken word, and world rhythms. The time for concerts seems to have ended, but her “delicate-skinned” hands continue to write still.
Baudelaire, the only writer quoted as an exergue, appears to accompany her in her poetry and worldview. It’s unclear from her disillusioned tone whether she feels overwhelmed by life or caught up by death.
Fratrasie by Brigitte Fontaine, Le Tripode.
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