School : memories for an inventory
translated from my book Faire peau neuve, poèmes et portraits, written in French
No portrait but a rough inventory, made of bits and bobs, as it must be, the name of my school as a child being : école Jacques Prévert.
Yes, the poet, the king of inventories…
1 ) MARBLE (or anything round)
Glass MARBLE, trophy and currency before the euro, the tiny ball of a ballpoint pen, funny face, round like a MARBLE, children gathering around their figure of fun, their scapegoat.
2 ) GLUE
Little pots of paste that smell of almonds, to be friends like two pots of GLUE, that girl who was so clingy and crashed the playground party every single day, glued to my chair on a three-hour detention Wednesday, because that awkward person couldn’t stand my funny face
3 ) PLAYGROUND
Place of daily resort, place where imagination unleashes, limits to our everyday universe, paradise where the chalked hopscotch leads to, before crossing the Styx, on the other side of Hell where my parents live, PLAYGROUND of which you are the hero, PLAYGROUND where you are a flop, PLAYGROUND where you can pour wild Indian cries in and play macadam Huckleberry Finn, PLAYGROUND where you parade in a peacock-like way, in front of your first love in the sandpit, PLAYGROUND Court of Miracles, PLAYGROUND where, as a teenager, you cluster in clans or hover in between them
4 ) PAPER : tracing PAPER, carbon PAPER and purple handouts, PAPER wrapped around sweets with Carambar* jokes in them, snacks capped with rice PAPER, graph PAPER, Canson PAPER**, secret PAPER written on with invisible ink, toilet PAPER wrapped around the teacher’s Renault 5, PAPER planes, to look like my face was made from PAPER Mache, school, a harbour made of PAPER, to throw all my anger onto PAPER from the top of my ten years old
5 ) TEACHER who measures my wins and flops, TEACHER who measures my writing in full and thin, TEACHER with whom I measure the world, TEACHER who is fair and venerated, TEACHER who is an impostor and hated, thumb my nose, TEACHER who opens the doors to the world
6 ) SLATE that squeaks, magic SLATE, SLATE with a U-turn, SLATE I have dried up and can’t write a thing, SLATE good answer, well done, SLATE with hangman game, SLATE the bill we owed our friends for the coffee we drank for free
7 ) LOVEBIRDS so serious at seventeen, LOVEBIRDS on the school benches, publishing their first banns in life, LOVEBIRDS engraved in the bark of a tree, scarred for the circumstance
8 ) LIBERATION
The horror of the situation revealed, oxygen for your lungs, from head to toe ; shake your hair, a glimpse of your future, the key to knowledge ; to take to the open road and disappear, to fly away from becoming a loser ; the social divide ; the cultural mix, the anonymity, being freed at last from the fist-fight
9 ) HOLIDAYS
Parting going dancing growing moving importance abundance Byzantium Provence transhumance youth nonchalance ardor summer Saint John’s day leaping over the fire liberating transe
10) RELATIVITY
When we were at school it limited and delimited us, and it’s only when illimited we fly away that we see how school helped us in the end, as best as possible, to pack our bags, even without the manna of our Ancients
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*Carambar =popular French toffee
**Canson = French artsy paper used for painting or sketching