Olivia Tapiero, Nothing at All (trans. Kit Schluter

 

In Fez, my grandmother, still a child, feared the scarred faces of the men who had been placed on the front line, the cannon fodder recruited from the French colonies. Still, in the Montreal winter, she regrets her fear, remembers the sadness of those disfigured men when she whimpered in terror as they waved at her on the bus, and then her mother, that orphan from the mountain who threatened her if she didn’t behave. Be careful, I’ll hand you over to the Senegalese… My grandmother tells me this story and cries over her dumplings, so I tell her, Mamie, you didn’t know, you were so little and she repeats, but poor things, poor things, after all they’ve seen…

The latest title by Montreal-born Olivia Tapiero [performing virtually next week as part of VERSeFest] is Nothing at All (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2026), translated into English by Kit Schluter, and published with a Foreword by Anne Boyer. Nothing at All is a collection that Boyer describes as “a vital, accruing, distributed process.” “The threat precedes me. The chkoumoune,” Tapiero writes, via Schluter’s translation, mid-way through the collection, “the shour, which my grandmother pronounces zhor when she tells me about the spells the crumpled spirits impose on those women who attract the evil eye. One morning, in a village where the wind drives people mad, her mother wakes her up screaming, forbidding her to look in the mirror: the zhor has disfigured her, her childlike features have drained from the right side of her face.” Nothing at All reads as an expansive lyric gesture of shadow and liquid, relaying story and trauma across an expansive suite of fragments composed via an accumulation of prose poems, prose poem sections, writing of endings and beginnings; writing history and its devastations, accumulations; its ripples, and its waves. Set in sections of self-contained but interconnected prose sections—“Black Hole,” “Now You Say Nothing,” “Letter,” “Here I Am, a Dull Transplant,” “Zhor” and “The Unthinkable Orifice”—Tapiero’s precise, prose abstracts on and around war and memory, family story and upheavals read as echoes of works by the late Etel Adnan (1925-2021) [see my review of her most recent here] or even Canadian expat Nathanaël, asking, precisely, what one inherits through such a history, and one so deeply present.

I speak to you of buried flesh and names that can’t be found. I speak to you of the limits of literature, and of its tentacles. What do you want me to say? The premature sacking, the cannibalistic maternity, the coffee the rapist pays for the day after, the colonization of Algeria? Where does the wound begin? I’m trying to find out whose ghost I am. I know how to inhabit other people’s childhoods, not this inherited void, not the crossed-out names of those who came before me. I’m ashamed, disarticulated. I repeat the crime the way one learns a lesson.