Sisters, Are You with Me? by Chloé Delaume

Reviewed by: Sisters, Are You with Me? by Chloé Delaume Deborah Gaensbauer Delaume, Chloé. Sisters, Are You with Me? Trans. Dawn M. Cornelio. New Dawn Editions, 2021. Pp [i]- 61. ISBN 978-0-2288-5888-1. CA$25.00 (paper). ISBN 978-0-2288-5890-4 CA$17.99 (eBook). This translation of Chloé Delaume's exuberant, fourth-wave feminist manifesto is ambitious and important as it makes available to an Anglophone public a compelling French feminist voice. Bridging the dystopic feminism of Delaume's 2016 Les sorcières de la République and the fictionalized paean to sisterhood in her 2020 Prix Médicis novel, Mes bien chères soeurs, Sisters calls for recuperating into contemporary French the antiquated word "sororité" as a lexical springboard to more inclusive and less competitive feminist practices and ethics. Delaume's marshalling of the term in her call for "[a]ctive feminism, the return of even more dangerous witches who have learned the spell of unity" (46) is entirely antithetical to its use on North American university campuses. The manifesto is pointedly addressed to all women, "no matter how they became women" (8). It reinvigorates for a social-media-connected society the 1970s North American feminist slogan, "sisterhood is powerful" and builds, in a mostly optimistic mode, on such acknowledged antecedents as Valerie Solanas's SCUM Manifesto (1967), Monique Wittig's Les guérillières (1969) and Virginie Despentes's King Kong Théorie (2006). In Sisters, Delaume celebrates the recent feminist solidarity made possible by the equalizing and unifying anonymity of the internet by promoting a "pact of non-aggression" among women (55): "No Mama Bosses here" (39). Writing from traumatic personal experience as she charts the evolution of the historical waves of feminism, particularly in France and the United States, Delaume offers contemporary approaches to creating a "united community, moved forward by the same will to thwart paternalistic strategies and everyday sexist violence, fertile compost for rape and uxoricide" (54). She targets with searing gallows humor the abusively demeaning ribaldry institutionalized in popular French culture. Even more ferociously, mobilizing her hallmark incantatory fund of grim statistics, she excoriates a patriarchal French society where "every three days, a woman dies at the hands of her partner" and "one woman in 10 has been or will be raped in her lifetime" (26). Delaume's experimental autofictions figure prominently among the compelling works by contemporary French women writers. However, little of her writing is available in English as translating her work poses daunting linguistic and cultural hurdles. Characteristic of Delaume's work in general, the dynamism of Sisters comes from her idiosyncratic humor and the unconventional language and poetic style of her prose. The freewheeling and irreverent play of neologisms, contorted syntax, intertextual allusions, and combative staccato rhythms playing off a flow of abundant alexandrines are not easily rendered in English. Cornelio, a prominent scholar of Delaume's highly varied artistic creations who worked closely with the author on the translation, was uniquely well qualified to take on this task. She has previously translated Delaume's Certainement pas (Not a Clue) [End Page 193] and more recently her short literary piece, "Dream Operator." Although the nature of English makes it difficult to render, for example, the humorous audacity of certain neologisms that particularly captured the attention of French readers such as couillidés and vieux papatronat (translated as "ball-bearers" and "old boys club"), the creative verve of Cornelio's translation captures remarkably well the provocative energy of Delaume's call for an updated approach to radical feminist activism. Additionally, to make the manifesto more accessible to Anglophone readers, Cornelio has seamlessly interpolated contextualization of Delaume's multiple, mostly unattributed, literary citations and her constant play of historicocultural references, puns, maxims, slogans and femininizing manipulations of French vocabulary. This perspicacious translation of Sisters provides further access to a lively and culturally broadening addition to women's and gender studies and comparative literature curricula, offering a crucial reminder, as Delaume underscores, that "[t]he fourth wave is visible, but it needs to be looked after, fattened up, nourished; it's not enough to surf on it" (57). Although initially unavailable outside Canada, paper copies will...

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