Marie Ginet

- France -

Passionate about poetry and spoken words, Marie Ginet performs live on theater and slam sessions under the nickname Ange Gabriel.e. She is an associated artist of La Générale d’Imaginaire, she is the author and interpreter of several shows about Roma, minorities and feminism.

She has published two poetry books at L’agitée editions : "Souffles nomades” (Nomadic Breaths) was published 2010 and "Pulsation" in 2014. Her next book "In the Angel's Belly and other Hiding-places " has come out in September, 2016 at Henry’s editions.

She is an author and interpreter of the show “Je nous tiens debout” (I stand us up) staged by Anne Conti about women status. In 2013, she created with the Poet Dominique Sorrente a poetic reading in a duet “Nord Sud où vont les fleuves” (The North the South where the rivers go). In 2015, the duet played “Zigzag déclame” (Zig-zag declaim), a performance mixing sound exploration, whispers and howls.

In addition, she publishes in magazines and websites. 


To open marie Ginet’s book, to write about her, is like being born. This article is like an announcement inviting us to an exponential nativity. Genesis, Ginet, Marie as well, but I also read that Ginet means “beautiful and well-born”. So here it is, her newborn book, named “Dans le ventre de l’Ange et autres cachettes / In the belly of the Ange (Angel) and other Hiding-places”. Marie Ginet adopted the name Ange Gabriel.e for when she stands on stage to perform, slam and whisper.

Well, well, Gabriel, the one who announces births, what a destiny… He who lends his name to the barge on which the book was partly conceived. For this belly, the Ange’s, is the supreme stash, the one in the shape of a bilge, in a boat crossing Belgium, from Namur to Béthune via Charleroi. Then, on the back of the book, it is written for 8 euro : “Through the porthole passes the world / Graffiti of love and loneliness / on the bridge piers / a child's ball, blue, floating / back of the factories”.

Yes, the world! Through the porthole, those angel’s eyes, an intimate place from where whizzes a voice who tells the river, its banks and everything that shoots there, lives and deaths interlaced.

If living is “moving from space to space”, then living in this book is moving from one stash to another without bumping against anything, with open eyes to walk, and to make a place become a knot to tell the seen and the heard, over a rope made of poems, as many travelling stashes.

The first one, which flies by at the speed of 11km/h, with the air it shifts, leads us back to ancient verses and new stanzas: from Rimbaud’s Bateau ivre to Verlaine's uneven vaporous rythms, from Apollinaire’s Zone, and Venaille’s Escaut, and all those Noms perdus, des sources aux pertes de la Meuse by Beurard-Valdoye. From fluidity contrasts made of collage emerge, inherited from Dharma bums and, without warning, come to us Baudelaire’s Charogne and Poe’s mortuaries.

Yes, sounds as fluid as a river, short percussive sentences, concealed alexandrins, some “gal gla gla”, some “tut tut”, some bucolic bursting paintings… Through industrial graveyards, the memories of craftmen and of ancient migrations, and the tragic presence and absence of today’s migrants scroll in front of the Ange’s belly.

 

This book is a mosaic of places from the first page to the last: “rivers : a dream under the tongue” (p.7), “We can kiss on the mouth” (p.41)... The whole book gives an important place to love and the lover. Because in the secret of hiding places, emotions, pleasures and melancholy are being born again and again… These Rooms of caresses are the counter-complaint of a stealer of eternity. They are like localised instants scattered throughout the text, carried around the heart, on the same string or rope that keeps eyelids open, like awnings that the Ange could lower.

“In the Angel's Belly and Other Hiding-places” is the art of inhabiting, the art of perceiving a recreated everyday, multiplied in space and time. Discoveries, rediscoveries, imaginations, memories, naming of territories, landscapes, faces and voices: a very personal liturgy of hours, celebrating life and lives, starting from that of Marie Ginet, Ange Gabriel.e.

 

By Jean Palomba