CACAPHONIE: HUMOR, THE LUDIC, AND MOTHERHOOD IN THE WORDS OF SLAM POET, RIM
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CACAphonie: Humor, the Ludic, and Motherhood in the Words of
Slam Poet, RiM
Andrea Jonsson
L'Esprit Créateur, Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2018, pp. 126-139 (Article)
Published by Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/esp.2018.0024
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/697455
[ Access provided at 11 Apr 2020 22:15 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]CACAphonie:
Humor, the Ludic, and Motherhood
in the Words of Slam Poet, RiM
A
Andrea Jonsson
MÉLIE PICQ-GRUMBACH (b. 1979), known on slam poetry
stages as RiM, is a prolific slam poet, singer, actress, and animatrice
of theater and poetry workshops around Paris. She has performed on
televised performances with Grand Corps Malade and is one of the founding
members of 129H Productions, with male slam artists Rouda, Neobled, and
Lyor.1 Picq-Grumbach is also the daughter of the well-known French feminist
historian Françoise Picq, who she claims has inspired her to take on feminist
issues through humor.2 RiM’s creative activity has adapted and evolved with
the changing priorities of her life. From performing sarcastic slam poetry
about gender politics in the Parisian dating scene to writing comical songs
about children’s bedtime routines, RiM cites everyday life from a female per-
spective as an active source of inspiration for her creative process.
Slam poetry activity in France has grown exponentially since the first slam
stages began in the early 2000s. Slam is a pre-written, oral poetry that is more
about process, sound, stage presence, and effect than thematic or stylistic con-
tent. Recently France has seen the rise of several successful slam poets who
straddle the genres of spoken word poetry, rap, music, and theater. Associations
such as Universlam, 129HProductions, and Slam ô féminin have organized a
network of weekly writing workshops, social outreach projects, and events to
use performance poetry as a tool for community building and as a pedagogical
aid for nonconforming students in the French educational system.3 RiM has
become a representative of women slameuses due to her prolific activity,
energy, and consistent poetic philosophy. For RiM, creativity and creation coa-
lesce in the everyday writing and performing of slam poetry. Her definition of
slam is fluid and centers on using the ludic as play and practice. She states:
Tu peux à la fois chanter, rapper, ou avoir un style plus théâtral, ça reste du slam, dès qu’il
y a l’échange et le partage de la parole. […] Ma façon de slamer, elle est très axée à la tech-
nique, à des jeux de mots, c’est ça qui m’amuse, je suis plus dans l’écriture ludique plus que
dans quelque chose d’engagé. […] C’est ça qui donne la richesse, c’est pas du tout formaté,
chacun fait ce qu’il veut, comme il veut […].4
For RiM, the ludic as play is not always compatible with the political engagé.
Using the term engagé to mean invested in a political cause, RiM instead
© L’Esprit Créateur, Vol. 58, No. 2 (2018), pp. 126–139ANdREA JoNSSoN
allows wordplay and creative writing as process to be the goal. However, the
ludic as practice aligns itself with a wider discourse concerning the complex-
ities of humor in political feminisms. RiM splits the ludic into what is written
into the text, “très axée à la technique, à des jeux de mots” (personal inter-
view), and what is experienced in performing it on stage—the plurality of
styles and community exchange. For RiM, slam is not so much about what is
written, but what makes it compatible with orality and gesture in performance.
Her own textual agency results from infusing textual language with a poly-
phonic and playful voice.
RiM’s technical employment of the ludic as practice becomes engagé
when analyzed through the lens of the feminist snap developed by Sara
Ahmed in Living a Feminist Life (2017). Ahmed’s book (and blog) describe
the “feminist killjoy” as a woman who will not apologize for her lack of
humor in misogynistic, sexist or anti-feminist contexts.5 Her book explores
ways of rethinking key aspects of feminist theory in everyday life by accept-
ing the title of the killjoy feminist and being proud of “willfulness,” persist-
ence, resistance, and activism. To do this, Ahmed promotes being “snappy” as
an alternative to being happy. Snap, or “a brisk, sharp, cracking sound; to
break suddenly; to give way abruptly under pressure or tension” (Ahmed
189), is a sound and a mood that contrast with the anger and bitterness that
surround the stigma suffered by many feminists. Ahmed claims “snap can be
a genealogy, unfolding as an alternative family line, or as a feminist inheri-
tance” (Ahmed 192). Though there is an element of anger, irritation, and
sharpness in the snap, there is also a positive reappropriation of the patriarchal
script that decides the experience of ‘joy.’ In the case of RiM, the snap as
poetic wit in her slam poetry and performance on stage have provided her the
way to fit into a feminist tradition of resistance in a patriarchal society. The
slam stage also provides a productive modification for Ahmed’s feminist
snap: in a soirée slam, the audience is encouraged to snap approval physically
when they hear a line to which they particularly relate. In RiM’s poetry, snap
is thus both performed and elicited, and connects the poet with her public by
highlighting the poem’s contagious rhythm of quips and wisecracks.
In this article, divided into two sections, I position RiM’s particular brand
of the ludic snap first in her creative activity during motherhood. In the
second section I perform a close reading of two of her earlier poems published
in Stéphane Martinez’s slam anthology, Slam entre les mots (2007): “Les
maux que je crie” and “d chiffres et d lettres.”6 I argue that RiM’s poetic phi-
losophy based on wordplay, sound, polyphony, and humor creates a definition
of the ludic that allies itself with the complex uses of humor in recent theoret-
VoL. 58, No. 2 127L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
ical feminisms and that elevates her to the status of a femme créa(c)tive. This
latter term designates the reciprocal and ancillary relationship between cre-
ativity and social and political action that is both a goal and a byproduct of her
performance poetry. RiM’s poetry is polyphonic, first, in the way she uses
sound (orality) to charge words with additional meanings, and second in her
use of the ludic to engage the voices of her audience and readers. In these two
poems, RiM enhances and complicates the gap between textuality and orality
through puns, phonetic spellings, and number puzzles, causing the reader to
use her/his own voice to decipher the text. In this way she uses her poetic
technique to create the opportunity for multiple voices to coalesce, complicat-
ing the roles of performer and audience, and poem and reader. The ludic
becomes the bridge between orality, textuality, and subjectivity, and is an
essential element in her published poems.
For RiM, polyphonic puns and the slippage into synonyms and homonyms
are fertile ground for her poetic process. Though RiM’s ludic can be read adja-
cent to the “ludique” outlined in Jacques derrida’s 1966 lecture “Structure,
Sign, and Play in the discourse of the Human Sciences,” my analysis focuses
on the mastery of the poetic voice(s) as polyphonic tools and the dynamic
between orality and textuality in the poetic structure that exploits the link
between feminist humor and writing.7 RiM’s poetic creativity uses a unique
blend of humor, wordplay, and facetiousness to subvert rhetorical strategies
and scripts in which women are subjected to victimization, marginalization,
sexism, and misogyny when they occupy the domestic sphere.
RiM’s poetic crea(c)tivity in motherhood
After the birth of her first son in 2010, RiM’s creative production found new
inspiration in motherhood. In 2014 she produced an album of children’s songs
(Chansons super chouettes),8 and she uses them in her recurring performance
One Maman Show. She continues to be inspired by the comical challenges of
parenthood, and her just-released book, Le guide de survie des mamans débor-
dées, uses jokes, cartoons, and facetious anecdotes to demonstrate how the pri-
mary responsibilities of parenthood in modern French society still fall mainly
on women.9 In october 2017, she gave birth to her second child, and her poetic
activity continues to embrace motherhood as a parallel source of gestation, cre-
ativity, and inspiration. RiM’s transformation into the stage persona of “Super
Maman” has given her a platform from which to challenge patriarchal tropes,
while creating a space where families can come together to laugh.
Integrating and involving multiple characters on stage and on the page is
part of RiM’s signature style. The One Maman Show is a “super pestacle,”
128 SUMMER 2018ANdREA JoNSSoN
ideal for kids aged four to ten and their families, which ran at Le Point Virgule
in Paris in the spring of 2016 and at the Sentier des Halles in 2017. In a mask,
cape, and golden leggings, RiM becomes “Super Maman,” and she performs
a combination of songs, slams, and stand-up comedy centered on children’s
humor. In the show, calls come in on a toy phone with requests for bedtime
stories, jokes, poems, and bisous, and she answers every request with a slap-
stick sketch, song or slam. In her show, the domestic space of motherhood is
made public. The audience is often asked to contribute to the show, singing
refrains about brushing teeth, or proposing costume changes. RiM masterfully
problematizes how a mother’s day-to-day life is transformed to revolve
around the bodily rhythms of her children, and she highlights the many roles
she has to play expertly as mother. Where this idea could be seen as disenfran-
chising a mother’s own subjective agency, her auto-derisive humoristic writ-
ing reestablishes the tone and rhythm as her own: “depuis mon accouchement
/ Je ne ferme plus mes pantalons / Je prends mon fils en photo / toutes les 20
secondes environ / Je sens tout l’temps l’vomi / Je dors trois-quarts d’heures
par nuit / Je passe mes week-ends au parc / Je suis coiffée comme Jeanne
d’Arc.”10 From sleep, to hunger, to potty breaks, the domestic structure
demonstrates the non-stop activity of a mother as primary caregiver and moth-
ers achieve superhero status.
RiM exploits the day-to-day rhythms imposed on her by her child and
integrates them into her creative process. Her 2014 album Chansons super
chouettes is made up of twelve tracks to symbolize the twelve hours in a
child’s day:
Il y a 12 titres sur l’album, qui représentent 12 heures de la vie d’un enfant. C’est les chan-
sons et paroles qui accompagnent les enfants pendant les moments clés de la journée, comme
l’heure du bain, l’heure de s’habiller etc. […] donc il y en a douze: onze chansons et un
slam. Mais pour le spectacle il y a une place plus importante donnée au slam. J’avais envie
quand même de garder cette partie de mon identité artistique. J’avais envie de cibler un autre
public, mais il y a quand même le même esprit du slam: l’oralité et les jeux de mots. (per-
sonal telephone interview, 2014)
Her songs and poems include scatological puns such as “Pipizza,” “Pipica-
casso,” “Caca-mion,” “Ma copipine Jessicaca,” and “Vive la poezizi” that
play with the taboo potty subjects young children love to laugh about. Though
there is an element of her album that caters to young children, the technique
of adding repeating syllables that charge a word with comical playfulness
demonstrates how she breaks language into smaller parts in order to make
tools that straddle multiple registers.
VoL. 58, No. 2 129L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
The way RiM emphasizes voice and sound in her poetry engages with the
multi-voiced feminist movements in France during her lifetime. Espousing
polyphony as a poetic technique highlights the intersectional nature of women
in simultaneous societal roles. Historically, humor and feminism have had a
complex relationship. Though there is not one unified feminist movement in
France, the rise of interest in second-wave feminism in the 1960s provided
insight into how women activists demanded to be taken seriously. Françoise
Picq claims that though the many activist movements from the 60s to the 90s
struggled to unite, one main concern of the movements was how to address
masculine order as a dominant ideology without using the same discourse or
declaring that all women claimed the same intersectional identities. According
to Monique Wittig, humor that does not reinforce silence provides a way for
women to shift oppressive, sexist scripts.11 Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray’s
writings promote laughter as a way of seizing the ability to speak outside mas-
culine discourse. For Cixous, “Le rire de la Méduse” means using feminine
writing to disrupt the gender binary and take back feminine desires and pul-
sions.12 Like derrida, she recognizes writing as full of tools that can transform
the system. She encourages women to write, linking the desire to produce
poetry to the desire to gestate life: “Il faut que la femme s’écrive!” (Cixous
39); “Écris! L’écriture est pour toi, tu es pour toi. Ton corps est à toi, prend-
le” (Cixous 40); “Il est temps que la femme marque ses coups dans la langue
écrite et orale” (Cixous 43). For Cixous, motherhood is a metaphor for the
synthesis of the body’s laughter, connecting to creation through writing:
“Nous n’allons pas refouler quelque chose d’aussi simple que l’envie de vie.
Pulsion orale, pulsion anale, pulsion vocale, toutes les pulsions sont nos
bonnes forces, et parmi elles la pulsion de gestations—tout comme l’envie
d’écrire: une envie de se vivre dedans, une envie du ventre, de la langue, du
sang” (Cixous 52). RiM’s ludic engages with this connection between moth-
erhood and creative writing by harnessing the performative qualities of the
body. She engages her public in play in order to incite them to take part in the
creative writing process.
In RiM’s motherhood poetry, Ahmed’s feminist snap interconnects with
Sean Zwagerman’s notion that voiced humor is performative because of how
it relies on bodily gestures, drives, and functions.13 Zwagerman defines humor
as performative because it is “explicit or implicit, direct or indirect, as an act
of communication, linguistic or otherwise, having a world-to-word or world-
to-symbol/gesture—direction of fit, toward some perlocutionary effect”
(Zwagerman 22). In writing, RiM uses sound to push the discursive effects
into the body. Both the elicited snap and laughter become the quintessential
130 SUMMER 2018ANdREA JoNSSoN
perlocutionary effects that relate back to the initial intimacy, bodily rhythms,
and pre-verbal communication between mother and child.14
on stage, RiM harnesses the rhythmic pre-verbal bodily gestures as part
of her performance technique. She appropriates a personal, self-deprecatory
humor that anticipates and choreographs the timing of a snap. In her slam
workshops, RiM’s chief goal is to incorporate the ludic into the writing and
performing process. Play and enjoyment in her ateliers are inextricably linked
to learning how to put an identificatory mark on style. The performer is
encouraged to see how s/he is creator and proprietor of his/her ideas by devel-
oping a unique textual voice and stage diction. Sharing, in these settings,
highlights the respectful listening as much as taking possession of the
moment. Coming from a theater background, RiM highlights how the ludic
injects energy into the poetic voice. She states, referring to the participants in
her slam workshop:
Je travaille beaucoup sur le regard et l’énergie. À l’écrit ou à l’oral, ça passe beaucoup par
le jeu. Je veux qu’ils s’amusent et qu’ils prennent plaisir à se faire écouter. Je donne des sit-
uations ridicules, je leur demande de faire des accents. Je demande qu’ils trouvent un volume
de voix, des articulations, des intonations, le regard, c’est des éléments sur lesquelles je mets
le doigt en tout cas. […] Pour moi, [le slam] c’est l’oralité, le regard et l’énergie. (personal
interview)
RiM’s vision of performance, as seen through how she structures her work-
shops and how she approaches stage presence, relies on an active playfulness
that originates in the text. on stage, her vision of the relationship between per-
former and audience as based on “oralité,” “regard,” and “énergie” can be
transposed to the relationship between poem and reader as demonstrated in
the following section.
RiM—between stage and page
In this second section, I analyze two of RiM’s poems that represent her style
of the ludic in written form. She performed these poems often in her early
years on slam stages and was asked to include them in Stéphane Martinez’s
anthology Slam entre les mots. The anthology begins with an introduction that
explains slam’s rise in popularity in the last few years. In setting up his col-
lection, Martinez presents a fluid definition of slam by emphasizing the poly-
phonic quality of the slam stages. Though many of those included in the col-
lection show a perceptible rage and use a language of revolt, Martinez does
not characterize slam poetry as a genre of rebellion that propagates a language
in crisis. It is, however, a language that is in a constant process of formation,
VoL. 58, No. 2 131L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
development, and growth—what he calls a language in “gestation,” a connec-
tion to the writing incited by Cixous in the first section of this article (Mar-
tinez 18). Martinez recognizes the fragility of grouping many different slam
artists together as an ensemble. For this reason, the anthology as a textual
instance of slam remains a cross-section that highlights plurality, polyphony,
and diversity, while falling short of defining the fluid genre. Martinez writes,
“En l’espace de quelques années, le slam a su séduire, au fil des soirées organ-
isées dans des rades de quartiers ou dans des salles de fortune, une foule
d’habitués ou de pratiquants occasionnels” (Martinez 9). Those included in
the anthology are meant to represent the habitués, and those who have pro-
vided slam in France with a unique angle and platform. Similar to the effect
created by the many poets included in other anthologies (such as the associa-
tion Slam ô féminin’s 2009 anthology or Anne Peyrouse and André Marceau’s
2008 Slam ma muse: Anthologie de la poésie slamée à Quebec), the style of
the twenty-three poets included in Martinez’s anthology differs greatly while
claiming a common source of inspiration: the everyday.15 Martinez writes,
“Quand on demande aux slameurs d’où viennent ces phrases abruptes, ces
paroles enflammées, ce besoin de noircir quotidiennement plusieurs pages, ou
ce plaisir à suivre des voies détournées, leur réponse est immuable: de l’ob-
servation de la vie quotidienne” (Martinez 15).
In “Les maux que je crie,” RiM’s writing reflects and anticipates her vocal
performance by injecting orality and activity into the text through the ludic.16
The poem expresses her decision to become a slam poet and highlights her
passion with wordplay and language. In both poems included in the anthol-
ogy, RiM enhances textuality to provide the reader an access to his/her own
performative voice. In “Les maux que je crie,” RiM enhances the notion of
portable orality by using an allusion to three-dimensionality to structure the
many voices. Through a focus on vertical and horizontal musical and poetic
structures, it is possible to understand how the poem moves between two
axes: form (vertical) and content (horizontal). Here, the vertical axis is the
ensemble of the rhyme scheme, word play, grammatical structures, and punc-
tuation, while the horizontal axis provides the melody, rhythm, repetition, eli-
sion, context, and narrative. RiM’s poetic style focuses on the intersection
between verticality and horizontality that become clues to reading orality in
her printed works. The relationship between textual verticality and horizontal-
ity is most clearly seen in the allusion to homonyms, where one interpretation
is enhanced by another oral interpretation stacked on top of it. In “Les maux
que je crie,” the title already presents the stacked play between the textual and
the oral, “les maux que je crie” being heard equally as “les mots que j’écris.”
132 SUMMER 2018ANdREA JoNSSoN
The poem places itself in the interval between text and performance,
actively and continuously comparing the two disciplines of orality and textu-
ality through the technique of the ludic. The poem opens by questioning the
definition of writing by splitting it into its smallest parts, in essence molecu-
larizing the text: “Tous ces S / Tous ces L / Que l’on triture / Est-ce / Ce qu’on
appelle / L’écriture?” (vv. 1–6). Immediately the notion of the ludic comes
into the definition of writing, “triture” (triturer, “to twist around, to play or
fiddle with”), contrasting only by the missing initial sound of the word “écri-
ture.” The sounds of each letter are played with, almost as though they were
material objects being examined from every angle. The sound “es” in the first
line fits into the text as a mirror image of its preceding sound, “ces” (v. 1),
whose homonyms, ses, c’est also allude to their close homonyms sait(s). The
“es” sound is also heard, split, mirrored, and then repeated through enjamb-
ment in the question “Est-ce / Ce qu’on appelle” (vv. 4–5, my emphasis). The
“el” sound also contains verticality by alluding to the pronoun “elle(s),”
echoed as a building block in the subsequent words, “appelle” (v. 4),
“voyelles” (v. 6) and “qu’elles” (v. 10). These repetitive sounds act as har-
monic voices that establish the tools of language, providing the rhythmic plat-
form for the snap.
Textuality and orality are contrasted but work together throughout the
poem to exemplify RiM’s choice of slam poetry as a genre upon which to
build a career. RiM presents and performs a new definition of writing as
choice and instrumentalization of the smallest parts down to the sounds of the
letters. The poetic voice throughout the poem oscillates between extolling the
virtues of orality and sound and highlighting the physical and technical game
of preparing the sounds for the page. The words chosen are both seen and
heard: “Toutes ces voyelles / Toutes ces consonnes / Que l’on délivre / Pour
qu’on n’voie qu’elles / Et que ça sonne / Comme dans les livres” (vv. 8–12).
The goal is to infuse textual sound with resonance that anticipates or replaces
stage orality through play and choice: “Toutes ces phrases / Qu’on embreille
/ Tour à tour / Pour qu’elles embrasent / Même les oreilles / des sourds” (vv.
13–18). This phrase recognizes that words contain a perlocutionary sonority
that can be experienced through the text, even by the deaf. The word
“embreille” is presented as a phonetic misspelling of “embraie,” from
“embrayer,” to engage or put into gear. However, the word is spelled differ-
ently, causing the eye to provide clues the ear cannot understand. The ending
of the word “breille” is a homonym of the verb “brailler” (bray, bawl, yell,
bellow). Thus it relates back to the title of the active “je crie,” alluding as well
to the fact that slam poetry normally does not rely on the eyes but on the ears.
VoL. 58, No. 2 133L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
The homonym “Embreille” is also just one sound and one sign away from en
braille, the tactile writing system for the blind. In this way, RiM is alluding to
how poetry is a set of codes and challenges that exploit the different bodily
senses. Reading her poetry points to a reversal of the roles of audience and
performer. The tactility alluded to in Braille highlights encouraging a hands-
on approach to consuming her poetry.
From the set-up that presents these two sides of slam poetry—written and
oral—the structure of the poem continues to juxtapose text and orality, follow-
ing a rhythmic pendulum that swings between the two systems throughout the
poem. It becomes clear that not all writing is conducive to an enjoyable slam
performance, which leads the reader to discover which elements of écriture
ludique are productive. The climax in the line “Moralité: j’ai choisi l’oralité”
(v. 63) contrasts with the final stanza’s “Moi j’veux vivre de l’écriture / Un
point c’est tout” (v. 87), in order to highlight that the writing RiM has chosen
breaks with the stiff rules she was forced to follow in school, but without aban-
doning writing altogether. Writing slam poetry for RiM comes down to making
choices of how to put signs together within a working structure in order to
anticipate the pleasure of performance: “Je dois l’admettre / C’est mon sweet-
est taboo” (vv. 22–23). The two letters that begin the poem, S and L, are also
the two letters that begin the word slam, and they are chosen as a starting point
from “Toutes ces voyelles / Toutes ces consonnes … toutes ces lettres / Qu’on
doit mettre / Bout à bout” (vv. 7–8, 19–21). Therefore, even the sign (the word
slam) that stands for the poetic genre is picked apart and made into poetic tools.
Writing in “Les maux que je crie” is split into two categories: the mechan-
ical (active) and the creative (affective). RiM speaks of breaking from the
mechanical to embrace the affective assonance of writing slam poetry by trac-
ing her own poetic trajectory of infusing and enhancing her poetry. She con-
cludes that her writing must include:
des rimes riches qui rafraîchissent les lettres en friches / Transforment banalités et ratures /
En une forme de littérature / Qui s’acclame / Et se clame à l’oral / Sans leçon de moral / La
seule chose à faire / C’est dire ses passions / Les fautes d’orthographe / Ne me font plus peur
/ Mes mots je les dégrafe / Avec moins de pudeur / depuis qu’mes paragraphes / Sont pour
des auditeurs / Moralité: j’ai choisi l’oralité. (vv. 55–63)
The poem takes us into RiM’s linguistic laboratory and walks the reader
through her experiments with play. Here, the ludic can be teased out through
elision, alliteration, rhythm, and word play: “J’ai découvert / Ces syllabes ora-
toires / J’ai donc ouvert / Un grand laboratoire / où l’on expérimente / Les
rimes qui pimentent / Les slams, les poésies / Et puis la vie aussi” (vv. 24–27).
134 SUMMER 2018ANdREA JoNSSoN
once again, RiM focuses on the smallest building blocks, the “syllabes ora-
toires” (v. 24), but recognizes that her experimentations lead her not only to
stringing the words “bout à bout” (v. 21) but to adding and enhancing each
syllable vertically: “L’engrais d’ma poésie / C’est mon grain de folie / Et je le
cultive / à l’eau de source d’inspiration / À laquelle j’ajoute / les mots, les sons
les émotions / des cornes d’assonance / et des fleurs d’allitération / Poussent
en abondance / dans les fruits de mes plantations” (vv. 46–51). What she
places on paper rises vertically, as a seed planted in the ground grows into
plants, flowers, and even yields fruit. The verticality becomes what is added
to language both stylistically over time (“l’engrais” [v. 46], “l’eau de source
d’inspiration” [v. 48]) and within a particular poem (“mots, les sons les émo-
tions / des cornes d’assonance / et des fleurs d’allitération” [vv. 49–50]).
The embellishment on which RiM’s poetry relies is both active and cre-
ative. The harvest metaphor of picking a plant growing vertically from the
ground is compared to her foundational memories of writing, pulling apart,
and recombining her poetry written on stacks of post-its. “Ya des souv’nirs de
mes mots / Sur tout un tas de post-its / Normal j’écris des mémos / depuis
qu’j’suis toute petite” (vv. 34–38). Memories are taken possession of through
elision, in “j’écris des mémos” (v. 36), “mémos” becoming mes mots—a sty-
listic set of written sounds. once again alluding to the word play in the title,
pain must elicit sound through writing: “Les maux que j’écris / Sont toujours
partants / Pour que je les crie / Même à bout portant / Mes vers sont-ils ver-
satiles pour autant?” (vv. 40–42).
Simultaneously, the affective embellishments stacked onto the words, the
“cornes d’assonance” (v. 50) (echoing “cornes d’abondance”) and “des fleurs
d’allitérations” (echoing “des fleurs de la littérature”), take on the role of
material, technical embellishments. She contrasts these additions to the
mechanical writing she learned at school, the grammar, spelling, accents, and
punctuation: “Je mets les cédilles sous les C / Si j’vous ai mis entre paren-
thèses, / C’était pas volontaire / C’était juste pour / Vous entendre vous taire”
(vv. 67–70). Ironically, after stating that she puts “les cédilles sous les C” she
reproduces the same sound twice in “C’était” without needing the cedilla to
soften the “C.” However, though she disregards the type of writing learned in
school that is associated with fear, judgment, and disregard for her own sense
of style, she recognizes that textual markings can produce sonic change, and
she uses the allusion to punctuation to perform a sarcastic snap as a message
to judgmental past teachers. The parentheses she places around her past teach-
ers reproduce a visible and palpable silence, and the knowledge that punctua-
tion can also be performative becomes a useful tool for RiM as slam poet.
VoL. 58, No. 2 135L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
The sound of orality and the silence of textual poetics come together most
effectively in the final third of the poem in the repetition of the word “point.”
The word becomes both the bridge and the snap that highlight the interval
between textuality and orality through exaggerated repetition (20 times in 25
lines). It is through the break with the past that the “points s’exclament” (v.
66), and this line triggers a wave of word play with “point” at the origin. RiM
uses each pun as a “point de repère” (v. 73) for navigating through memories.
Her life, told as though punctuated with points, is described on an axis: the
compass containing the “4 points cardinaux de mes souv’nirs” (v. 77). The
poetic voice has a choice between vertical and horizontal axes, each taking
her in a different direction stylistically and sonically. This choice complicates
the notion of time as linear and the idea that temporal origins can be regained
through writing.
RiM’s other poem in the anthology, “d chiffres et d lettres,” is written in
a similarly playful style. In the original version for the performance of this
particular poem, RiM goes on stage with two other women, splitting the per-
formance between letters, numbers, and words. The result is a counterpointed
spectacle that challenges the audience to follow the multi-modal punctuation
of the narrative.17 In form, the poem is a math lesson, and the ludic is a type
of sound-code critiquing dating and gender clichés. Written as a mixture of
letters, symbols, numbers, and parts of words, the poem is difficult to decipher
in a traditional manner. Instead, the reader is impelled to take part in the poem,
by mouthing or reciting the combinations of letters, numbers, and syllables in
order to hear them as recognizable words. The first line, “on 10 quand on M
on n’compte pas” (v. 1, on dit quand on aime on ne compte pas), eases the
reader into the code only to complicate the written signs as the poem pro-
gresses. The name Émilie is written “é1000i,” and liaisons create three-sign
sentences such as “LzM” (v. 89, elles aiment). She adds in “d maTmatik” (v.
43, des mathématiques), even writing in the delta symbol: “G 3 ∆ d’hectares
et 1 car 2 touristes” (vv. 104, J’ai trois quarts d’hectares et un car de touristes.
RiM causes the reader to become a slam artist and perform her portable text.
Guided by the text’s unveiling of its own artifice, the spectator/reader takes on
an active role as performer, made to pay attention to the overarching structure
and sounds that fit together as poetry.
The content of the poem reads as a critique of stereotypical gender roles
and a list of advice for “les meufs” and “les mecs,” mixed with a list of gripes
about how women are materialistic and men “pensent qu’o Q” (v. 134,
pensent qu’au cul). RiM presents both “les meufs” and “les mecs” of the
poem through ironic vulgarity: “Par exemple si T une meuf / et que tu veux
136 SUMMER 2018ANdREA JoNSSoN
qu’un mec te tringle, / Achète-toi d vêt’ments 9 / et sois tirée à 4 épingles”
(vv. 10–13). Making use of the shock effect of the vulgar and slang, she also
mocks women for caring only about money and nice cars: “Si vous voulez
d2moizL / éviT d’rouler en 4L / faut minimum une 206 / pour une nuit à
l’otel Ibis / [ …] il va falloir diner A6 / et puis autre chose qu’un 100dwich /
C sur tu serres plus si T riche” (vv. 60–67, des demoiselles is “d2moizeL,”
and sandwich is “100dwich”). Mixing numbers and phonetic spellings into
the written poem plays ironically with the importance of monetary wealth in
the superficial dating relationship between men and women. “Si je réKpitule
/ Ma KriKture / Les mecs Kpitulent / C dans leur nature / Ils partent faire le
Kcous à Cancun / En quête de coquines Ktins / Qu’ils taquinent et qu’ils ken
/ Sans Qlpabilité / Car ils ne pensent qu’o Q / Et qu’oQune corde au cou ne
les retient / Les mecs nous font coQ / on n’y peut rien” (vv. 126–37). The gen-
dered content of the poem remains cliché, seemingly saying that women
should just resign themselves to being “coQ” (cocues). “Les mecs nous font
coQ / on n’y peut rien / Pourquoi tenter d’les coincer / Si c’est pour encaisser
/ Les coups qui secouent le cœur / La rancune et la rancœur m’écœurent /
donc j’me dis qu’y a K accepter leur / KpaciT à faire des French kiss / À
toutes celles qui passent / Et ce slam, je leur d10cass” (vv. 136–45). However,
the final syllable as snap unveils her creative agency and resistance to the
trope of the unfaithful men. “Cass” (v. 145) from “d10cass” or dédicace, is
the final rhythmic beat on the syllable that is a synonym for “exit” (“je me
casse”) and part of the expression “to break up with” (“je casse avec lui”). As
in “Les maux que je crie,” this vertical stacking of meanings into one sound
draws attention to its own polyphony and creates a perlocutionary effect. The
sound effectively ends the poem, producing snaps of approval, solidarity, and
support among the women in the audience who can relate to the situation and
acknowledge RiM’s wit.
Across her creative production, RiM’s voice is uniquely musical, theatri-
cal, and playful, testing the limits of the oral genre. Where the boundless slip-
page could lead to cacophony, she is able to unify the multidimensional
words. Her poetry becomes a French-language example of what Paul Barker
calls an essential element of “voiceness,” or the “instance where the printed
word, the sounded word, and the embodied word all potentially synthesize to
form a single, unified voice.”18 This evolution as slam artist has enhanced
both the genre and RiM’s position as representative slameuse and creative
activist. Continuing her message to create accessibility to poetry through the
ludic, she has expanded the audience of slam poetry and increased its reach.
RiM makes use of the writing process to question how to inject orality into
VoL. 58, No. 2 137L’ESPRIT CRÉATEUR
the text by drawing on the bodily pulsions and perlocutionary affect of laugh-
ter. The ludic provides a platform that reestablishes the importance of the mas-
tery of written language as an anticipatory tool for performance while making
use of how notions of performance must draw on everyday experiences that
affect the writer strongly. RiM’s polyphonic slam style consistently highlights
how to achieve the feminist snap through humor, the ludic, and polyphonic
wordplay. Her text as performance uses play and sonority to invite the reader
to produce his/her own orality while reading. In this way, the roles of per-
former and audience are reversed, just as they are during a writing workshop.
Anticipating sonority in slam relates back to eliciting the snap as response.
For RiM, this representative language—from its smallest parts to its poly-
phonic structures—provides the possibility to approach political activism
through a humoristic lens.
Texas Tech University
Notes
1. 129H Productions, www.129H.org.
2. Françoise Picq, Libération des femmes: Les années mouvement (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
3. Universlam Association, www.Universlam.com; Association Slam ô Féminin, Slamofemi-
nin.free.fr.
4. Amélie Picq-Grumbach (RiM), personal telephone interview (conducted by Andrea Jonsson
[author], February 10, 2014).
5. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (durham: duke U P, 2017), 187–234; Sara Ahmed,
Feministkilljoys.com.
6. Slam entre les mots: Anthologie, Stéphane Martinez, ed. (Paris: La Table Ronde, 2007).
7. Jacques derrida, L’écriture et la différence (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1967); Writing and
Difference, Alan Bass, trans. (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980). Here, I would not go so far
as to say that RiM is pushing the ludic towards a representation of différance or linking it
to derrida’s historical event that destabilizes man as the origin of ideas. She uses the ludic
as a process to oppose the need for a set poetic structure.
8. Amélie Picq-Grumbach (RiM), Chansons super chouettes (Paris: Fleurus Éditions, 2014).
9. Amélie Picq-Grumbach (RiM), Le guide de survie des mamans débordées (Paris: Broché,
2017).
10. Amélie Picq-Grumbach (RiM), One Maman Show le Blog, https://onemamanshowleblog.
com/la-super-maman.
11. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992).
12. Hélène Cixous, “Le rire de la Méduse,” Simone de Beauvoir et la lutte des femmes, L’Arc,
61 (1975): 39–54.
13. Sean Zwagerman, Wit’s End: Women’s Humor as Rhetorical and Performative Strategy
(Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2010).
14. J. L. Austin, How to do Things with Words J. o. Urmson, ed. (oxford: Clarendon, 1962).
For Austin, the perlocutionary is related to the emotional effect produced by a performative
utterance: “If illocution denotes the function performed in saying something, then perlocu-
tion denotes the effect I produced by issuing the utterance” (18).
15. Slam ma muse: Anthologie de la poésie slamée à Quebec, Anne Peyrouse and André
Marceau, eds. (Quebec City: Cornac, 2008).
138 SUMMER 2018ANdREA JoNSSoN
16. Amélie Picq-Grumbach (RiM), “Les maux que je crie,” in Stéphane Martinez, ed., Slam
entre les mots.
17. RiM @ Big Show au Divan du Monde, http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2y6hm.
18. Paul Barker, “With one Voice: disambiguating Sung and Spoken Voices through a Com-
poser’s Experience,” in Voice Studies: Critical Approaches to Process, Performance, and
Experience, Thomaidis Konstantinos and Ben Macpherson, eds. (New York: Routledge,
2015), xxi.
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