The Cartography of Footloose Pedalling in Tree Abraham’s 'Cyclettes'
Tree Abraham’s Cyclettes takes the reader for a delightful spin around the byways of Ottawa, onto the far reaches of the globe, and deep into the bumpy terrain of memory, family, and melancholy. Abraham packages her text into a series of brief vignettes, numbered like the blocks of a city, and there are many sights to see along the way. Prose alternates with maps, lists, diagrams, sketches, travel photos, and a set of 8mm video stills.
The format feels contemporary, but has roots in centuries past. Entrelacement, we are told, is “… a medieval literary technique that braids textual and/or pictorial subplots into a larger narrative. Digressions and motifs are designed to feel like a bewildering maze of disordered events from the inside, but once on the outside an integral multiplicity that better represents how people perceive the complexity of life than would a simple, chronological story.” Abraham uses this technique skillfully to bring us into her world, though the work is essentially structured on chronological lines.
We follow Abraham from her childhood bike rides on the suburban streets of Canada’s capital city, to her early adult years cycling through India, Africa, Europe, and various parts of North America. Like the best of travel companions, she nudges us to notice more of our surroundings, not just the bare sights and sounds but all they may conjure of nostalgia and perception. The perceptual apparatus itself is a preoccupation of her journey — how, exactly, is meaning made out of our experience, and out of experience shared with others?
“I remember only that which has been customized through my retellings,” she confesses, “or twice baked by an activity that is both physically active and socially connective.”
Abraham expresses a lack of rootedness, but it’s of a sort that perhaps is grounded in a deep security of family support and resources. Her footloose lifestyle will be familiar to those who share her background, but may appear baffling to readers whose sense of place is anchored in realities like needing to look after children or hold down a steady job.
The very mechanics of travel are assumed within the text and therefore, for those who aren’t as comfortable with how all this works, are obscured. Bicycles are lovely, but you can’t ride a bicycle to get to India. We’re missing some pieces here — the parts that are carbon-intensive, and that cost money. The result is a strangely disembodied central character, despite her self-propelled mode of local transport. She peddles about in a cloud of introspection, and flits between continents by a kind of narrative telekinesis.
That said, Abraham does a wonderful job of it, and would we not wish this kind of personal freedom for everyone? She’s been generous in sharing with us the fruits of her interior and geographical journeys, and we are privileged to join her as armchair travellers. Early in the book, Abraham confides her desire to be “like an early explorer (minus the colonization and disease), … to shade in shapes I eponymously claim, affinities ordered by an internal compass in conference with the storm gods each day.”
If the aim is to create a map in which to journey, where others may also voyage and locate their own dragons within the author’s eloquent cartography, then the book succeeds. Anyone who has spent time tracing their finger across the pages of an atlas will understand the joys of moving within a world sketched on paper. This book, with its wealth of visual and verbal material, offers the reader such a space.
Thank you to Book*hug Press for providing Shrapnel with a review copy of Cyclettes which is available now for purchase at Book*hug Press’s website and in bookstores across Canada.
Price: $23.00 CAD
ISBN: 9781771667951
Genre: Hybrid Forms
Pub date: November 10, 2022
Book Review
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December 5,
2022
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5-minute read
Dawn Macdonald
lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, where she was raised off the grid. She holds a degree in applied mathematics, and used to know a lot about infinite series. Her poetry is in the Bullshit Anthology, appears regularly in journals, and has been nominated for a Pushcart prize.