SOURCE: "i, a mother / i am other: L'Amèr and the Matter of Mater," in Studies in Canadian Literature, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1991, pp. 17-38.

In the following essay, Bok asserts that in Brossard's L'Amèr, she "disarms phallogocentric language, disarms such words as 'mother' and 'woman' and 'figure' so that they can no longer he used as masculine weapons."

Nicole Brossard calls L'Amèr a book of combat, and indeed the (s)wordplay begins with the title—one word that suggests three: la mère (the mother), la mer (the sea), and l'amer (the bitter). The English translation These Our Mothers by Barbara Godard cleverly sustains this tripartite pun through elision: these our mothers, the sea our mother, and the sour mothers. Such paranomasia recalls The Newly Born Woman by French feminists Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément, a text whose title in French also suggests a...