The Brooklyn Rail

About halfway through artist Magali Duzant’s new book La vie is like that, she quotes from Dutch psychologist Douwe Draaisma, “What you remember is called a memory, but what you forget is called a —?” Observing how the English language offers a lack of specificity for the experience of forgetting, Draaisma elaborates: “A memory can be vague or clear, pleasant or painful, but the thing you forget is only an absence, a nothingness, without attributes or qualities.” Duzant’s artist book aims to fill in this absence, to bring new vocabulary—in both photographic and textual forms—to counter the lack that defines the forgotten object.

Structured like an alphabet primer (A is for Aphasia, G is for Grüezi, O is for Onions), Duzant’s book reflects on her father’s dementia diagnosis and subsequent vocabulary loss in short autobiographical chapters. His fading and misremembered words in English, French, and his first tongue, Antillean Creole, brush up against her efforts to learn a new language: Swiss German, the dialect of her new home in Zurich. From their different perspectives, the book follows both father and daughter as they struggle with the shapes of what they cannot say—and through Duzant’s juxtaposition of research and photographic work, this missing language doesn’t feel like an absence or loss of meaning. Throughout the pages of La vie is like that, missing language is something closer to a shared texture, one that provides footholds in their relationship across geographic distance, one that shapes her experience of grief after his death.

Titled for one of the mismatched aphorisms—la vie is a bitch!—her father began to express during his dementia, La vie is like that opens with the myth of the Ship of Theseus, a well-worn philosophical conundrum about continuity and change. Annually, a vessel sailed from Athens to Delos, in honour of Theseus’s grand feats in the founding of the ancient Greek city. Over centuries, pieces of the ship were replaced as they rotted away—materially, the ship became an entirely new object, yet emotionally and socially, in the eyes of historical memory, it was the same. Duzant recounts how countless Western philosophers, from Plato to Hobbes, have considered this paradox and its implications for the presumed permanence of identity in an ever-changing body. As she moves from New York to Zurich, as her father’s dementia compounds his lifetime of migrations from Saint Barthélemy in the Caribbean, to France, to the United States, the Ship of Theseus narrative also becomes one of diaspora and inter-cultural negotiation. As his languages are lost, she finds new ones—they change, they stay the same.

These written narratives are accompanied by Duzant’s risograph printed photographs—each a hazy grain of soft colours punctuating the letters of her alphabet primer. The images are both mundane and intimate, emphasizing shapes that refract, shadow, and adorn otherwise flat surfaces: the distorted outline of potted plants carved in sunlight grazing an adjoining wall; roots of a massive tree cracking through firm concrete; elderly hands (likely her father’s) clasping a lightly crinkled—and well-used—French language word search quiz. The dreamy blur of the risograph printing lends itself well to Duzant’s themes of intergenerational memory and forgetting, yet the content of the photographs also seems to reperform the associative quality of her writing process, where topics and memories echo and bounce off one another with ease. An old note on a forgotten Post-it leads to a research tangent on the renewal practices of Japanese shrines. A jar of gifted honey prompts an exploration of scientific discoveries in bee communication and poet Edwin Honig’s turns of phrase during his Alzheimer’s diagnosis (for honig means honey in German). Like the images, like Duzant herself, each topic is altered somewhat when it grazes against a new context. “I think I am scared to grow differently,” she writes, “transplanting myself somewhere new has been a series of small shocks to my system, but maybe it is necessary to branch out to find the shock of connection in a new language.”

Aside from the oblique intimacy of an occasional hand, people rarely appear in the images of La vie is like that. So, when a small, decades-old passport photo of Duzant’s father—smiling softly from the weathered surface of the document—appears halfway through the book, the result is striking. Duzant follows the scanned image with a few blank pages, as if acknowledging that her readers might need a moment to pause. It bears repeating that alongside those philosophical arguments about permanence and change, the Ship of Theseus story is one of commemoration; a community gathering to enact memory as a collective action, turning a loss into a relationship that is sustained over time. Across the letters of her reconfigured alphabet, Duzant finds her own way to speak her father’s memory, to rebuild his image again and again.