Review by Cathy Galvin
Pascale Petit, My Hummingbird Father (Salt, September 2024)
Writers are often immersed in a process of transition in their work and yet it is common to express an element of surprise, discomfort even, when a writer shifts between established forms. Short story writers understand that pressure to become something else, to ”evolve” as a writer from the short story to the more commercially viable novel and to leave a passion for the concision of the short form behind. But as we know, shape-shifting from the story to other forms, poetry, flash-fiction, script-writing, memoir and back again, is what writers enjoy – in part because it is enriching to experiment and in part because there is an important freedom in movement through the in-between. Fiction, in all its various guises is, after all, also continually evolving.
When that shape-shifting extends to being both a visual artist and a writer, as in the case of Petit, it is a particularly interesting process. In her first novel, My Hummingbird Father, the renowned poet Pascale Petit brings elements of the familiar themes of her work into play: the abuse of children within the family, the complexities of relationships, environmental destruction, the exuberant gorgeousness of the wild and the autobiographical.
From the very beginning of the novel, Petit places a vivid mark on the canvas of her fiction with every instinct and technique at her disposal: visual play, the poetic, the psychological, the mythic, all feeding into character and time. The novel begins with these words from her six year-old protagonist:
I rise out of myself and hover above my body on the kitchen table so I can watch what the doctor is doing. I am the hummingbird of colours no one should see, new colours painted on snow-soft feathers. Now I can watch the rolls of cotton wool the doctor keeps dabbing at my body, how they are smeared with sunrise.
From the first, we learn that this is a child, abandoned by her father and so badly abused by him that she will never have children. Her imaginative childhood belongs to the animals of the Amazon Basin, jaguars and hummingbirds, and creatures “no-one has seen before”, named pain, beauty, hunger and camouflage, that she is “releasing into the canopy of my canvas”.
Petit paints a Sublime inner world and holds its motifs within deft and more conventional prose in the four sections that follow. We move quickly from the first person to the third, as the author presents her central character, Dominique – now grown into a thirty-seven year-old visual artist who has been working in Venezuela. Dominique unexpectedly receives a letter from her father after thirty years of no communication. Epistolary and diary devices are used throughout. He asks to see his daughter and Dominique doesn’t hesitate: she hurries to him in Paris, where he lives but is unwell, possibly dying.
The story that unfolds over several years from the late 1990’s develops a satisfying narrative, exploring both the joy and horror of Dominique’s adult encounters with her father, the pain of survivor memory and revelation. The reader is drawn close to the father and also begins to understand Dominique’s difficult relationship with her sister, Veronique, and her estranged mother, recently dead. We also meet Dominique’s lover, Juan, and through him and their love for each other glimpse a hope that she can heal enough to allow a relationship to flourish.
Woven around this narrative fiction is the maturing, reflective, inner poetic voice of Dominique: an artist who has learned to seek the truths within pain and use them in her art and life. This device, the switch between prose poetry and prose, creates a duality between the world as it is and the shadow world of the spirit/psyche that will be familiar to many from their own experiences and disquieting for a reader who simply wants to follow the story and may not want to know too much. This is not a book for someone seeking solace since the subject matter is disturbing. But is a significant book. Sentence by sentence, stroke by stroke, Petit controls her subject matter with imagination and clarity. This is not an experimental work, it is accessible. The colours haunt, the words echo.
Why Petit has chosen to take this deeply personal story into novel form is a question only she can answer but she is to be applauded for doing so: the poetry carries the truth and awkwardness of pain, beauty and the final shedding of protective camouflage; the prose builds character and context effectively. The full horror of this child’s experience and what has led to it are laid bare.
This book also represents a sustained contemplation on what it means to be an artist, whatever the form or genre. Does an early wounding, and the psychic disruption that follows, begin to create the artist? Is every story an attempt to reach something of the same story, every painting an attempt to capture the essence of something beyond reach? Petit now lives in the north of Cornwall and at the heart of this story, I can hear the voice of another artist who made her home further west in the county, the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. Hepworth said of her art: “ what one wants to say is formed in childhood, and the rest of one’s life is spent in trying to say it.”
Petit, as this novel shows, intends to say the unsayable in whatever literary and artistic form she can. There are lessons here, particularly for writers who feel despair when want they want to express seems always to come from the same source: in this novel they may find cause to celebrate the focus of that intent rather than to lament it. Petit offers insights into the solitude and courage art and life can demand and, in the depths of that brave endeavour, creates a visceral core of redemption.
Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales and lives in Cornwall. She is of French, Welsh and Indian heritage. Her ninth poetry collection, Tiger Girl, from Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and for Wales Book of the Year. Her seventh poetry collection Mama Amazonica, published by Bloodaxe in 2017, won the inaugural Laurel Prize in 2020, won the RSL Ondaatje Prize in 2018, was shortlisted for the Roehampton Poetry Prize, and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. My Hummingbird Father is her first novel. Her latest collection, Beast, was published in 2025 by Bloodaxe.
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Cathy Galvin is the founder of The Word Factory.
