In my adventures with reading French more often, I’ve returned to a book I bought at least a year or two ago from Drawn and Quarterly in Montreal: Les rythmes de la poussière by Léa Murat-Ingles. What drew me to the novel is its collage-like nature: it mixes standard narration alongside text exchanges alongside artistically-rendered historic documents blotted out in various ways alongside academic and theoretical prose. It’s a true mélange of elements that enhances its core themes and covers a lot of ground. One of the collage elements in particular is pretty clever; in the main narration, there’s some discussion of trying to find her place and then there’s a garbled copy of those pages you used to have to print to calibrate printers with all the arrows and lines and so on. It was very conceptual and clever.
I’ll try to summarize the book, but it’s going to be a challenge. It’s set in 2045 amidst a global pandemic and a bi Black girl finds herself isolated in her apartment, having almost no contact with the outside world. If I read it correctly, she lost her job working for an AI company because she didn’t have coding capabilities. Tech is ubiquitous, with there being cleaning drones that go around cleaning the tops of buildings and AI is so pervasive that it can recreate someone’s personality from files uploaded to an Ancestry.com-like website and make them into a chat bot. The main character receives boxes and boxes of old files, a mini-archive, from her grandmother. Her isolation prompts her to look through them and start to categorize them.
A central tension in the book is how to actually go about categorizing the files. The 23-and-Me stand-in, Decujus, harvests peoples’ ancestry data. Everything that gets uploaded gets flattened and amalgamated, and the distinctness of unique experiences fades away. While purporting to be an archive, its main feature is actually erasure. On top of that, you have to pay subscription fees or else your files don’t load properly; you lose access to relevant data, you can only look at so many files, and so on. Murat-Ingles explores this flattening power of AI in light of a diasporic experience—people whose stories are already falling out of the eye of History are further erased. As the book progresses, there are increasing entries in an academic treatise—basically a thesis project—about how to properly and ethically create an archive that documents authentic experience without being subsumed by grand narratives. The critique is both pointed and nuanced. The book is almost as much a novel as it is a manifesto.
At the more everyday level of the text, the narrator is increasingly isolated and depressed, hardly interacting with anyone. Through her archival explorations on Decujus, she makes contact with a virtual friend, who she anticipates will ghost her (un <<fantome d’hiver>>, in her words). Well, she’s partly right: the user she’s talking to is dead. It turns out that Decujus creates independently-acting AI chat bots based on what everyone has uploaded, including all their previous messages—as long as you pay the premium. There’s an odd kind of connection between the narrator and the AI. Despite the tensions of the AI, she does find connection with this bot who, in life, came out as being trans and was disowned by their family. It gets increasingly creepy when the AI tells her how it knows she has no friends, how she’s got less to hold on to in the world, and how she should just join them. The implications are unclear: is the AI telling her to kill herself? Or is it merely coercion to have her upload everything to Decujus? The conflict between them escalates quickly, and has a very satisfying ending.
Contrasted with the ghostly AI bot, the narrator is also visited by ghosts from the archives she’s looking through. They visit her every night, more or less. It’s another device for showing the different approaches of AI-archives and more humanizing ones. The ghosts manifest in different forms for different purposes.
Despite some really dark turns, the book ultimately is optimistic about the future, and specifically a reimagined Afrocanadian future that looks to the past for a speculative future. There is a darkness in the text in the sense that the future looks really bleak: disease is rampant, you don’t likely get access to electricity consistently, and everything is wildly expensive. The main character’s cat tragically passes away by eating a ball of string from one of the archival boxes; she also forgets to respond to her lonely grandma, who sends her a bit of a rebuke at the end of the book—there are some pretty heartbreaking moments. At the same time, going through her research inspires her to reclaim her hybrid and diasporic identity and it feels uplifting at the end of the book that she’s exploring that.
Sidenote: the speculative nature of the text shines in small moments and in small ways. For example, it’s suggested that in the future, the academy makes use of AI for all its research databases and such. The narrator eschews the practice. Instead, she reverts to actual books (!) and personal accounts and e-mails and letters that fall outside of the official discourse. Notably, there’s a part in the thesis that argues that not all knowledge is meant for the Academy. Some knowledges are community-based and maintained. It felt like Léa Murat-Ingles both championed and illustrated that approach.
I’m sure I didn’t ‘get’ everything in the book. Reading in my second language necessarily means I’m going to miss out on some things. Yet, Les rythmes de la poussière has so much going on that even if I’ve missed 20% of it, the remaining 80% has a ton of angles worthy of discussion.
Happy reading!
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