I, Chimera

Biology and belonging are usually best kept separate. One seems precise and ineluctable, only marginally within our control; the other is contingent and can be radically reshaped by the lives we choose to lead. Myriam Ouellette’s Souches documents an extreme case where these registers collide, as the narrator’s body revolts and makes its claims in the stark terms of genetics.

This powerful novel is a work of autofiction based on Ouellette’s cancer diagnosis and bone marrow transplant. The charged title has no direct English equivalent. It refers to both the “stems” of stem cells and a cultural pedigree: the phrase “Québécois de souche” describes “old stock” francophones and is loaded with connotations of ethnic purity. Ouellette’s origins are plural: her father a descendant of the colonists of New France and her mother from Morocco’s Jewish community. When, in her forties, Ouellette develops leukemia, this ancestry becomes a complication. After chemotherapy fails to control her disease, she needs a donor who shares “exactly the same genetic baggage.”

Part diary of her illness, part family portrait, the novel follows the stages of her treatment. Short chapters with titles like “Day One” and “Day Two” chronicle her hospital stays, their brevity reflecting the narrator’s struggle to project herself into the future. Ouellette’s descent into the world of the sick is rapid and brutal. As soon as she is diagnosed, she must spend a month in the cancer ward, where she becomes too susceptible to contagion for her five-year-old daughter to visit. Catheters limit her ability to bathe, and she almost dies of a fever caused by the normally harmless “aspergillus, an opportunistic mushroom that took advantage of my reduced immune system to colonize my lungs.”

Other chapters describe a family history marked by improbable unions and fracture. Ouellette’s Moroccan grandmother is abandoned by her husband, who changes his name from Judas to Jules and moves to France. Her mother, born in Casablanca, departs for Israel in the 1950s; she meets her husband, a Québécois theology student turned Jewish convert, by chance during an archeological field trip. After the divorce, Ouellette grows up in Montreal, eating chips and skiing with her father while her mother offers eclairs and jazz ballet, set to the sounds of Thelonious Monk. Her brother, Aaron, becomes estranged from the family. A public figure within Quebec’s Jewish community —“spokesperson and reconciler of these mismatched identities”— he reconnects with Ouellette during her illness. He turns out to be a compatible donor, but he still refuses to build bridges with their parents.

The depiction of these family dynamics is more evocative than conclusive. Ouellette’s condition echoes the dramas of earlier generations, among those who have died young or been miraculously spared. The question of cultural fidelity likewise recurs. Her mother never teaches her Hebrew or Arabic but seeks to make up for the “double treason of exile and exogamy” by at least giving her the traditionally Jewish name of Myriam. Ouellette also explores biological inheritance and entanglement. Her children appear as “beautiful products of genetic roulette,” a description of their varying appearances but also a loaded metaphor in the context of disease. Aaron’s agreement to step in as a donor makes the details of his DNA alarmingly relevant; a successful transplant will lead his immune system to replace hers, and “the perspective, very concrete, of sharing with him the same biological destiny terrorizes me.” His insider-outsider position within the family is paralleled at the cellular level, as his bone marrow must be “sufficiently other to thwart the illness, sufficiently similar so that my body does not scream at the intruder.”

While the narrator’s eldest and youngest children are clearly drawn, her middle child remains abstract. Her husband appears as a blank supporting presence, in contrast to doctors and nurses who make distinct impressions even during brief appearances. Much is never explained, including Aaron’s estrangement, contextualized only by a gesture toward a punk phase. Perhaps such gaps are inevitable in autofiction: family history is learned in bits and pieces, and not everything can be disclosed. When the narrator includes a photograph of her great-grandmother, barely visible in a faded corner, it appears as a microcosm of the project as a whole.

Stylistically, Souches blends a poetic sensibility with clinical jargon. Consider how Ouellette describes her preparation for the transplant: “A week of myelosuppressive conditioning destroyed my bone marrow. Left my body without defence or memory. An immunitary desert, a razed, scorched earth, which must be counted on to bud again.” Given the author’s training in comparative literature and philosophy, it is not surprising that she reflects on the use of such images. For some, she writes, “the more science teaches us about the real functioning of pathologies, the less metaphor will appear necessary.” Ouellette responds in favour of inexact analogies, preferring the imperfection of being declared a “warrior” to medical terminology that is “impersonal and cold as a scalpel.”

The question of how to interpret her situation never goes away, as Ouellette considers how “the sick being lives in a world at once saturated and poor in meaning.” She oscillates between seeing her condition as fate and as bad luck, between science, superstition, and prayer. Old behaviours take on new resonances, as when fifty-year-old Aaron, in preparation for the transplant, needs to complete a detailed questionnaire about his “life hygiene,” including past drug use and sexual practices. He explains the shame of having to “lay out his youthful escapades,” even if he might have bragged about them in other contexts. The author likewise wonders about the reactions of the staff to her disclosures, and whether she should have lived knowing “I would sooner or later be held accountable.” Capturing such moments is the book’s greatest strength.

After the transplant, Ouellette declares to her brother, “I’m a chimera!” The same could be said of her novel. Part missive from the world of the sick, part genealogical reconstruction, it oscillates between two levels that prove compatible even as they remain distinct. As Ouellette enters into remission, any conclusions about the meanings of her illness feel provisional, especially as a second tragedy arrives in the final pages. But in the shadow of death’s finality, the uncertainty becomes a gift.