Pascale Petit, "My Hummingbird Father"

 

Pascale Petit, photo by Derrick Kakembo

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 eighth poetry collection, Tiger Girl, from Bloodaxe in 2020, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and for Wales Book of the Year. A poem from the book won the Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize. 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. Trained as a sculptor at the Royal College of Art, she spent the first part of her life as a visual artist. My Hummingbird Father is her first novel, published by Salt in 2024. Her website is here. 

About My Hummingbird Father
When artist Dominique receives a letter from her dying father, a reckoning with repressed memories and a pull for romantic and familial love sends shock waves through her life, as she journeys to Paris to face the places and events of her early years.

Balanced with visits to the Venezuelan Amazon, where Dominique explores a spiritual and loving longing (meeting a young guide, Juan), a raw and tender unfolding of this love story is a parallel to the uncovering of the shocking truth of Dominique’s birth, and her parents’ relationship.

Pascale Petit’s My Hummingbird Father is a beautifully lyrical debut novel in dialogue with Pascale’s Ondaatje and Laurel Prize-winning poetry collection, Mama Amazonica.

You can read more about My Hummingbird Father on the publisher's website here. Below, you can read an excerpt from the novel.  

From My Hummingbird Father, by Pascale Petit
The letter trembles in Dominique’s hand as if she’s holding Angel Falls – a kilometre-long cataract shrunk to the size of a page. She folds the letter and it’s like trying to hold an archangel’s wing in her palm. She unfolds it and it fills the room. She’s creased it so many times that one line of Father’s address is faint. What if her tears blur his phone number? 

Now she’s dressing, no time for breakfast. She’s running for the tube to the French Consulate, which closes for emergencies at noon. They must renew her passport; she’ll make them do it. 

Now she has her passport and she’s running back home, to the phone, to let him know she’s coming. 

A week ago, she dreamt of him: she was back in Venezuela, at the base of Angel Falls. His face appeared titanic in the tumbling comets. She looked into the vapour as his face dissolved and reformed. First, she saw the lace of a wedding-veil, shreds of skin behind a veil, then his face turned towards her, and she saw her father. 

Dominique dials the number and listens to his phone ringing, and in the pause as she waits for him to answer there is this sound – far away and very near, as if she’s also got the Amazon on the line. A series of low grunts inside her ear, then an icy roar – deeper and longer than a jaguar’s. Howler monkeys swing through the space between them while time drops in light-year-long arrows. And she can wait. She has already waited thirty years. She is not afraid. Then a voice – French, formal, familiar, from the slash-and-burn past: 

‘I have thought of you every day,’ he says. It’s in French, so she has to check she’s heard right. He repeats, ‘I have thought of you every day, chérie.’ 

Dominique tries to absorb this word as he asks, ‘What time will you arrive?’ 

‘I’m catching the Eurostar tomorrow at ten,’ she says.

‘Can’t you come this evening?’ he asks.

‘I have to pack!’ she explains. And she has to tint her hair and wash and dry her best clothes. And there is a mask she has to conjure, to hide her hunting-face.