Writings / Reviews: George Elliott Clarke

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Twin Tongues
by Claire Lacey
Invisible Publishing, 2013
80 pp, $15

Scribble & Grin: 53 Rhymes for Inspiring Times
by Mary Giuffre and Paul L. Clark
Inspirtainment Ink, 2013
142 pp, $30

Having grown up partly on Halifax’s Maynard Street, I’m admittedly partial to Invisible Publishing, which is based there, and also to its poetry publication, Twin Tongues, by Claire Lacey, an Alberta-based poet.

Lacey’s subject is the collision between English—the tongue of ye olde Empire—and so-called pidgin English, i.e. the mishmash of words that a “local” people develop to connect their native tongue to the conqueror-settler speech.

In Twin Tongues (Invisible Publishing, $15), Lacey narrates the self-conscious anxiety of a white woman (Canuck?) ESL teacher engaged to help raise the 50% literacy rate in Papua New Guinea (PNG), where the lingua franca, is Tok Pisin, a tongue supposedly inferior to Queen’s English, but which helps PNG folks parley beyond the comprehension of come-from-aways.

Tok Pisin sounds a lot like “Talk Pidgin,” and “pidgin” sounds exactly like “pigeon.” So, Lacey employs a talking pigeon that soon—like other PNG natives—bids her “English” character eat crow.

Puns and jests are essential to Twin Tongues, itself influenced clearly by M. NourbeSe Philip’s great work of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1989), which ponders the violence wrought upon African languages by the imposition of English, but also the havoc African speakers wreaked upon English as they molded the language to suit their needs.

Lacey argues similarly in a two-line poem: “A Short History of English: d v n c,” or, “deviancy.” Wherever the exported language settled, it deviated from the “Standard,” whether one thinks of Amurka, Astraylya, or Jamayka (as Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has recently demonstrated).

So, “English,” the teacher-heroine, “keeps a crow,” and/or a “New Guinea Pigeon,” which “cannot be taught to talk,” but which does find a way to say “f” “u,” the lesson that “English” gets taught by Tok Pisin.

That the crow/pigeon (pidgin) is named Jasper thickens the tongue (if not the plot), given that Jasper Language refers to the ability of non-native English speakers to comprehend the language.

The most harrowing moment for the white Anglo heroine occurs when she encounters a machine-gun toting man (presumably “of colour”) whose “voice sweats” and whose “syllables won’t resolve themselves into familiarity.” Her incomprehension of his tongue, but fear of his potential menace, repeats the encounter, centuries ago, between gunboat Europeans and aboriginal peoples globally.

Lacey won the 2013 Robert Kroetsch Award for Experimental Poetry, presumably for the manuscript for Twin Tongues. It is definitely a work that twists and torques and contorts English, to illustrate its position as an interloper within the 200 languages of PNG.

Her “playful” effort makes the prose poems and verse lyrics difficult. Invisible Publishing claims the book is “concrete, conceptual, but readily readable.” No, it’s not. But that is precisely Lacey’s point.

Twin Tongues should be read after viewing Nicholas Roeg’s film, Walkabout (1971), which also explores the clash between Euro-imperialist materialism and the philosophies of indigenous peoples.

Next up for review is Scribble & Grin: 53 Rhymes for Inspiring Times, a hardcover, illustrated children’s book.

Authored by Ontarians Mary Giuffre and Paul L. Clark, with art by Hollywood-based Troy Sullivan, these poems—rollicking limericks and cute rhymes—ask kids (and parents too) to “think with the heart,” accept themselves as they are, be kind to others, and enjoy life.

Ex-children’s tv producers, Giuffre and Clark write playground-friendly lyrics about toenail clipping-garnished desserts and nose slime that leaves green stains on sleeves. There are also a set of poems about musical instruments and their idiosyncracies.

The opening poems are a bit preachy, urging the benefits of play, and warning about dangerous adults, etc. But this drawback is offset by illustrations that show kids of all abilities having gleeful fun.

Here’s a poem: “I know that I’m taking a chance, / When I’m so close to wetting my pants! / I just wiggle and jiggle— / And my siblings they giggle, / ‘Just look at that fancy pants dance!’”

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