And I Alone Escaped To Tell You
by Sylvia D. Hamilton
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2014
96 pp, $20
Generations Re-Merging
by Shalan Joudry
Kentville, NS: Gaspereau, 2014
64 pp. $19
I open by being open: 1) Gaspereau Press has published much of my poetry; 2) Sylvia Hamilton is a relative, friend, and mentor. Now, it’s on to the reviews.
Prize-winning filmmaker, historian, and educator, Sylvia D. Hamilton, is now a published poet. And I Alone Escaped To Tell You marks her long-awaited debut.
A Black Nova Scotian, Beechville native, and a teacher and journalist before applying her research skills to making documentaries, Hamilton is an artist and intellectual with a socio-political focus.
Following Ezra Pound’s dictum, that poetry be as well written as prose, Hamilton drafts prose poems and found poems, often culled from archives, to resurrect lost voices of African-Nova Scotian history.
A Black Loyalist woman, in Shelburne, NS, in 1784, tells her sister about how her son attempted to stop her receipt of 200 lashes, but “they jump him force him to the ground. He just a boy but they make him lie in that wet cold jail. Rats wait in every corner.”
At Cape Negro, NS, in 1827, Ambrose Smart is prevented from murdering the man who owns his wife, Hannah, because “She took my knife from its secret pocket in my boot. // I fix my left hand round his throat, / I reach for my blade—it gone.”
Hamilton renames runaway slaves as “Freedom Runners.” One such woman, Flora, ripped “Her petticoat … into strips to wrap her cracked, bloody feet.”
In her poem, “Crazy Black Luce,” Hamilton even channels the late Maxine Tynes.
Hamilton also pens lyric and imagist poems; some expressing poignantly the struggle of a black girl and young woman (herself perhaps) to forge a positive self-image, in spite of the casual Negrophobia and misogyny of Canuck culture, “back in the day.”
Hamilton is most affecting in her personal, familial poems.
In “Parade,” she tells of a girl who dreams of being a sparkling majorette, but who must make do with “Only tight braids / bound with small ribbons…. / Knees and legs, dry and ashy / from the wild sun. Cotton madras shorts, a short-sleeve / blouse, a rip or two mended again for the umpteenth time.”
And I Alone Escaped To Tell You yields a panorama of Africadian experience and smart introspection.
Shalan Joudry is a Mi’kmaw writer, performance artist, and storyteller, and also a cultural interpreter and community ecologist at Bear River First Nation, NS. Her title, Generations Re-Merging, is her first poetry collection.
Like Hamilton, Joudry is interested in foregrounding lost histories; but she also needs to “re-merge” the Mi’kmaw tongue: “tomorrow i will struggle to learn / one more word L’nueiei / teach my tongue to soften at the back of my throat / and make scaffolding out of language / to hold up a nation once beaten into submission….”
The task of restoration expressed in an immediate epigram: “how can something known / become unknown / in so little time.”
It’s repeated—partly—later in a poem that deplores the application of the word “wild” to forests, for such denies the presence of Indigenous civilization.
Joudrey seeks to recover generational wisdom, the lore of folk, but erasure is a constant threat: “every moment / is the loss of something.”
Joudrey’s free verse seems confessional. She uses her experience as girl, then wife, and mother to elucidate the challenges of living as a Mi’kmaw woman in an era of conflict between Indigenous thought and (past) practice and the global, consumerist ethos that cannibalizes the “exotic” and poisons the environment.
If her poetry is autobiographical, life-long has been Joudrey’s struggle to forge a hybrid, Mi’kmaw identity.
In “Yellow Pond,” she tells of a girl whom other kids stone and beat with baseball bats, so that her escape is to climb trees or to play piano, “conducting eighty-eight keys /making love to music / then begin wishing I had more notes to play / more dreams.”
An adult reverie works similarly: “I want my children to smell of forest… / spruce boughs scattered on their floors / instead of carpet….”
Thus, righteous rage surfaces in “Menace to Your House”: “I’ve learned the careful art of silence / and retreat….” But: “I will shake this house / and rattle you blood-deep.”
Joudry may be the late Rita Joe “re-merged.”
