Reviews

George Elliot Clarke

0 comments
Spread the love

The Blind Man’s Eyes: New and Selected Poetry
by Rita Joe
Sydney, NS: Breton Books
106 pp, $18.00

English-Canadian poets are downtown types or suburbanites, whose idea of the Great Outdoors is to ponder camping trips, with an e-reader in one hip pocket and a flask in the other.

Perhaps the above sets a context for the cigar-store-Indian-splintering, poet who is Dr. Rita Joe, C.M.

Born Rita Bernard in Whycocomagh, Cape Breton Isle, in 1932, Joe grew up as a disenfranchised minority (Mi’kmaw) within a disadvantaged majority (the Scots) who were themselves a minority ethnicity within Nova Scotia entire.

To be the voice of an oppressed people, Joe could not ink pretentious poetry. She was homespun to the point of being deliberately homely, eschewing Ivory Towers to talk of the Rez, her beloved Church, and the ghosts of Mi’kmaq elders gone on.

The Blind Man’s Eyes: New and Selected Poetry (Breton Books, $18) is a vital reminder of Joe’s particular excellence, and publisher and friend Ronald Caplan’s choice of Joe’s pieces is effective.

Passing away at age 75 in 2007, Joe left a true, literary legacy, but it has been misunderstood.

Read superficially, she seems simplistic. But much more is going on.

For instance, in “I am the Indian,” Joe identifies herself as “Indian” and as bearing a “burden” that has an “invisible line”—one that she cannot “drop” because she remains dissatisfied with the quality of her hefting.

Joe’s burden is both race and art, or the articulation of race versus erasure. Joe tells us her “minor self-war has turned into a mountain, I cannot reach the top. The top being my own satisfied conclusion.”

Her “burden” is the necessity of reconciling her various heritages—Mi’qmaw, Anglo, Catholic, Nova Scotian—with Indigenous Faith and the aloof aesthetics of modernism.

In other words, Joe follows an existentialist ethos, the idea of Double Consciousness (cf. W.E.B. Du Bois), of being a poet and having to express “Nativism”—not parochial nationalism, but a belief system that appreciates earth and roots, ecology and psychology, geography and genealogy.

In (re-) reading Joe, note a complex of ideas haunting lines that are prima facie plain. Yet, her accessibility is that of William Blake, a clarity that is dazzling because it is infused with the light of mysticism or spirituality.

“His face I see on the cloud…. / The dust I would wash off his feet / If he asked.”

Joe sees angels, hears voices, has visions, and all are presented as truth: “During the night… / I moved from the bed to the chesterfield / During the night I had dream paralysis / In my mind I asked for someone’s touch…. / In my dream my husband bent his head to kiss me….”

Joe is constantly constructing in her poetry a wigwam cathedral—or chapel—wherein thought passes “Between two minds” or is “Swinging to and fro / From English to Native” (see “Ankita’si” [1999]).

A characteristic of poet-mystics or mystical poets is the tendency to fetishize “I,” for it is the eye of the visionary, the eccentric, the uniquely gifted, the genius, the Seer, who is empowered via vatic attributes to relate glimpses of the Divine.

Joe titles a book, We are the Dreamers (1999), but there is usually only one oracle in her poems: Herself—or her persona.

Joe’s tone is subtle, quiet, almost withdrawn. She whispers, muses, meditates.

But she jests too: “I want my country to know / Natives are No. 1, then mounties, then finally the snow” (“In Order of Line”). The miniscule “m” for “mounties” is a sly cutting down to size of a police force with a history of legalized Terrorism against the First Nations. Even in joking, Joe may imply an impolitic critique.

In keeping with her modernist heritage, Joe is an Imagist.

See her 1978-era poem about the making of moose butter: “After the meat is removed / The bones of the moose are collected, / Pounded with rocks / Reduced to powder, / Then placed in a kettle / And boiled well, / Bringing the grease atop….” The poem moves as nimbly as might a documentary filmmaker’s camera.

Joe’s story, “The Legend of Matlan,” echoes the opening of Shakespeare’s King Lear, but then edges into delightful, Hans Christian Andersen territory.

How to end? With one of her last poems: “[J]ust ask the next person / Did she die? / Then smile, because I’ll be happy / At least you asked.”

de book of Mary: A Performance Poem
by Pamela Mordecai
Toronto, ON: Mawenzi, 2016
151 pp, $21.00

Tell: poems for a girlhood
by Soraya Peerbaye
St. John, NL: Pedlar Press, 2015
100 pp, $20

Two new poetry works view women as the pivots of theology and equality politics. de book of Mary: A Performance Poem is Jamaican-Canadian Pamela Mordecai’s vison of Mary, mother of Jesus and thus of divinity, in the first book of an epic trilogy. Tell: poems for a girlhood is Mauritian-Canadian Soraya Peerbaye’s study of the social meaning of the murder of Reena Virk, a teen of South Asian descent, who was beaten and drowned in Saanich, BC, on November 14, 1997.

Mordecai’s verses hew to gospel-truths, but also respect both the poet’s Jewish heritage of scepticism and her roots in Jamaica’s Afro-spiritual-accented and ganja-scented Christianity. So, this story of Mary unfolds in three-line stanzas, but in the lingo of Jamaican nation-language or patois.

However, Mordecai keeps only hints of Jamaican English, so that the Canuck reader can follow the tale easily. Then again, de book of Mary is meant to be performed, to be read aloud. In performance, one should hear the accents accurately.

Mordecai insists that a female perspective on Mary is more trustworthy than the male: “none // of you lot never carry a child. / YOU all pump us up / so casually / and den for / nine long month / we must haul de belly.”

After Mary receives the portentous news of archangel Gabriel, Mordecai allows God (“Jah-Jah”) this feminist insight: “Never mind old time ways, never mind / how she young, woman not nobody property. / She free to decide on her own destiny.”

Soon, Mary narrates Jesus’ childhood. When Jesus is born, “de baby [is] wrap up tight / in warm clothes lying down in an animal trough.” The boy is mischievous: When his pet cat devours a neighbour woman’s plate of fish, Jesus laughs and says, “Miss Ruth, why don’t you go back inside / make sure your fish missing for sure.” Miraculously, as Mary reports, Jesus “just clap him hand / and put de fish / back on her plate. Come evening, she tired / to talk bout her dinner tasty.”

Mordecai covers Jesus’ ministry, crucifixion, and the persecutions of the first Christians, as told by Mary, in the manner of a folk gospel. One is reminded of African-American poet James Weldon Johnson’s folk sermons, God’s Trombones (1927), which liberates Ebonics by letting God parley “de” vernacular…

Reena Virk’s murder—brought on by 8 assailants (including 7 girls, 5 of them white)—haunts Soraya Peerbaye, for she is also South Asian, and was herself a girl-immigrant to Canada in the 1970s. So, Tell relates two “brown” girlhoods: Virk’s—and Peerbaye’s. But the story tracks the police procedural, the why’d-they-do-it narrative of Virk’s homicide, then the why-do-we-suffer-so critique of Canuck racism and sexism that informs Peerbaye’s own bio.

The antique precedent for Tell is John Milton’s Lycidas (1637), which mourns the death by drowning of Milton’s friend. But that death, for all its pathos, was accidental. Virk’s wasn’t, but marine imagery still applies: “The graze and drag of her, / clumsy, obstructive in the divided /cares of eelgrass.”

Peerbaye employs official, forensic reports: “Bloody discharge from the nose… / bruised cheek, bruised // mouth and chin, dark red // bruising about her lips….” Such lines, balanced with the poetry—“The pathologist’s hands, along / the throat’s interior / the tongue, the bone below”—achieve equal resonance. Peerbaye retorts—at times—to the autopsy.

When a pathologist says Virk’s corpse has a “wrinkly ‘washerwoman’ appearance,” Peerbaye recalls, “the brown-skinned washerwomen, back on the island, / standing up to their thighs in water, in saris.” Thus, she links the sexist work assigned to Mauritian women with the racist violence that brown-skinned Virk suffered here.

Similarly, when Peerbaye uses the trial testimony of the two persons accused of Virk’s murder, it makes her muse on her own life.

“‘Go check Kelly’s jacket,’ said Warren. ‘She said her jacket / reeked, like blood, like rotten fish.’”

Peerbaye remembers, “I could feel the strangeness of standing inside a body / looking out…. / I felt as though I were standing in a doorway / to myself, decoding / how to enter.”

Tell is a powerful addition to the canon of Canadian true-crime, poetry texts. Look it up.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Leave a Comment

x  Powerful Protection for WordPress, from Shield Security
This Site Is Protected By
ShieldPRO
Skip to toolbar