More on whether there is one literature, or there are many...

In this post, I'm using a comment from Geoffrey Philp (as ever, thanks Geoff) to further think through the matter of whether there is one literature or there are many literatures, and, as an example, whether there is room in Canadian literature for a Caribbean voice.

Geoff says:

"... a literature has to do with community and memory, so to the extent that a poem/short story or novel captures something that is important for that community to remember, then it becomes something cherished. SNIP (New paragraph) This does not, however, take into consideration community politics, etc. where a writer's work may be ignored for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the work. This is along way of saying yes, there may be room in Canadian literature for a Caribbean voice, but it will depend upon the Canadian community to decide whether that voice will become part of their collective memory."

I keep saying that twenty men in the world now decide much of what the rest of us get to read. (Okay. It may be a few more than twenty, but not that many more.) It is they who decide what gets into books, and books are the modern collective memory. Thus, in many cases, the community may never get to hear the poem, short story or novel of a particular writer, and so may never get to choose to remember or to forget it.

American poet, Emily Dickinson helps to make the case: Fewer than a dozen of nearly eighteen hundred poems that she wrote were published during her lifetime. Had her sister Vinnie not found the poems and been determined that they should be published, the community might never have known of Dickinson's poetry. Furthermore, according to Wikipedia, "The work that was published during her lifetime was usually altered significantly by the publishers to fit the conventional poetic rules of the time..." Indeed! And, "Until the 1955 publication of Dickinson's Complete Poems by Thomas H. Johnson, her poetry was considerably edited and altered from their manuscript versions..." Ha! Those twenty men at work...

Out of her story, some points to be made. (1) Many writers are recluses. (2) The community needs to value those who make songs and stories, support them, and seek them out, if necessary, or else it is they who will lose the prize of the work. (3) Scholars, when they function well, do what Johnson did. They find the work, respect it, make it available. (4) Good presses are needed to complete the process of delivering the work to the world.

A community is not twenty men. That's why the small press movement is such an important one. It gives people other than those twenty men the power to make the choice about whose stories and poems get sent out into the world, whose songs have a chance to be heard so that the community may make its choice about what to remember and what to forget. That's why the Internet is so important as well. Indeed, the more I think about it, the more it seems that it's the Internet that will cut through this Gordian knot by making everything available to everybody.

There has been a fuss recently here in Canada about literary prizes, and who gets them, and who decides on who shall get them. It has been noted that only one of the three judges for this year's Griffin prize is Canadian. And that that is good. It's certainly to the point of our present discussion, for it's a way of working us towards that big fat global notion of what is song and story. The fact that the Griffin is awarded not just to a Canadian but also to an international poet of distinction is also a step in that direction. Nor does that international poet need to be a poet who writes in English! We should note that in 2006, Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite was the Griffin international prizewinner, thus demonstrating at least that Canadian ideas of the very best poetry certainly do include Caribbean voices.

This discussion isn't done, by any means. For instance, here in Canada we need to talk about why Québec does so much more publishing than the rest of Canada. It's not a matter of size, so it must be something about how the community values song and story, how it arranges for the discovery of singers and storytellers, and enables their works to reach the people who will choose to remember — or not. For sure we can't ignore that it so happens that the community is French.

So. Canadian literature. French Canadian literature. English Canadian literature. French Canadian literature that includes Caribbean voices. English Canadian literature that includes Caribbean voices. French Canadian literature that includes Caribbean voices in English. English Canadian literature that includes Caribbean voices in French. And, good people, we've only just begun to look at the songs and stories of Canada...

Is there room in Canadian literature for a Caribbean voice?

As you will know if you visit here, I’ve been thinking recently about whether there are many literatures. The differences in people’s languages, histories, contemporary experiences and worldviews, in the very fact that some people sing and recite their songs and stories while others write them down, seemed to make a strong argument for separate literatures. In the last few days, however, someone wrote me with questions that put these considerations into a precise context and I was driven beyond pondering, to try for answers. In today’s post I reproduce, with some alterations, the questions and my response.

The Questions

Where does culture specific literature fit in, in a setting such as Canada, where many attempts are made at creating a ‘Canadian’ identity that presupposes various cultures, but (for the most part) merges them together? Is the Caribbean-Canadian poet speaking with a different voice from the Caribbean poet?

The Response

If it is true that “many attempts are made at creating a ‘Canadian’ identity that presupposes various cultures, but (for the most part) merges them together,” then one must question the extent to which such attempts have been successful.

We have lived for 15 years in a neighbourhood in Toronto where, for the most part, Italian and Portuguese people have made their homes, some for close to four decades. We have neighbours who still can't speak more than a few words of English, never mind that they have lived here for so long, worked here, and raised their children here. It's true that their children learn English and many forget or never learn their parents' languages. It's true that their children learn new behaviours and so ‘acculturate’ to more or less extents. In that case, we have to ask: Are these new, adopted mores and behaviours, Canadian? Or do they derive from American TV and Hollywood movies? If they are Canadian, how would one describe this ‘Canadianness’? Maple syrup, hockey and curling?

Further, concerning a ‘Canadian’ identity: Is it English or French? And aren't both those groups of long-ago imperialist invaders merely earlier ‘immigrants’ of a nastier sort? Aren't First Nations the only people who have a true claim to a Canadian identity?

In Toronto there are clearly demarcated ‘towns’ and ‘settlements’ of Chinese, Koreans, Italians, East Indians, Portuguese, Maltese, Ethiopians, Senegalese, etc., etc. Immigrant communities, cultures and religions in many cases remain intact, even after having been here for very long periods of time. Sikh communities in Western Canada are a good example. Indeed, Canadian multicultural legislation in some respects nurtures and preserves these differences. Some languages in the former Russian satellite states, superseded by Russian in their own communities, survive in Canada.

Perhaps Canada could better be described as a mosaic society, one in which many different cultures live side my side, within their own contained sub-communities?

So many questions...

All that having been said, my task as a Jamaican born Canadian citizen who earns a living from writing is straightforward: it is to write, honestly and truly, about the things that I know best, in the languages that I know best. I lived more than half of my life in the Caribbean, emigrating when I was over 50 years old. Jamaica is my home by virtue of an extensive investment in time and experience. Jamaican Creole is one of my two first languages. It is a language of extraordinary literary power and I often choose to use it for poetry, prose fiction and for the theatre, though I write in English as well, and with equal ease, and occasionally use other languages for my purposes.

I have never ever found the fact that I write out of my Caribbean history and experience, in the languages of that region, to be a problem with any Canadian audience. Quite the contrary. I recently read DE MAN, a book-length performance poem about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ written entirely in Jamaican Creole, in a church in Calgary. It went so well they wanted to bring me back to repeat the reading on Good Friday. On each occasion that DE MAN has been read in Canada, the response has been the same – overwhelming. It’s a good poem.

So literature might well be culture-and-language specific, but it's equally human-and-earth specific. It's the same – and it's different. It is this difference-in-sameness and sameness-in-difference that empowers it. And now, something else is happening – perhaps akin to the phenomenon in music called ‘mashup’? The languages are interpenetrating (Chinglish, Spanglish) and the literature is using the linguistic admixtures, as well as traipsing across national and cultural boundaries, roping in everybody’s histories, refusing to respect traditional separations.

The business of scholars and critics and publishers is to keep up with where literature is going, and perhaps it is fair to do a little quarreling here. Is it that scholars have become less assiduous? (We’ve talked a bit about that on this blog.) Might there be a problem with the way publishers decide on the works they publish? With the people they choose to collect anthologies? (I’ve had a bit to say about this too.) Should we reconsider the basis on which the judges of literary prizes are chosen? Overhaul the criteria those judges apply in selecting prizewinners? Do something about the very fact that the literary marketplace is so prize-driven?

Now that we are faced with literatures that are crossing borders and languages and ethnicities, sometimes carrying over a particular ethnic and linguistic burden, sometimes setting the burden down before the crossing to take up a new one, or half-abandoning it, a Caribbean/Canadian writer may be doing any – or all – of these things! So might a Caribbean writer, looking north to the Canadian diaspora, or to Euro-Canada... Chances are that a Caribbean-Canadian poet might be more attracted to write about Canadian life and society and landscape and experiences, but as for a difference in voice? I’d be very careful about making hard and fast judgments about differences there. Individual circumstances would dictate particular cases. Man would jus haffe look an see!

The Eye of God and the A.I.G. Bonuses

Iz ow sum peepl cyaan si wat clock a straik?

Choosing at random: the bee colonies are breaking down and (so?) the food supplies are dwindling; the polar ice is melting; the permafrost is damaged beyond mending; the weather has turned wild and unpredictable, so we have impossibly powerful hurricanes and tornadoes creating unprecedented devastation; the jet streams from aircraft and sundry other carbon exhalations have over-heated the atmosphere; and, to top it all, the world economy has been plunged into ruin by a very small group of enormously greedy people, so that individuals have lost their spouses, families, homes, jobs, businesses, savings, indeed, their lives, in some cases. Meanwhile, the folks at AIG are proceeding as if it’s business as usual, paying out, and accepting, large bonuses, and that from public monies?

To repeat: how is it that some people can’t see [or hear] what [hour the] clock is striking, can’t wake up and smell the excrement, can’t grasp that we are inter Scylla Charibdysque, or, in English, between the Devil and the deep blue sea? (We are way, way out of rock and hard place territory, here! The high frights of myth and the base horrors of slavery can probably, however, serve our purposes.)

There have been some pictures, recently circulating on the internet, of God’s Eye. Go here: http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl_eye_of_god.htm
According to Urban Legends, the photo, or composite of photos, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, actually depicts the so-called Helix Nebula. Astronomers describe the Nebula as "a trillion-mile-long tunnel of glowing gases." At its center is a dying star that has ejected masses of dust and gas to form tentacle-like filaments stretching toward an outer rim composed of the same material. Our own sun may look like this in several billion years. (It matters not to me that it’s a blue eye. The colour may well change in due course. It’s just a pretty amazing image floating out there.)

Also, interestingly enough, in a book called The World’s Eye (University of Kentucky Press, 1982), Albert Potts informs us that the Huichol Indians in a remote spot in the southern Sierra Madre Occidental of Mexico have for centuries been making sikuli or eyes, ritual objects made of thread. It was believed that the eyes of the gods looked out through the middle of the woven ‘cross’ of an eye. You make sikuli by winding a web of ever expanding threads around two crossed sticks. The objects express a prayer that the eye of god or the gods would rest, benignly, one supposes, upon the supplicant. Anthropologist Carl Lumholz encountered these artifacts on a visit between 1895 and 1898. In time, the sikuli, as ojo de dios, spread throughout Latin America and into North America and the Caribbean. The Aymara in Bolivia and the Hopi and Dineh (Navajo) in North America, among others, now share the tradition. Craftspeople create elaborate ojos de dios. Kids make them in art class. I can remember making ojos de dios myself, ages ago.

Potts tells us, though, that the sikuli phenomenon is not limited to Latin America; rather, it is a worldwide one. Anthropologists elsewhere know the eye as a thread cross or Fadenkreuz. There are also variations known as Fadenstern or thread stars. And they have been around for a long time. There is evidence that they existed in Latin America before A.D. 500; eyes of a similar rhomboid shape appear on pottery in Troy and the Middle East thousands of years before Christ.

So what do the ojo de dios, the Fadenkreuz and the God’s Eye image as depicted in the Hubble polyglot photo have to do with big bonuses being paid out by AIG to already super rich people? Probably nothing at all. Or maybe, just maybe, in the spirit of re-associating sensibilities, or, as Lauryn Hill put it, because “everything is everything,” if primitive peoples have known for millennia that the Eye of God is watching them, wouldn’t you think that these super-technocrats who rule in the cyberage ought to have got the message?

As everybody and him granny have a way to say, “God is not bedridden and him not asleep.” (Note: ojos de dios do not depict closed eyes.)

Iz jus dat fe Im taim langa dan roup.

Pam Mordecai reads in Calgary on March 4 and March 6

On Wednesday, March 4 at 7:00 p.m. at Pages Bookstore, 1135 Kensington Road NW, I read at an event sponsored by the Canada Council and the Creative Writing Research Group at the University of Calgary. The reading is free and open to the public.

On Friday, March 6 at 7:30 pm at St Stephen’s Anglican Church, 1121 14 Avenue SW, Calgary, Calgary resident, Howard Gallimore will join me in a reading of my Good Friday performance poem, de Man. Howard reads the part of Samuel and I read Naomi. Naomi (maid to Pilate’s wife) and Samuel meet on the road to Calgary for the first time in a long time and report on the crucifixion event as it takes place. The reading is free and open to the public. Books on sale, part proceeds in aid of the Church.

Elizabeth Alexander's Inauguration Poem

Well, not a big response to our poll on the inauguration poem — perhaps because so many websites have been carrying people’s responses. Just one person voted who said the poem was good, rather than middling or great.

Occasional poems aren’t easy to write. Add to that the formal demands of a praise song, and compound the matter further with the expectations of a vast and varied audience on an unprecedented occasion… Clearly Elizabeth Alexander had her work cut out for her.

Setting aside for now how good or bad the poem was, a great many people commented that Professor Alexander’s reading didn’t transmit the poem’s music, didn’t make the best use of its natural rhythms. And the audience did have a right to expect music, for the poem had named itself that way — it was, after all, a praise song. Perhaps the poet read slowly because she wanted people to understand; perhaps she was awed by the occasion. Whatever it was, the truth is, even if not all poets are performers, this poet on this occasion needed to be one, needed to steep herself in the imagined moment, so that when she opened her mouth before the great congregation, the poem would emerge powerfully, as Rev Lowery’s prayer did. (In fact, some people have compared the poem, unfavourably, to Rev Lowery’s benediction.)

Quraysh Ali Lansana, director of the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing and associate professor of English and creative writing at Chicago State University had this to say: “Elizabeth is a poet who renders her work very much in the way that many poets have been schooled or trained, certainly many academics, which is to read the poem and sort of let the words live on their own, without the emotional emphasis placed in certain areas… It is a school of thought for many poets and academics, and I am an academic, but I don’t ascribe to this approach to reading work.”

Might there be, lurking under his comment about the manner of ‘reading work,’ a similar observation about writing it?

Why did so many people not like the poem? Is it perhaps because their poetic expectations derive from the diet of rhyme (straight or slant), rhythm, and ‘deep emotion,’ that still characterize many popular songs? Such expectations might account for a comment like, “This is poetry? Gosh, if I'd turned in this kind of crap in elementary school, I'd have failed on the spot… Dr Suess (sic) did a better job!” or one like, “The dull and somewhat monotonous reading style improved very little the bland and repetitious verses of a confusing poem…”

Wordsworth, in that famous long-time definition, saw a “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” as being at the root of the poetry-making activity, and rhyme and rhythm are ancient, worthy tools of poetic craft. Indeed, rhyme or no rhyme — there’s no issue about rhythm, for if it’s words, they will have rhythm — an occasional poem needs to rise to the occasion, and if the event is as big as this one was, then there needs must be a mighty rising.

So what did I think of the poem? I think the poet did a good, work-woman-like job, but not a great one, which I suppose amounts to saying that she didn’t quite manage to meet the demands of the moment. Some people say she was trying to fit in with Obama’s low-key, practical, we-have-lots-of-work-to-set-about-doing speech. I don’t agree. I think she saw her job right. It was to sing a praise song, and, as David Ulin of the Los Angeles Times observed, in the stanza in which she recalled the stories of the many whose struggles made the day possible, her poem did make music.

But I think we must at least consider the possibility that some persons have hijacked poetry and run off with it to a distant hill, where they have been cooking and reheating the poetic corpse so that it’s now a weary, wary, prosy poetry. That might explain the poet letting out the string so that the kite of her poem (in the verse Ulin refers to) lifts with, “Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices…” only to fetch it up in some prosy brambles by proceeding to describe the edifices as ones “they would then keep clean and work inside of…” Oh dear!

All of which brings me back to the question in my previous post about whether there are many different poetries…

What Makes a Good Poem?

A lot of talk about Elizabeth Alexander’s inauguration poem, “Praisesong for the Day.” Some people liked it, some didn’t. If you pass by over the next few days, do participate in our poll! I’ll save my comments until the results are available. I’ve been thinking about poetry, though, and my ruminations benefited yesterday from a conversation with Dan Varrette, one of the editors at Insomniac Press (thanks, Dan), as well as some eavesdropping online today.

I’ve often found myself remarking, in discussions about poetry, that soldiers in WWI took books of poetry with them into the trenches. Poetry was that important. So, like, maybe that would be a good criterion to apply to a poem? Would you take this poem with you into a war? Would you have wanted to take Elizabeth Alexander’s poem, or a piece of that poem, with you into a war? That’s kind of a tough test but, since some poems at a previous time have passed it, maybe it’s not an unfair measure. How high? That high!

(Worth noting that a lasting body of work emerged from the pens of soldiers in both World Wars…)

There are actually poems that I remember, and am glad to recollect, some from when I was at school, and other poems or bits of poems encountered since. So maybe that could be another criterion. Is this poem, or a part of a poem, something I want to remember? We do remember songs, after all, the truth being that some songs are fine poems: think Bob Marley, the Beatles, Leonard Cohen.

What I’m wondering is whether it’s inevitable that people’s taste in poetry, their expectations of a poem and their ideas about the good-and-bad-of-it, be determined by where they are from, their history, their language(s) and their culture. For some people, poetry is a way of finding out who they are (Césaire’s "Qui et quel nous sommes?"), and thinking through their history. There’s the famous Walcott quote from “A Far Cry from Africa” that puts the matter up front and personal:

I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa, and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

Brother Bob’s “Redemption song” reports that never mind our history of being stolen and forcibly relocated…

Old pirates, yes, they rob I;
Sold I to the merchant ships,
Minutes after they took I
From the bottomless pit.

…because of the strong, uplifting hand of the Almighty, triumph is ours and so “We forward in this generation.”

Should all poets address concerns like these? Or is it only people whose history includes oppression and the horrors of slavery, deracination and forced relocation across oceans and continents — and if not those precise subjects, versions thereof?

Is England’s Philip Larkin looking, albeit with a much tighter lens, and from a somewhat different angle, at who we are and how our history informs us in his bad-behave poem, “This Be the Verse”?

This Be The Verse

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

These and similar questions beg to be asked. Does white people’s poetry have to be different from the poetry of black people? Does the poetry of black and white people have to be different from the poetry of native people? What about gay people? Women? Men? Do they all write separate poetries?

Are some poets preoccupied with ‘new and different’ because for them poems need no longer bear any serious burdens? If, after all, poems struggle with issues of justice, of unequal relations within and between nations, of racism, classism, gender relations, it would seem that they hardly need to set out to be different. Must they not get there under the terrible strain? And if they don’t, what does it matter? Isn’t the issue whether the words make your hair stand on end, or fail to?

It’s interesting to compare the excerpts from these three poets. Derek Walcott sounds almost histrionic, set against Bob Marley’s laconic recounting of rapine and Larkin’s mischievous — and deadly — counsel to us to abandon the reproductive enterprise. But the anguish that wrenches Walcott’s questions from his gut emanates from a history of capture, abduction, and plantation slavery that more than supports it. The shrieks are warranted. If Bob’s tempo is different, he’s singing the same tune. And Larkin’s little nursery rhyme delivers the most terrifying verdict of all: misery is our inheritance, and so we should just stop. Period.

Interestingly enough, all three use rhyme (Bob’s rhyme of ‘Almighty’ and ‘triumphantly’ is missing here), and three better practitioners of the Muses’ art it would be hard to pick. More on poetry soon.

EL NUMERO UNO; runnings in Toronto and Calgary

El Numero Uno or the Pig from Lopinot is a play (for children, sort of, I guess) that I’ve been working on for the last few years, during which time it’s been through several workshops at the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People. LKTYP commissioned the script when Pierre Tétrault was Artistic Director, and current AD, Allen MacInnes and his crew have nurtured it since. The most recent workshop was in January when Lisa Codrington, Sham Downer, Jujube Mandiela, Billy Merasty, Karim Morgan, Karen Robinson and Rhoma Spencer gave it a workout, under the direction of ahdri zina mandiela and with dramaturg (that’s with a hard ‘g’), Stephen Colella keeping tabs, and apprentice director Joan Kivanda looking in and on. Allen MacInnis, LKTYP’s Artistic Director, visited with us from time to time. Allen has enriched the offerings at LKTYP, the current production, The Forbidden Phoenix, being a good example of the diverse fare that LKTYP now has on the boards. (See below for further info on The Forbidden Phoenix.)

So this here is a big, public thank-you to all these folks! Merçi, gracias, tanx, thank-you. I can’t say it often enough because it’s a real privilege to have something you’ve written taken through its paces in this rigorous, attentive, whole-hearted way. It’s also enormously useful. The script has evolved over time, and, what with changes from the last workshop, we may now have something with which to go forward to production. Whether we do get that far or not, I couldn’t have hoped for a better experience than I’ve had working on the play with these, as well as other actors like d’bi young and Alison Sealey-Smith. So nuff respec and big ups, all! “Irie, amen, and seen!” as Ras Onelove, one of the characters in the play, would say.

The Forbidden Phoenix
The current production at LKTYP, The Forbidden Phoenix, has its world première tonight. A musical, the play is loosely based on the experience of Chinese immigrants brought to Canada to work on the railroad in the 1800s, and explores themes of freedom, diversity, family, community and environmentalism. It fuses martial arts, acrobatics, stunning costumes, and contemporary musical theatre and cleverly weaves the comic antics of traditional Monkey King stories with the powerful tale of a father’s sacrifice to provide for his family. Check http://www.lktyp.ca/en/current/forbidden.cfm

Pamela Mordecai Reads in Calgary
I go to Calgary on 2 March at the invitation of the University of Calgary for a class visit with Aruna Srivastava’s class on 3 March and a public reading on 4 March. Details for these events forthcoming, but just wanted to give you an early heads up.

There will also be a reading of my Good Friday performance poem, de Man, at St Stephen’s Anglican Church, 1121 14th Avenue SW, Calgary. Calgary resident, Howard Gallimore will join me in the reading. Howard reads the part of Samuel and I read Naomi.

Toronto Launch of Half World by Hiromi Goto
On Friday February 13th at 7:00 p.m., Canadian author, Hiromi Goto, launches her novel, Half World, at the Toronto Women’s Bookstore at 7:00 p.m. For more n this crossover/YA novel, visit http://www.halfworld.ca/