essays in the face of uncertainties

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) might be Milan Kundera’s best-known novel, but I was always partial to Immortality (1990). This is a book, of course, I can’t locate in my library. I know I still have it around, although it might still live in our storage unit, two-plus kilometres east; a storage remnant of our two years’ past basement flood and extensive downstairs reconstruction. I remember first reading Immortality when I was twenty-four years old, and I told myself for some time that the novel ‘changed my life,’ although I can’t remember exactly how. That was nearly thirty years ago, after all. Since those days, I’ve admired Kundera’s ability to equally blend elements of the political, philosophical and the intimate, a goalpost I’ve worked to reach in my own fiction. It’s hard to do well, and easier to see when it misses the mark, and Kundera managed to articulate novels from within a period of turbulence, writing of political and social upheaval. I read a debut novel some twenty years ago that went back and forth between a political thread and a romantic thread, but only one of those threads was compelling, which meant the other lay fallow. At the end of my paperback copy of Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, he closes an interview conducted by Philip Roth with this:

I am wary of the words pessimism and optimism. A novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions. I don’t know whether my nation will perish and I don’t know which of my characters is right. I invent stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place. In any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays ask, so that the voice of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human certainties.

While he remains one of the great writers of the Czech Republic’s Prague Spring, and one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, certain elements of Kundera’s work don’t exactly age well. His depictions of women, for example. And yet, his an example of living, breathing and writing through the midst of great crisis. Writing as a way of thinking, of documenting. Of processing. How does one write in a crisis?

And crisis is relative, of course. There were those on both sides of Quebec’s language debate in the Bill-101 years that Mordecai Richler wrote about in his non-fiction blend of politics and satire, OH CANADA! OH QUEBEC! (1992), that saw themselves as the victims of unrelenting crisis. One could also begin to finally ask, also, why there have been water advisories in certain communities, predominantly aboriginal communities, in Canada at all, let alone some lasting four decades or more? How do we allow such conditions to continue, especially those we’ve the ability to change? I dread to think of how hard some of these communities could be hit, through this crisis, in part due to their lack of basic necessities, even before any potential access to masks, gloves and ventilators. How does one write in a crisis?

In the introduction to Resisting Canada: An Anthology of Poetry (2019), editor Nyla Matuk writes: “The poems in this book question the triumphalist, nation-building narratives typical of Canada’s historiography. As a settler-colony, Canada will only find the road to moral ground once it attempts to understand how and why it sits atop land, cultures, significant landmarks, and memories that do not belong to it, and faces its history of irreversible damage to First Nations Peoples, including its genocidal intent; once the state stops taking for granted that its self-declared presence permits access to unceded lands or entitles it to ignore or transgress the territorial or jurisdictional sovereignty of First Nations.” She continues:

            But colonialism isn’t merely a historic phenomenon we can dismiss as irreversible. It’s an ongoing set of practices negatively affecting human beings and the environment. The poems in this anthology believe that these practices can be confronted. Such decolonization requires art form that re-orient a settler society to bear witness to the standpoint of the colonized. Or at least they may offer a gambit in that direction. The point, to borrow a phrase from feminist political theorist bell hooks, is to move the locus of colonized meaning and knowledge from margin to centre. As writer and activist M. NourbeSe Philip tells us, “the power and threat of the artist, poet or writer lies in this ability to create new i-mages, i-mages that speak to the essential being of the people among whom and for whom the artist creates. If allowed free expression, these images succeed in altering the way a society perceives itself and, eventually, its collective consciousness.”

I think of Billy-Ray Belcourt’s NDN Coping Mechanisms (2019), where he writes: “Let us undertake an ethnomusicology of tears. I am after the frequency of NDN grievability. My hunch is that the pitch interrogates itself, like a hymn.” I think of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017), writing: “But the term American Indian parts our conversation like a hollow bloated / boat that is not ours that neither my friend nor I want to board, knowing it will never take us / anywhere but to rot. If the language of race is ever truly attached to emptiness whatever it is / I feel now has me in the hull, head knees feet curled, I dare say, to fetal position—but better / stated as a form I resort to inside the jaws of a reference; [.]”

I might ask how one writes in a crisis, but to many, the very question broadcasts my lack of awareness of the larger world in which we live. To some, crisis has been here for hundreds of years. None of this is new.

essays in the face of uncertainties

Layli Long Soldier, Whereas

When I want to write seriously I think of people like

dg for whom I wrote a long poem for whom I revised

until the poem forgot its way back troubled I let it go when

you love something let it go if it returns be a good mother

father welcome the poem open armed pull out the frying

pan grease it coat it prepare a meal

apron and kitchen sweat labor

my love and sleeves pushed

to elbows like the old days a sack

of flour and keys I push them

typography and hotcakes work

seduce a poem into believing

I can home it I can provide it

white gravy whatever the craving

poem eat and lie down full

poem rest here full don’t

lift a single l

etter. (“Vaporative”)

I’m a stunned by Santa Fe, New Mexico poet Layli Long Soldier’s remarkable Whereas (Graywolf, 2017), a book of lyric revolt, resistance and argument; moreso stunned for the fact that this is Soldier’s debut, a stunningly smart and fearless collection of poems that “confronts the coercive language of the United States government in its responses, treaties, and apologies to Native American peoples and tribes, and reflects that language in its officiousness and duplicities back on its perpetrators.” There is both an ease and a heft to Soldier’s lyrics, stating clearly and resolutely her terms of resolution without aggression, but as an absolute, incredible and clear-eyed force. The terms of her resistance are many, and powerful.

A poem about writing, bo-ring. Says my contemporary artistic companionate, a muscular observation and I agree. A poem about writing poems, how. Boring as it is, it asks me to do. I couldn’t any other thing tonight. I sat I wrote about writing. I write I sit about writing. I’m about to write about it, writing and sitting. I will write and sit with my writing.

Defamiliarize your writing then, somebody says okay I’m not sitting then I say to somebody. I’m chewing at a funeral and. I’m nibbling my pulp knuckles. I’m watching a man with a stain on his. Pants always wrinkle in this heat, gnats and humidity. I walk to the front pew to make a lewd, joke. I regard laughter from the man in the. Pants are always honest I mean really heavy at a summer burial. Yet he doesn’t ever cry, the stained man, why. When I observe nothing (unusual) I do nothing (unusual) in response. New or novel. Real lit relics on these occasions. In ritual: nobody’s learning, true. And to lewd is dumb, likewise. Like the way I put up my dukes when I observe the cowboy kneel. He’s praying he’s asking. He doesn’t see me, my gesture’s futile. What am I doing here, writing. What am I doing here righting the page at funerals. (“Vaporative”)

I’m obviously far more aware of examples of contemporary poetry of resistance on the Canadian side of the border, so there aren’t nearly as many examples of American contemporary poets and poetry titles of resistance; as Canadian poets Christine Leclerc and Stephen Collis have composed work in resistance to the Northern Gateway Pipeline, Soldier’s Whereas exists in solidarity with a series of historical and contemporary crises, from “the fate of the Dakota 38, hanged for the Sioux Uprising of 1862” to the recent protests over the building of an oil pipeline at the Standing Rock Reservation. Her introduction to the title section of the book, which exists as the second half of Whereas, speaks better than I on what she is doing:

On Saturday, December 19, 2009, US President Barack Obama signed the Congressional Resolution of Apology to Native Americans. No tribal leaders or official representatives were invited to witness and receive the Apology on behalf of tribal nations. President Obama never read the Apology aloud, publicly—although, for the record, Senator Sam Brownback five months later read the Apology to a gathering of five tribal leaders, though there are more than 560 federally recognized tribes in the US. The Apology was then folded into a larger, unrelated piece of legislation called the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act.

My response is directed to the Apology’s delivery, as well as the language, crafting, and arrangement of the written document. I am a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship, I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.

In many ways, as she composes utilizing the language of the oppressor in response, turning the tables, Soldier’s work could also be seen in relation to some of the work Jordan Abel has been doing in his own series of reclamation projects, from his poetry titles Injun (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2016), The Place of Scraps (Talonbooks, 2013) and Un/inhabited (Talonbooks/Project Space Press, 2014), engaged in his own conversations attached to Idle No More and Truth and Reconciliation, and Language/Conceptual Poetries. The title poem/section to Soldier’s Whereas is composed utilizing the flavour of legal language (akin to that of the Apology), twisting it back against the original document:

WHEREAS I did not desire in childhood to be a part of this but desired most of all to be a part. A piece combined with others to make up a whole. Some but not all of something. In Lakoka it’s hanké, a piece or part of anything. Like the creek trickling behind my aunt’s house where Uncle built her a bridge to cross from bank to bank, not far from a grassy clearing with three tipis, a place to gather. She holds three-day workshops on traditional arts, young people from Kyle and Potato Creek arrive one by one eager to participate. They have the option my auntie says to sleep at home and return in the morning but by and large they’ll stay and camp even during South Dakota winters. The comfort of being together. I think of Plains winds snow drifts ice and limbs the exposure and when I slide my arms into a wool coat and put my hand to the door knob, ready to breave the sub-zero dark, someone says be careful out there always consider the snow your friend. Think badly of it, snow will burn you. I walk out remembering that for millennia we have called ourselves Lakota meaning friend or ally. This relationship to the other. Some but not all, still our piece to everything;

If this book doesn’t win at least half the awards, there is something terribly, terribly wrong.