Cicely Belle Blain, Burning Sugar

 

MANITOBA

I found Black people between groves of wheat
drove hours along open road back to Winnipeg
heard whispers in the topography
Ta-Nehisi said I could go anywhere
he told me in two hundred pages that Black folds could travel
said seeing the world is not a luxury
reserved for white men 

we do travel though

some of us are still
on ships

West coast poet and activist Cicely Belle Blain’s full-length poetry debut, published as part of Vivek Shraya’s VS. BOOKS imprint, is Burning Sugar (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2020). Burning Sugar opens with a suite of poems composed around familiar geographies, written from a perspective far too often overlooked, ignored or overwritten. “Black bodies against snow,” they write, to open the poem “MINNESOTA,” “radiating / kente cloth wears thin over broken bones / snow, sun, dancing / vibrant diaspora calls me home / Africa lives between the snowflakes / icicles drip in tongues [.]” Blain articulates a sequence of experiences around history, Blackness, racism and what lingers, silently, in those spaces, often a history that can’t be washed away, and a history that shouldn’t be forgotten. They write of silences, and the ongoing impact of those silences. As Blain writes as part of the sequence “LONDON,” specifically referencing the British-borne slave trade: “I imagine hard lines when I think of you / the beginnings of destruction / worlds upended to bring you gold // you are the birthplace of endings [.]” In a 2017 interview conducted by Jillian Christmas for Room Magazine, one could easily see how Blain’s activism, including their work as founder of Black Lives Matter iy– Vancouver, are an integral part of their approach to writing:

I’m always excited to be visibilizing Black communities in a city that has historically erased them. I’m excited about the amount of people who show out and support us. Who come out and hear what we have to say, who believe in us, despite BLM being a group of young activists. Public speaking puts me in my happy place. Coming from a pretty white-centric upbringing and always wondering about my place in the world, finally finding something I’m good at and having the ability to make people listen to important causes fills me with joy. It’s a platform of privilege and one that I must navigate with precarity. Globally, Blackness is exotic and desirable, a culture that is over-consumed by non-Black folks yet under-appreciated when on Black bodies. Especially in Vancouver, Blackness seems so removed from most people’s daily lives (despite the fact that they probably engage in multiple pieces of Black culture throughout their day) that people sort of idolize Black Lives Matter. They are excited to listen to Black voices and they are excited to be seen as allies; people will listen to anything I say and so I have to be super careful. I think also subconsciously, I am trying to dispel the notion of an “angry Black woman”; for better or worse, my calmness and my smile makes me approachable and people more receptive to our cause.

The book moves through three sections of short lyrics—“PLACE,” “ART” and “CHILD”—exploring subjects of landscape, geography, history, colonialism and systematic violence. “the hardest part about colonization: / even the air we breathe has been colonized,” they write, to end the poem “ALEXANDRA BRIDGE.” The pieces in Burning Sugar are fascinating in the ways in which they approach subject through the lyric, composing a book-length poem through a blend of essay and memoir on geography, history and Blackness through research and Blain’s own experiences. Structurally, there are comparable elements of Blain’s poems to the essay-poems of Phil Hall and Erín Moure, or even Vancouver writer and editor Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant (Book*hug, 2018) [see my review of such here], for how the lyric is propelled as much by language as by exploration of and through some weighty subject matter. Blain’s poems are thoughtful and passionate, seeking to acknowledge and document, and working to seek out. The opening piece of ‘SOUL OF A NATION,” subtitled “Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom,” the opening piece in the second section, “ART,” begins:

Inside the whitest walls, my mother and I found Soul of a Nation—an exhibition dedicated to the American civil rights movement and all the dreams that rose and fell with it. The exhibition begins in 1963—a year full of strife, anti-Blackness and state-sanctioned violence. Artists design a blueprint for revolution: sculpture, painting, drawing, film, text scream for justice. A desperate cry for liberation aches from canvases.
            The art is American in the deepest sense but also African. Mouhammad Ali, Jack Johnson, Angela Davis, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X dance from white plinths. The juxtaposition is nauseating. The stories of Black pain carve irreversible lines onto my heart. There is love, too, though, scattered like Ben-Day dots through the exhibition. Sometimes joy, rippling in brush strokes, occasionally hope and always resilience.

Still, Burning Sugar is a book not weighed down by loss and pain, but one that articulates a belonging, one that is pieced together through patience and will, through research and seeking out. Blain’s poems explore the lost threads and dark elements that can still be woven together into something grand, and hopeful, working through what could have been into what still might be possible.

Alex Leslie, Vancouver for Beginners

POSTCARD HOME FROM ENGLISH BAY

Nostalgia is a territory. Chain-smoking seagulls do yoga on the horizon at dawn. English Bay organized into lanes with flaming buoys for swimmers to do their drive-by banking. The bridge shut down for candidates who launch down the inlet on robotic wings, competing for votes. People tread water below to witness, swallow the new Pacific vaccine. The famous building with the tree growing out of its roof drinks rainwater, spits mercury into the teacups for developers. Acid rain rainbows the parade tie-dye, the marchers photograph their chemical shadows and post in Renaissance filter, reflections in oil paints. Pride bellyflops into a harbor of profit. The portrait artist hired by the mayor works until sunset, then lies down in the surf and dissolves, skin floating off clear as a jellyfish, black formal tails trailing ink. It is so beautiful here. This child will draw your caricature for free by throwing a glass of coins in your face and raising his fingers to catch the bent light that arcs off your cheekbones. Blink and you’ll miss the moon inspecting its own bruises, reading Captain Vancouver’s letters home by the lights of a thousand rigs, miniatures available in bottles for collectors and investors. Visit soon.

Having seen some examples of her prose poems in various places over the past couple of years, I was curious to see Vancouver writer Alex Leslie’s full-length poetry title, Vancouver for Beginners (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2019), following on the heels of two short story collections, as well as her full-length prose poetry debut, The things I heard about you (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2014). I’ve written on such more than a couple of times and places (including here), but I’ve long been fascinated at just how often Vancouver is depicted in full-length poetry titles, perhaps more often than any other Canadian geography (which is, by itself, saying quite a lot), and even a quick shortlist of examples would make a hefty list, from George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Kitchener ON: Weed/Flower Press, 1970) and Daphne Marlatt’s Vancouver Poems (Vancouver BC: Georgia Straight Writing Supplement, 1972) to more recent titles such as Michael Turner’s Kingsway (Vancouver BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995), Oana Avasilichioaei’s feria: a poempark (Toronto ON: Wolsak & Wynn, 2008) [see my review of such here], Meredith Quartermain’s Vancouver Walking (Edmonton AB: NeWest, 2005) and Nightmarker (NeWest Press, 2008) [see my review of such here], George Stanley’s Vancouver: A Poem (Vancouver BC: New Star, 2008) [see my review of such here], Sachiko Murakami’s The Invisibility Exhibit (Talonbooks, 2008) [see my review of such here] and Rebuild (Talonbooks, 2011), Daphne Marlatt’s rewritten Liquidities: Vancouver Poems Then and Now (Talonbooks, 2012) [see my review of such here] and Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here], among multiple others. What is it about Vancouver that prompts so many poets to respond? A far more complex question, I’m sure, than I have the tools to unpack.

In an interview posted earlier this year, conducted by Isabella Wang for Room, Leslie describes the pieces in Vancouver for Beginners as “prose poems, free verse poems and pieces that could be read as microfictions or prose poems.” The fluidity of form and approach is curious, as though the structure of the collection is less a montage of form than an exploration between the arbitrary distinctions of genre—microfiction, the prose poem and the more traditional free-verse lyric—and the divisions that exist on either side of the contemporary prose poem. There were moments throughout the collection that I wanted her lines to be tighter than they were, but when they work, they are remarkable. While Leslie does seem far more comfortable on the prose side than on the lyric or line-break, the most compelling pieces are those that exercise a further density through whatever short form she is attempting. A poem such as “LAND REGISTRY,” as well, might be composed with short, accumulative lines, but lines that are sharpened down to bone, as the poem begins: “Every new arrival gets / a free upload.” Further on, she writes: “Diction is mineral. / Press your finger to the screen, / take it, take everything / you want, fingerwhorl stamped / in concrete.”

Vancouver exists as backdrop, but one that is explored, described and critiqued in great detail, including multiple development decisions to build, tear-down or rebuild, from the response to the Great Fire of 1886, surveyor’s maps and the infamous Woodward’s squat. As she writes to open the poem “BARTER”: “In the news today: Vancouver is tearing down the art gallery that / used to be the land registry. The barge that unloads the hybrid / cars leaves full of cedar, fat roots like fingers in the oil slick due / north. The trawler’s hold unloads flash-frozen salmon, departs / full of clouds and tickets.” The questions of Leslie’s Vancouver for Beginners seem very much to explore how a resident of Vancouver might retain their humanity in the face of so much trauma and inhumanity, from the many development decisions that seem to be actively crushing communities and individuals of that same humanity, to writing around Robert Picton, seasonal affective disorder and the list of murdered and missing women and girls, as in the poem “INTERSECTION,” that begins:

Nobody stopped to watch. They

erected a coffin in the centre of the

intersection at Granville and Georgia

while the Missing Women’s Inquiry

was taking place in the office towers

above. When I walked to work from

the train station, the coffin was

surrounded by a zoo of commuters,

suits, some protesters. Three

concentric rings around the coffin:

placards, navy police uniforms, then

the scarves and blankly beaming

screens of passersby who had come

to warm their hands in the glow of

tragedy, or were only curious. Maybe

they didn’t know what they were

looking at. Cold-weather tourists.

The news was everywhere.

Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine

Wittgenstein wrote: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Incomplete in several languages, I grow heartened in the places I rub against the edges of different tongues. The world’s languages push against this English I write, they work their way in, ingeniously trespass. Writing, I imagine my text will become a conduit for illegal traffic, a body to incubate a different type of future—fractured, polyphonic, cacophonous, but sutured with silence, with all that remains impossible to put into words.

Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe, most experiences are unsayable. They happen in a space that no word has ever entered and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Another library, endless rows, enough space: the shelves are populated with volumes of complicated questions phrased with uncommon beauty. (Najwa Ali, “Writing, In Transit”)

Edited by Meghan Bell and the “Growing Room Collective” and co-produced through and by Vancouver’s Room Magazine and Caitlin Press is the anthology Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine (2017), an impressive four hundred pages plus of poetry, fiction, essays, translations and interviews covering the first four decades of a journal dedicated to publishing, supporting and promoting a series of diverse voices of Canadian writers. Sectioned into decades, part of what is fascinating about this volume is the way in which each section opens with an interview with an editor from that period, from co-founder Gayla Reid (“The First Decade (1975-1987)”), editor Mary Schendlinger (“The Second Decade (1988-1997”), editor Lana Okerlund (“The Third Decade (1998-2007)”) and former Managing Editor Rachel Thompson (“The Fourth Decade (2008-2016)”). The interviews provide an essential context for not only the journal and its activities, but the surrounding culture and communities. As co-founder Gayla Reid responds in her interview:

We felt very much that we belonged in the feminist landscape. High time that women had their own space to write about whatever we wanted. Women’s voices needed to be heard. Silent no more. There was no requirement that submissions should explicitly address sexism. We wanted to publish writing by women that was good writing, and we were convinced that there would be a lot of it around—and there was. At the time, writers typically got started by publishing in a little literary magazine (usually edited by men). So, Room would be a place where women could get started. Our voices could be heard, we could emerge, develop, blossom—all those growing images.

What becomes interesting, as well, is in beginning to understand, by creating a thoughtfully-edited journal of great writing, just how much Room helped to carve out a real and sustained space for feminist writing and conversation, opening the door to multiple writers, conversations and journals, including more recent publications such as Canthius and Minola Review. As Reid continues, in her interview:

At first we were busy choosing from submitted works. After a few years, we also sought out specific Canadian female writers. The first adventure we had in this area was a special issue on Québécoise feminist writers [4.1], which was tremendously exciting because we did not know their work—very little of it was available in translation

            In terms of literary writing, I’d say we were most often looking for what Doris Lessing called the “small personal voice,” which is what poetry and short fiction writing is particularly good at rendering.

Featuring work by seventy-eight Canadian writers—including Marie Annharte Baker, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Juliane Okot Bitek, Nicole Brossard, Lynn Crosbie, Leona Gom, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Nancy Holmes, Aislinn Hunter, Amy Jones, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Jen Sookfong Lee, Erín Moure, Dorothy Livesay, Susan Musgrave, Sina Queyras, Rebecca Rosenblum, Carolyn Smart, Ayelet Tsabari, Betsy Warland and others—Making Room attempts to track some of the shifts in and responses to the culture, from shifts in language to responding to rape culture as well as the Montreal Massacre, conversations around gender issues and multiple other subjects. Just as often, by simply providing a space, Room was at the forefront of some of those conversations, as Vancouver writer and editor Amber Dawn writes to end her introduction, “Overturning Scarcity: Forty Years of Abundant Change”:

Room changed CanLit when Cyndia Cole’s groundbreaking “No Rape No” (p. 24) was first published in the 1970s. Room has shown CanLit that women’s complex bodies are indeed a bit, with fiction like Juliane Okot Bitek’s “The Busuuti and the Bra” (p. 109) and with poems like jia qing wilson-yang’s “trans womanhood, in colour” (p. 376). Room continues to recognize that trans and non-binary gender narratives are an inherent and esteemed part of feminist literature by calling attention to Ivan Coyote’s “My Hero” (p. 195) and Lucas Crawford’s “Failed Séances for Rita MacNeil” (p. 364). By honouring work like Doretta Lau’s “Best Practices for Time Travel” (p. 388) and Eden Robinson’s “Lament” (p. 221, Room challenges tired notions that social justice and Indigenous speculative fiction are anything less than synonymous with great literature.

             As you read this anthology, you will undoubtedly regard it as a timely collection of seventy-eight exceptional literary works. Please also take a moment to marvel at how scarcity and shame have not claimed a single page, not a single line or word of this anthology. You, dear readers, and I, and the seventy-five remarkable contributors are both teaching and learning a new message, right now. Say it with me. There is Room. We do fit.