Mercedes Eng, Cop City Swagger

 

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills but am not surprised when a mayoral
candidate says that 100 new police will make The City

            safe

I am taking crazy pills and I live in a brown body so I know 100 new
cops will not make The City

            safe

because people of colour with mental illnesses are not safe from the
police who hurt and kill us, who do not leave us

intact, unharmed, in good health, still alive

The latest from Vancouver poet and curator Mercedes Eng is Cop City Swagger (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2024), following my yt mama (Talonbooks, 2020) [see my review of such here], Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Talonbooks, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Mercenary English (Vancouver BC: CUE Books, 2013; Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], furthering her ongoing trajectory of poetic investigations of racism and colonialism in Canada. Eng spotlights a blend of archival and first-person commentaries on police action, police violence, in and across Vancouver, and the foundations of violence that extend out from the office of the mayor. Set in nine poem-sections—“Core Values,” “Corporate Values,” “Coporate Values,” “Tent City Citizens’ Safety,” “Public School Safety,” “Public Safety Budget,” “Workplace Safety,” “Indigenous Women, Girls, Nonbinary, and / Two Spirit Peoples’ Safety” and “Chinatown Public Safety”—Eng composes a book-length suite of critiques on perpetual state violence on and across vulnerable communities, and the very question of who and what, exactly, is being served. “I take the alley,” she writes, as part of the second sequence, “which I shouldn’t. It’s one of the last public spaces people who use drugs have left and I am taking up room. Several people are using, a woman’s hand is swollen from an abscess, and little hunks of meat are littered on the ground. In Chinatown there are several butcher shops as well as dumpster foragers so refuse spilled in the alleyways is common but I see red meat cleaving from bone and cartilage for days. When I get to the church the police tape is gone and I can see blood on the sidewalk cracks.”

In sharp bursts of prose lyric, Eng employs elements of the long poem into precise action, perhaps not far from what Dorothy Livesay originally intended for the “documentary long poem,” a form she employed across her own blend of politics and poetics. Eng writes an extended lyric through the official records and official responses of the mayor and the police chief, articulating a lyric from the ground level of police violence, not in a way of glorifying, but to document what she sees. Hers is a direct and urgent lyric, composed through archive, gesture and appeal through class and poverty, and the ongoing assaults upon both. Offering this “Content Note” at the offset, she writes:

This book is about the police which means this book is about violence. This book is about the Vancouver Police Department’s violence against women. Black and Indigenous People and People of Colour, people who are mentally ill, and people who are unhoused and low-income. Readers will encounter evidence of the VPD’s excessive, sometimes deadly, use of force, racism and racial profiling, sexual assault, extortion, harassment of female civilians and officers, which led an officer to suicide, and their continuous failure of duty of care in regard to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, Nonbinary, and Two Spirit People.

Mercedes Eng, my yt mama

how my yt settler mama met my

Chinese immigrant dad

there are different versions of how. I remember my dad telling an exciting story of breaking out of Matsqui Penitentiary in B.C.: scaling the chain-link fence and throwing a jacket over the razor wire at the top so he wouldn’t cut himself as he went over it, hiding out through the night in an itchy haystack in a farmer’s field adjacent to the pen, before running to Medicine Hat, Alberta to seek sanctuary with his stepdad, the only grandpa I ever knew. grandpa Tai ran an antique store right across the street from the Canadian Pacific Railway station and lived in the basement. mom says dad and other prisoners were getting day passes to go pick strawberries in the many berry fields now occupying unceded Matsqui Territory in the Fraser Valley and there was a rumour that these work permits that granted little bits of freedom would be stopped so he ran away while on one, but both stories begin with dad leaving the prison when he wasn’t supposed to and end with dad running to Medicine Hat to hide out at grandpa’s. Medicine Hat, where my mom lived her whole life up to that point. they met at a party.

Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng’s third full-length poetry title is my yt mama (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2020), a continuation of “her poetic investigation of racism and colonialism in Canada.” my yt mama exists as a direct continuation of the work of her prior collection, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Talonbooks, 2017), a book that explored the Canadian prison system and systematic racism through archival material and her own biography [see my review of such here]. While that work focused on her father, absent throughout her life due to his incarceration, (thus prompting her book-length exploration of, among other related threads, the Canadian prison system), this collection, in turn, focuses on her mother, writing “when I try to talk to my mom about what it was like / to grow up surrounded by yt people in the prairies / in the 80s though it seemed like the 50s / she tells me in a so-there tone / that Mariah is a mixee and that people love her” (“Mariah according to my yt mama”).

Because I had to look it up (of course, not understanding what the “yt” stood for), I discovered that “‘White’ (sometimes abbreviated as ‘yt’) is a slang term for a white person, often used in a pejorative manner.” As Eng writes in her acknowledgments:

This book is indebted to Lindsay Nixon’s nîtisânak, their phenomenal memoir about queer Indigenous life on the prairies. Years ago I wrote a poem about my mother that I kept returning to, finally seeing what I could grow it into after reading nîtisânak. Also, though I’d seen “yt” used as social-media shorthand, Nixon’s book is the first I’d read that changed the orthography of the word, destabilizing the concept of ytness by frequently naming it, and then changing the spelling of that naming to non-standard English, so I wanted to do that too. Lastly, Nixon’s book reminded me to remember my youth and my queer kin in the prairies, and of what I miss about where I come from: kisiskāciwani-sīpiy (the South Saskatchewan River), the big sky in all its permutations of blue, the wild roses.

Eng’s exploration of race, colonialism and identity is deeply intimate and deeply personal, as she writes out a layering of trauma for both her and her mother, writing out the disconnect between her and her mother on racial issues, and how trauma is passed and parsed along succeeding generations. Eng’s my yt mama, in many ways, is comparable to Vancouver writer and editor Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018) [see my review of such here] for their shared use of poetic memoir to articulate and unpack trauma, including explorations of race and poverty.

Through my yt mama, it is as though Eng is attempting to reconcile what it is she inherited so that she might be able to better navigate her own history and trauma, choose what she is able of what she might retain, and reconcile what she has no control over. Eng writes a lyric suite of what become self-protections upon a body and a self that initially had very little control, writing out how such control could slowly be taken, developed and finally, possibly, achieved. As she writes as part of the extended poem “this body,” towards the end of the collection: “this body is taking space / this body is itinerant / could this body be medicine? / this boxy is indexical / this body is ephemeral / this body is star-seeded / this body is transgressive [.]” This is a dark collection, but one that doesn’t shy away from some extremely difficult material, such as the prose-sequence “the crazy things my mother told me when I / was a kid” that includes:

I remember my mom coming home with a big book of black-and-yt World War II photographs, one of the books the public library was giving away. there was a picture of some broad steps on which a whole bunch of people’s bodies and parts were scattered and there was this disconnected little baby leg with its sock and shoe still on. I was 5, 6 maybe, the pictures of Hitler were scary. he looked really mad and mean like a cop. I remember asking my mom about the war and her telling me about Nazis and how only blond-haired blue-eyed people were desired and how he killed all these Jewish people because they weren’t and I remember asking about me, if he would gas chamber me because I was, after all, part German too

she, unlike so many other prejudiced people in our shitty town, didn’t see my dad as less than because he wasn’t yt, because he was a convict, a junkie, but I don’t think she understood the impact of what she said, that in a not-so-far-away country and in a not-so-far-away time I might have been exterminated

Mercedes Eng, Prison Industrial Complex Explodes

he gets out when I’m 2, but goes back because later I remember my mom saying I have a surprise for you and I think it’s a record player, but it’s my dad behind the door, home from jail. so he went somewhere between 2 and 7, somewhere with dinosaurs and a bumpy gravel road.

we are on the highway in Vancouver, starting our drive back home to Medicine Hat. the car stops suddenly and then there are two really angry men yelling, “open the fucking door!” they smash open the window and they’re both grabbing my dad, one by the hair, the other by the throat. it looks like they wanna strangle him. my dad is kicking, he’s fighting. but it doesn’t work, they take him and he’s gone.

there is a good time, we move to a bigger house. but something happens and my dad is gone again. but then he gets out and he is straightened out and he is working the gas fields and there is money and our allowance goes up and my little brother gets G.I. Joe everything for Christmas and my mom is happy.

we spend summer vacation at the women’s shelter.

Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng’s second collection is Prison Industrial Complex Explodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2017), an incredibly powerful and intimate exploration of the Canadian prison system and systematic racism through archival material and her own biography, specifically that of an absent and imprisoned father. There is something akin to George Bowering’s George, Vancouver (Weed/Flower Press, 1970) to the way Eng goes back and forth between the personal and the archive, and a line between the two that often ceases to exist, working through a portrait of her father, his incarceration, and the effects it couldn’t help but have upon her childhood.

This is a difficult and complex work, one that exists as much as a non-fiction critique on the inherent racism throughout the prison system as it does an intimate long poem utilizing her father’s words against, one might say, the words of the state. Given how deeply Eng composes her long poem as critical essay, it does feel very much that she has opened the boundaries of what had been done previously with a form that Dorothy Livesay termed the “documentary poem”; Eng isn’t simply reshaping the archive into the space of her poem, but discovering, instead, a space where the form of the long poem and the critical essay, in part through her use of found and archived materials, meet. Furthering the work of what has come before her, this is the long poem realized in an entirely new way, all while articulating some very difficult terrain. And the question becomes: now that we’ve Mercedes Eng’s Prison Industrial Complex Explodes, how are we to respond? Where do we go from here? After the emergence of such a poetry of witness, might it perhaps spark an action?

According to RCMP documents obtained through access-to-information requests, the federal government created a wide-ranging surveillance network in early 2007 to monitor protests by First Nations people, including those that would garner national attention or target “critical infrastructure” like highways, railways, and pipelines.

An RCMP slideshow presentation from 2009 shows the intelligence unit reported weekly to approximately 450 recipients in law enforcement, government, and unarmed “industry partners” in the energy and private sectors. The presentation states that the intelligence unit can “provide information on activist groups who are promoting Aboriginal issues within your area.”

A series of “weekly situational awareness reports” from Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada reveals a rigorous cataloguing of Idle No More’s activities. In addition to the Aboriginal Affairs reports, Canada’s Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre, which operates within the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), prepared a threat assessment on Idle No More.