M. NourbeSe Philip's "Discourse on the Logic of Language"

Philip’s poem is a multifaceted comment on language and the power it holds in colonial (and post-colonial) contexts. Historically, the English language has been used as a tool for the oppression of colonized peoples, frustrating self-realization and identity formation within the context of a foreign English framework. Philip subverts the conventional English poetic form in her use of various fonts, changing the orientation of words on the page, and including sections of very different diction styles to emphasize the polyvocal nature of the piece. When performed live, these seperate sections often overlap: the stream–of-consciousness description competes with and is often drowned out by clinical descriptions portrayed in a male, English voice. As well as critiquing language as a tool for the oppression of colonized, Philip also comments on the patriarchal and singular nature of linguistic meaning and how it also serves to marginalize women. This discussion and the techniques used inspired a spoken poetry/slam piece that I wrote in conjunction with another creative individual discussing sexist rhetoric and systemic oppression of women in a patriarchal (language) system. In this piece, we emulated the polyvocal nature of Philips’ poem by including clinical, “proper” descriptions as well as more fluid, stream-of-consciousness sections. Because we had two voices to work with, we were able to overlap words and sections and vocal tones in the performance of the piece. The different voices are denoted by A and B in the following excerpts of the 8 minute-long piece:

AB What's in a name? A That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
...

B Woman. noun. derived from the Old English wifman meaning, naturally, wife of man. Later forms include wifmon and wimmon whose usage continued until the 15th century. By 1200 CE the rounding of wi- to wu- was clearly established and at that time characteristic of Middle English texts
...

A mother tongue tied by father time.
An other tongue speaks the
la-laa-language
...

B she is given the seeds to sow
Eve’s seductive, destructive apple
echoing Adam (A ADAM)
Adam’s apple speaks his story
Herstory is extra (A ordinary)
woman is man but twisted
AB a footnote B of woe in the tale that defines mankind
A kindly
AB The limits of our language are the limits of our world

The poem finishes with an emotional build-up of the two voices competing for space, voice A repeating “The limits of our language are the limits of our world” while voice B runs through a mash-up of the following words and their definitions:

Manpower –power in terms of people
Manufacture –the making or producing of anything
Manipulate –to manage or influence skilfully
Manoeuvre--action requiring dexterity and skill
Manage–to take charge, or care of
Manhood–the state of being human

Edwidge Danticat’s Brother, I’m Dying

In weaving together a tale about her family's past, Danticat has fused elements of biography and autobiography to tell a story that seems to be simulaneously subjective and objective. Although this book has obvious personal implications for Danticat, she places herself as more of a "witness" to the events in the text, sworn to tell truth only to the best of her ability. Stating at the end of the book that "what [she] really wanted to say was that the dead and the new life were already linked, through [her] blood, through [her]", Danticat again places herself in the role of the seeker or the link that ties the narrative together; she's an object of the narrative, not the subject.
This seems to be indicative of the struggles contained in life writing as a genre which stretches notions of truth, authority, and accountability.

Rohinton Mistry's "Swimming Lessons"

In his short story detailing a portion of the life of a writer living in Toronto and the nature of his correspondence with his parents in India, Mistry touches particularly on the theme of cause and effect and its mirror, effect and cause. Mistry refers to this ambiguous dichotomy in various contexts: as osteoporosis being an illness that “hollow[s] out the bones and turn[s] effect into cause” (237), and also in his questioning of the relationship between the high rate of divorce in Parsi community and its increasing westernization, asking “which is a result of the other?”(238). This motif of cause and effect is present less explicitly in the text’s ideas surrounding the act of writing. The parents of the narrator are puzzled by his lack of writing regarding his home of Toronto, voicing the common perception that “writers use their own experience to make stories” (256). In this statement lies an issue central to literary theory, particularly in a post-colonial context: does our identity inform our writing, or does our writing give form to our identity? Later on in the story the narrator’s parents also voice the concern that if their son becomes more assimilated and less like an immigrant, “he will write like one of them [a Canadian?] and lose the important difference” (259). Whereas before they were concerned that the true “essence”—if you will—of their son’s writing wasn’t making it into his work, now they are worried that writing in a certain way will change who he is. Reinforcing this, the narrator's mother makes the statement that his father is "confusing fiction with facts, fiction does not create facts...you must not confuse what really happened with what the story says happened, you must not loose your grasp on reality, that way madness lies" (261).

Dionne Brand's "Blue Airmail Letter"

The entirety of Dionne Brand's "Blue Airmail Letter" is written as a letter from narrator Eula, in Canada, to her dead mother. Throughout the letter, the act of writing letters is referred to multiple times, often in the the form of apologies [for not writing] or as a comment on the limitations of words as a form of communication. Eula refers to this letter narrative as "writing [only] to commit an act, to write a letter" (237) and also to the act of writing as an aid to forgetting as opposed to a clarifying: "I'm forgetting you even as I write this letter. The more I write, the more I forget...perhaps I need to forget you now" (239).
Discussions surrounding the relative power and limitations of words reminded me of a creative writing exercise that I learned in the past. In this activity, the goal is to use only the words from one page of the dictionary (front and back) to create a poem that describes another idea/concept.
The following poem is constructed using this page from the dictionary:

























Storm
Street streams strait streaks
Straddle streetcar straps
strain
strain
strain
Stout

In asking various people to read this poem and identify its subject matter, no one was able to determine that the poem is attempting to describe "mud". Given the limitations of the single dictionary page I had, I wasn't able to express the idea, mud, in a way that readers understood.

Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach

Robinson’s novel Monkey Beach is a text that, in its narration and various forms of description, makes the reader aware that s/he is slightly removed from the text and is placed as an outsider to the story it contains. In one such moment of description, a mapping exercise (5), Lisa guides the reader in finding the town of Kitamaat on a map of British Columbia. In this passage there is mention of confusion in the naming of the village of Kitamaat and the complications that the “official naming” of places poses.
Being interested in the act of mapping and its implications in the formation of identity, I recently created a poem heavily influenced by this part of Robinson’s novel. The poem, entitled Mapping Beaver People is written as a sort of instructional guide to the reader, outlining a journey down a river in and into the woods of Northern Ontario. I’ve blended the use of cartographic terms and words that allude to the reading and writing and tracing of maps with vivid imagery of the actual landscape that underlies the map—the landscape as I grew up knowing it. The juxtaposition of clear instructions and internal description serves to continually wrench the reader in and out of the poem, enforcing his/her position as outside the true content of the poem. Along with Lisa’s mapping exercise, this piece questions the authority of the map-maker and indicates that maps cannot fully display the truth of what they represent.

Maps of Beaver People
LEAH ROBINSON

Tucked into Belaney’s
Tales of an Empty Cabin
Unfold it, brush dusty crease
and place a finger on Severn Falls: docks
exposed to the wake

Trace river Northwest
to the bridge, spray-painted signatures peeling
(Be careful. From heights,
water is as hard as concrete)
but don’t stop
there.

Three inlets
downstream find the bay
clear, bottom’s easy to read

We called it Turtle (You write it in)
At Dinnertime Rapids
you’re not there yet
Reached Lost Channel
you’ve gone too far.

Shoreline, dock rots,
upthehill
don’t trip.

A burst of roses at the top
sloping forest and a pinwheel of legs

Trace it now,
Skirt northeast pond
beyond another pond
and another
and
you’ve gone too far.
here

mud-cake lodge
here
coordinates (You write them in)

inside
knees tucked under chin
I am
curling toes Due North
Which Way?

Archie Belaney and Jell Roll

Gerald Vizenor’s Almost Brown

In response to Vizenor’s short story chronicling a portion of the life of the fictional Aboriginal character Almost Browne, I’ve chosen to recreate a page of one of the blank books that Almost and Drain decided to sell to college students in the story. It is mentioned in the short that each blank book included one page on which Almost had painted a “tribal pictomyth” in green ink, so I have included my own imagined pictomyth: a green drawing of a Thunderbird character. The choice of picture is a deliberately stereotypical, chosen to highlight the issues with the commodification of culture that Almost and Drain present in their sale of the books and their use of shaman drum tapes to increase profits.
I have also written in the “blank book” from the perspective of a college student, using the page as a weekly agenda detailing my assignments and the mundane to-do lists. The purpose of this is twofold: to highlight the juxtaposition of the student’s writing and the tribal pictomyth, and to address some comments in Vizenor's narrative, namely, “students were tired of books filled with words behind double doors that never pictured anything,”(2780) and the idea that the blank books with the pictomyths were a “ ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’” (2781).This last phrase alludes to Wordsworthian ideas of expression and the notion that poetry and creativity are the result of “emotion recollected in tranquility.” In a slight rearrangement of the original phrase, I’ve scribbled directly beneath the pictomyth in my blank book the line, “a space where my own spontaneous overflow of feelings is powerful,” pointing out issues of authority in the writing of words and the publishing of books.

Focusing on a literary context in particular, who has the authority to decide what’s worthy of publication? Professor Monte Franzgomery (2781) deems the blank books to be fit for use in his romantic literature course because he sees them as adhering to the Western Wordsworthian ideas mentioned above. Would the books have sold as well if they contained words written by Almost or Drain, or would the romantic mystery of the pictomyth have been ruined this way?

(click image to enlarge)