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3. Edgework: Indigenous Poetics as Re-placement
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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3 Edgework: Indigenous Poetics as Re-placement Warren Cariou Poetics, a Greek Word Contemporary poetry is an arena of edges and boundaries. There are competing schools and styles, pitched battles for supremacy in the pages of review journals. Manifestoes proliferate. Cliques and cadres and coteries. Young poets are encouraged or required to choose between language and lyric, concrete and spoken word, New Formalism and old free verse. Poems these days are being inscribed into the DNA of bacteria; they are being written by algorithms. Where does “Indigenous poetry” fit in this tumultuous field? Is it a style, or a school, or a way of relating language to the world? Does it have to jostle for space against all these other contemporary aesthetic categories that trumpet their principles so fiercely—or does it exist in a fluid relationship to them, flowing through and around their borders? Does it point toward their obsession with boundaries? I like to think that it infiltrates the colonial aesthetic categories and shows them that there is more to art than drawing distinctions. Aristotle, too, was a drawer of boundaries. Sometimes that makes me wish Indigenous artists had a different word for the thing he defined as poetics. But on the other hand, that might be inviting further marginalization of Indigenous literary art. Literature as rez. The colonial boundaries drawn on the land have caused troubles for generations and, as many Aboriginal writers will tell you, the bookstore categories are bad enough. The more I think about it, the more I have come to believe that Aristotle’s dusty old Greek word is as good as any for what this particular kind of Indigenous expression tries to do. Poesis: to make, to create. To be all verb. To move beyond the old restrictions, making way for something new. That 31 32 WA R R E N C A R I O U verbal quality is what is most appropriate to Indigenous ways of thinking, in which the entire world is always doing or relating rather than simply being. “Cree-ing loud into my night,” Louise Halfe writes in a line that gestures toward her inspiration for writing Blue Marrow as well as her practice of creating it.1 Cree-ing is the pronunciation of identity, an assertion that the speaker is connected to her people, to a way of life that is larger than herself. I think each Indigenous nation expresses its identity and its uniqueness in a similarly active and verbal way. Poetry as a cry, a cri, that echoes through communities and through the land itself, moving across the lines of class and race and epistemology toward something more elemental in us all, something that we feel in our bodies like the sound of a drum. Edgewalkers For me, one of the important functions of poetry in an Indigenous context is to help decolonize the imagination by bridging the ideological boundaries that often separate the beneficiaries of colonialism from those who are objectified and impoverished by it. Marvin Francis’s poem “Edgewalker” is an important work for me in this regard because it focuses on the lines that divide different communities in North America, showing how people in a sense become invisible to each other on the basis of nearly unconscious judgments about race and class. “Society edges the other from others ,”2 he writes, suggesting that the process of “othering” is essentially a drawing of boundaries around people and places that society would rather not acknowledge. These boundaries can quickly become so hardened that people can’t see past them; they become “edges that cut off our mind / from the crack baby”3 and from other terrible injustices that we would otherwise have to confront and acknowledge. This process of “edging” is in a sense what creates slums and Indian reserves, and also what enables the relatively wealthy and privileged to enjoy their place in the nation without being bothered by the horrific inequities that typify colonial reality on this continent. On the other hand, an “Edgewalker,” in Francis’s conception, is someone who travels along those boundaries, making them visible again and providing a necessary window across them. Though he doesn’t explicitly say this in the poem, I think Marvin Francis would agree that the poet is the ultimate edgewalker. Certainly Francis exemplified this in his own life as a poet of Winnipeg’s grittiest streets. I learned a lot from Marvin in the time I knew him, though I was supposed...