Indigenous Poetics in Canada

13. “Pimuteuat/Ils marchent/They Walk”: A Few Observations on Indigenous Poetry and Poetics in French

13 “Pimuteuat/Ils marchent/They Walk”: A Few Observations on Indigenous Poetry and Poetics in French Michèle Lacombe Many Indigenous poets from a wide group of First Nations in Quebec are publishing in French, although in this chapter I limit myself to work by Innu poets Joséphine Bacon and Rita Mestokosho. My interpretation of a few of their poems draws further attention to their writing, but also introduces several issues concerning the readership for Indigenous poetry written in French. Briefly, I address the difficult question of translation and self-translation, whether from Indigenous languages to French or from French to English; I consider the nature of recent collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers using French; I comment on linguistic challenges facing Indigenous poets educated in French (whether or not they attended residential school); and I translate a few words from Mestokosho and Bacon as well as by francophone scholars who speak to the critical reception of Indigenous creative writing in that language. In the process, I turn to the metaphor of walking to suggest the continuous and discontinuous movement between ancestral understandings based in Indigenous languages and cultures and the coexistence of such knowledge with European languages and urban cultures. My title is inspired by two passages. The first is the opening lines of Louise Halfe’s Blue Marrow: The walk began before I was a seed. My mother strung my umbilical cord in my moccasins... 159 160 M I C H È L E L A C O M B E Soon the mountain too had feet... âstam, she said [come, come here].1 The second is from the title and opening line of Joséphine Bacon’s poem “Pimuteuat” (They Walk), from which I quote later in the chapter.2 In both cases, I read these poems as referring not only to the ancestors’ life on the land, and to changing circumstances that have affected the speaker, but also to walking as a contemporary metaphor for poetic movement. Words that walk—whether in referential, metaphorical, translated, spoken, or dialogical language—point in a number of different directions that are more or less accessible to the reader, depending on her or his own experiences and language skills. Indigenous poetics allows for a wide range of linguistic, formal, and rhetorical strategies, realigning the contemporary poetic voice with older forms of storytelling. For me, the rhythms of the poetic foot, sometimes moccasined and sometimes not—rhythms associated with the heartbeat, with human breath, and with dancing in Indigenous and other languages—are embodied in “words that walk.” When Armand Garnet Ruffo toured Australia in 2003, together with Indigenous writers from across Canada who had been invited by the Canada Council to participate in an exchange with Indigenous writers from Australia, the list of those from Canada included only one name that he didn’t recognize—Rita Mestokosho, an Innu poet from Ekuanitshit (Mingan) in northeastern Quebec. Given that many Innu communities’ experiences of residential schools included being taught in French, it is not surprising that Mestokosho’s second language (after Innu) is French rather than English. And because the Indigenous writers from Canada and Australia who first met as part of this exchange spoke little, if any, French, Mestokosho read from her work in Innu. Ruffo comments on the irony that “‘one of our own’ stood on the periphery of our literary family” in a collective speaking tour meant “to forge links with other Indigenous writers.”3 An example of forging links with other writers is found in the 2008 anthology Mots de neige, de sable et d’océan, in which Mauricio Gatti brings together French-language work by Wendat, Innu, Atikamekw, Anishnaabe, Wabanaki, Amasigh, Kabyle, Ma’ohi, and Kanak Indigenous writers from Quebec, Algeria, Morocco, French Polynesia, and New Caledonia, many of whom are not familiar with English-speaking Indigenous writers from former colonies in their part of the world. Tomson Highway’s French-language preface to this book opens with the following words: “C’est toujours un défi d’écrire dans une langue qui n’est pas sa langue maternelle. C’est toujours un défi de devoir écrire dans une langue qui n’est pas sa langue maternelle” (It is always challenging to write in a language other than one’s “P I M U T E U AT /I L S M A R C H E N T /T H...