Indigenous Poetics in Canada

22. The “Nerve of Cree,” the Pulse of Africa: Sound Identities in Cree, Cree-Métis, and Dub Poetries in Canada

22 The “Nerve of Cree,” the Pulse of Africa: Sound Identities in Cree, Cree-Métis, and Dub Poetries in Canada Susan Gingell Why Bring Together Indigenous and Dub Poetries from Canada? Literary critics have generally shied away from bringing the writing of Indigenous and African diasporic peoples into conversation with one another, perhaps made wary by critiques of post-colonial theory that have rightly censured the tendency to make colonially centric and homogenous those peoples’ radically different histories and experiences of colonialism and neo-colonialism.1 However, Sophie McCall’s “Diaspora and Nation in Métis Writing” and Renate Eigenbrod’s “Diasporic Longings: (Re)Figurations of Home and Homelessness in Richard Wagamese’s Work” follow Neal McLeod’s “Coming Home Through Stories”2 in framing Indigenous dislocations as productive of diaspora, thus preparing one kind of theoretical ground for bringing together Indigenous literature and writing more commonly recognized as diasporic. While analogous experiences of racism come quickly to mind as another basis for effecting the convergence, literary critics rarely consider issues related to audible difference. However, attending to the creative and regenerative responses that Cree, Cree-Métis, and Canadian practitioners of the reggae-born, politically charged, foundationally oral poetry known as dub have made to the systematic suppression of the ways their people sound reveals the significance of these issues. Indeed, orature and orality richly resource these poetries. Any comparison of Indigenous and dub poetries in Canada needs to remain aware that the particular histories of (neo)colonialism suffered 271 272 S U S A N G I N G E L L by Indigenous peoples in Canada and those endured by enslaved African Jamaican and related diasporic peoples are distinct except where intermarriage has taken place. “In These Canadian Bones,” Lillian Allen thanks Native peoples for sharing the country she now calls home, and acknowledges that as a settler group, Jamaican Canadians have a different relationship to the land than Indigenous peoples do. Because the dub community in Canada is urban, Canadian dub characteristically thematizes city-based experience and rarely seems connected to the land beneath the asphalt and concrete. Urban Indigenous peoples, by contrast, may articulate a strong connection even when the land is paved over. Marvin Francis’s City Treaty, for instance, asserts that “native landscapes contain asphalt,”3 and that the “word drummers” (Indigenous writers) have rendered new Indigenous realities so that “the landscape now has city.”4 Moreover, the two groups have been negatively impacted by quite different Canadian government policies, though often with depressingly similar, impoverishing results. Enforced residential schooling and the 1960s scoops that tore children away from their parents for adoption were uniquely Indigenous experiences, so Canadian dub poetry offers nothing quite like the wrenching accounts of families torn apart such as we encounter in Maria Campbell’s translation of the Road Allowance people’s story “Jacob,” Louise Halfe’s “The Residential School Bus,” and Emma LaRocque’s “My Hometown Northern Canada South Africa.” Slavers did, however, permanently sever Africans’ ties with homeland and family there; when plantation masters sold slaves, including children, to distant plantations , families were again violently ruptured; and, more recently, mothers and children were separated because of Canada’s Caribbean Domestic Scheme’s requirement that workers have no dependants.5 Many Caribbean single mothers, pushed abroad by the collapse of their countries’ economies in the post–Second World War period, had, as Allen’s dub poem “I Fight Back” records, to leave their children with family members back in the Caribbean so they could care for others’ children abroad. Despite the two groups’ different histories, orality is central to the social lives and verbal arts of each. They share both a belief in the dynamism and potency of the sounded word, and experiences of the silencing of their languages by (neo)colonizers. Moreover, Indigenous and dub poets frequently describe their work as extending ancestral oral traditions even as they thematize the muting of their mother tongues. The poetry of the Cree and Cree-Métis, and of Canadian dubbers reveals a pronounced degree of overlap in the groups’ experience of the crucial place of language politics in colonization, so poets from these groups take up language as a primary vector of decolonization. In response to having English forced down their T H E “N E R V E O F C R E E , ” T H E P U L S E O F...