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BOOK REVI EWS One Performance Is Not Enough Paula Koneazny Performance Bond Wayde Compton Arsenal Pulp Press http://www.arsenalpulp.com 160 pages; paper (including a music CD), $17.95 In Performance Bond, Canadian poet/spoken word artist Wayde Compton plays off and plays with—performs—multiple identities, those of a mixed-race, border-crossing son of the African diaspora and those emerging from wordplay itself. Here, "bond" illuminates both that which joins (unites) and that which restrains, renders unfree. Bond as periphery: body and history. The body in history. Connection and disconnection. A connoisseur of the indeterminate, Compton fuses poetry and prose, history and faux history, word as sound and word as visual text. He follows the lure of all manner of boundaries, including the US-Canadian border, which has historically attracted many "refugees" from the US, including fugitive slaves and Vietnam-era draft resisters. Human traffic flows both ways, of course, and though Canada provides a market and an audience for US cultural products, the reverse has not always been true. Compton's point ofview is further complicated by his observation that he, too, is a consequence of border crossing, both geographical (his father immigrated to Vancouver from the US) and racial/ethnic. Thus it is at only slight personal remove that he takes up the various stances of the immigrant—of the sometimes detained, sometimes turned-back, sometimes in hiding. In more straightforward terms, a "performance bond" has to do with establishing identity; what Compton is tracking here are "identity cases." From this position, no allegiance can be simple, no sense of self ready-made. "Halfrican Nation" and "Afro-Saxon" function as possible labels for Compton's experienced hybridity and complicate other notions that he considers, such as "Afrocentripetalists," "Afroperipheric ," and "Afrofuturist." Indeed, the status of the "Afro-Saxon" in Canada is not the same as that of the African American in the United States, or of the African under colonialism and apartheid, or of the Palestinian living in occupied territory. However he splits or splices his origins, Compton is not indigenous, nor did his ancestors arrive as slaves. His parents are immigrants. They chose Canada. So, along with white Canadians, he shares the status of one who displaces and dispossesses. In "Inlet Holler" he explains, "I am a settler / 1 am uneasy //, there is nowhere to go." More than any personally construed identity, however, he is grappling with the broader question of what Canada, and more specifically, British Columbia, might represent in public terms. Performance Bond is composed of four sections , the first of which, "Stations (1996-2003)," is a montage of texts that brings to mind diverse locations or neighborhoods (stations along a line of public transport, perhaps) where one can get on and off or merely transit through following a brief stop. These are places of arrival and departure, and Stations of the Cross, as well, where one takes up a burden and that burden can be shared. Along the way, performances and bonds multiply and have consequences, create a heritage. In "To Poitier," " the speaker declares, "Sidney: I am a creation of the Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?-generation, I of the post-first-on-screen-interracial-kiss baby boom. In age and features, / I am the offspring of those flickering images." The inheritance that Compton claims, however, is a global one, one that also includes Papa Legba, the Haitian voodoo god ofthe crossroads; Ayizan, the mother of all initiates in the Yoruba tradition; and Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead. The poet is the offspring, too, of these "flickering images." Compton's writing isfresh, energetic, and irreverent, demonstrating an impressive cognizance ofthepass-through andpass-down ofculture and history. "(Bottle) (Poems)" originally appeared as a series of art objects — fifty single-poem scrolls inserted into various glass bottles. These poems invoke the tradition of bottle messages everywhere: words set down or adrift as cries for help or rescue, as records of having been here at a particular time (capsules buried or rocketed into space), or merely as fancy, for the sheer pleasure of the gesture. Various precursors, mentors, and models appear here as section headings (Marcus Garvey, "Edword" Brathwaite, Mifflin Gibbs...

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