There is a ghost inside the words of a book, waiting to jump out at you

Once one of the monks with Saint Francis asked if he might own just one book. Francis replied, "No, if you have a book, pretty soon you will need a bookshelf for your book. Then you will need a house for your bookshelf. After that you will need a lock on your door to protect your book from thieves breaking in and stealing it. 

I have some beautiful photos of the St. Francis of Assisi cathedral in Cuetzalan Mexico, but they are on a jumpdrive somewhere which I have to locate.
 
If you want to get at the pun of the title of this post, jump to the bottom of the page and read Natasha Trethewey's poem. 

I have a terrible problem: I love books and I buy books. Yes, books become part of the stuff we collect and to which we become attached, creating problems that tie us down and make us complicit in accumulation. As well as being a fire hazard when you have books piled up in every room because there is no more space on your book shelves. I have not counted all my books, but most likely I have more than 1000. I have slowly begun to give away some but every time I go to my shelves to find a few, I end up reading parts of them with wonder and saying to myself, "This is so interesting. I need this book." Then I put it back on the shelf.

I need books around me for comfort, to remind me about ideas, and to make visible the messages and knowledge inside of them. I could never store all my reading online or on an e-reader. Yes, I also read online texts; these too are irreplaceable. Yesterday, for example, I found a very interesting website that has a 3 volume e-book on decolonizing, reconcialition and the way forward in Canada called Speaking My Truth, which has a lot of interesting chapters by writers such as Waziyatawin, Ashok Mathur, Melissa Phung, Sylvia Hamilton, George Elliot Clarke, and Heather Igliolorte (who was just in TBay and gave a curator talk for the Decolonize Me exhibit which was recently at the TB Art Gallery; if I find a minute I will tell you about that, too), among many others. However, online books and articles or websites cannot replace actual books that have a look, a texture, a presence, a feel, and a language that jumps out at you, i.e. its title.

I just received Natasha Trethewey's latest poetry book Thrall (find a review here) in the mail. In this book, Trethewey, who is currently the Poet Laureate of the US, not only writes poems about her personal and family history but also takes a critical poetic eye to visual representation of mixed peoples. Specifically, she writes poetic musings on the Casta paintings from colonial Mexico. 

I have become fascinated with ekphrastic poetry, that is, poetry that responds to visual arts such as paintings or photographs (or other creative arts) since doing a close reading of Trethewey's earlier poetry book, Bellocq's Ophelia. In this book, using poetry she writes a book-length narrative that makes a history for some of the women posed in Bellocqs' early 1900s glass plate photos of mixed race sex workers in Storyville, New Orleans. 

Aptly, Trethewey ends Thrall with a musing on the enthrallment of books, a poem called "Illumination" (see below for the text).

Enthralling and illuminating, who can resist books? 

Now I am waiting with anticipation for the other books that I have ordered to arrive at my doorstep:  

• Rainy River Lives: Stories Told by Maggie Wilson ed. by Sally Cole
• Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita Gonzales &  the Poetics of Culture by Maria Eugenia Cotera
• Our Knowledge Is Not Primitive: Decolonizing Botanical Anishinaabe Teachings by Wendy Geniusz;
• Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security in Sixties Montreal by David Austin
• Debating Dissent: Canada and the 1960s by L. Campbell, D. Clement and G.Kealey
• Grammar Matters: The Social Significance of How We Use Language by Jila Ghomeshi
• Blood and Faith: The Purging of Muslim Spain 1492 - 1614 by Matthew Carr

 Hopefully, I will find the time to tell you a bit about each book! 

Trethewey's closing poem, a reflection on the magic of books: 

Illumination
Always    there is something more to know
    what lingers    at the edge of thought
awaiting illumination         as in
    this second-hand book    full
of annotations        daring the margins in pencil
a light stroke as if                  
    the writer of these small replies
meant not to leave them     forever  
    meant to erase
evidence of this private interaction      
    Here     a passage underlined    there
a single star on the page
    as in a night sky    cloud-swept and hazy
where only the brightest appears
    a tiny spark        I follow
its coded message    try to read in it
the direction of the solitary mind
        that thought to pencil in
a jagged arrow         It
    is a bolt of lightning
where it strikes
    I read the line over and over
as if I might discern
    the little fires set
the flames of an idea     licking the page
how knowledge burns     Beyond
    the exclamation point
its thin agreement     angle of surprise
there are questions        the word why
So much is left   
        untold         Between
the printed words     and the self-conscious scrawl
    between     what is said and not
white space framing the story
    the way the past     unwritten
eludes us    So much
    is implication         the afterimage
of measured syntax        always there
    ghosting the margins that words
their black-lined authority
    do not cross          Even
as they rise up         to meet us
    the white page hovers beneath
silent      incendiary    waiting

The Calling of Directions

image source

In April, which is poetry month, I attended a poetry workshop with Marilyn Dumont, one of my favourite poets. To prepare for the workshop, she asked us to collect words that are part of a history, or that someone at a specific time would use. Naturally, and because I had recently attended a Finno-Ugric drum workshop with Dalva Lamminmaki, I turned to my Finnish heritage. Also, I had been thinking of words that can call up beauty, so I had been scribbling words of pleasing sounds into my scribbler. In the end, I wrote up 10 lists of words. 

Here are two lists: 

bells

reindeer skin

drum

protection

help

susurring

shushing

swishing

journey

antlers

birch bark headdress

keyhole 

spirit animal

dived

descended

climbed

slept

dreamt

marveled

encircled

trembled

honoured

scattered  

rained

At the workshop, Marilyn asked us to play with the word cache we had collected and let the words lead us to new patterns and sounds. We were to convey something palpable through juxtapositions, through sound synchronicities. Dwell in disorder, she said. Pay attention to images, textures, colours. Commit to unfolding language, following sound to discover meaning. Above all, we were not to think about product, but to enjoy playing with language. In my playing, I combined some of the words I had collected and, eventually, playing with space too, I shaped the poem below. I added a title and fiddled with a few words and phrases.

The Calling of Directions

 

Itään: to the East

As stars slept

rocks journeyed

Deep blue dreamt of dancing

Gifts scattered, flying from

the rumble of reindeer,

the utterance unnameable.

Etelään: to the South

On the mountain carved with syllabics

in the forest of illusions

Whispers dreamt red ochre

Rattle rained flying antlers

in a shaman language

          old, drunk, ancestral.

Länteen: to the West

Rattle scattered blue sound,

echoing soft inscriptions

Small bells dreamt cold water pearls,

falling forever forward

River rained moon-eyed fish,

          silver-skinned delicious.

Pohjoiseen: to the North

A shape-shifting old woman,

skiing overhead, on the horizon

a surprise of animal gifts

Lime green sky laughing

Snow-maiden follows Drum across

the upper branches of the Great Tree

Life is a struggle

I have been absent from posting, but I hope to be back to a more regular routine soon. There are a few upcoming poetry events in TBay that look interesting. Above is the poster for a book launch this coming weekend. I don't usually go to Chapters (it's part of my BDS commitment as the majority owners of this bookstore founded Heseg the Foundation for Lone Soldiers ), but I will make an exception this once to go hear Al Hunter.

The Child is Not Dead

The other day, talking with a woman who I had not met before, we got into a discussion of poetry. She told me that she recently watched a movie about a South African poet called Black Butterflies; it is fictionalized history about the life of Ingrid Jonker, a white South African writer. Jonker, like a number of other white female poets of the 60s and 70s such as Sylvia Plath and Ann Sexton, committed suicide. Like Plath and Sexton, her words could not save her. Jonkers, like Virginia Woolf and the fictional Edna Pontellier of Kate Chopin's The Awakening, walks into the waves and drowns herself.  

The woman I met told me that Jonker struggled with her racist father who supported apartheid. She said that Nelson Mandela had used lines from a poem by Jonker when he gave the first address to the first African Congress. The story goes, Jonker had written the poem for her father, to help him move beyond his apartheid thinking; instead, after she read it to him, he tore the poem in two. I guess she must  have expected that as he had a high-ranking position in the National Party as a censure of writing.

When I looked up her poem and read it, I immediately thought of how her narrative thread leads to Palestine and resonates with other poems written by other women who are also writing about children who live--and are killed--within racist apartheid violence. I thought of poems by Ibtisam Barakat, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Lisa Suheir Majaj. The lines of hope with which Jonker ends her poem, hopefully, will one day come true for Palestinians as they have for black South Africans: no more passes. The demonstration in Sharpeville in 1960 was an anti-pass rally; 169 black people were killed by the Afrikaners police; today we commemorate this massacre on March 21, the International Day Against Racial Discrimination. 

Al-Dalu children killed by Israeli missiles in Gaza this November 18. There names and ages: Jamal Mohammed Jamal 6; Yousef Mohammed Jamal 4; Sarah Mohammed Jamal 7; and Ibrahim Mohammed Jamal 1. You can find the names of the 33 children killed by Israel this November on the Palestinian Centre for Human Rightswebsite.

When will Palestinian children be able to travel the land without passes? When will Palestinian children be able to step from behind the shadow of an Israeli soldier? Not be dead? When will Palestinians no longer be subjected to a racist and humiliating pass system? Gain the human right of free movement not policed by Israelis? No checkpoints. Without a pass. When will that day come?

The child is not dead 

by Ingrid Jonker

The child is not dead 
The child lifts his fists against his mother
Who shouts Afrika ! shouts the breath
Of freedom and the veld
In the locations of the cordoned heart

The child lifts his fists against his father 
in the march of the generations
who shouts Afrika ! shout the breath
of righteousness and blood
in the streets of his embattled pride

The child is not dead not at Langa nor at Nyanga 
not at Orlando nor at Sharpeville
nor at the police station at Philippi
where he lies with a bullet through his brain

The child is the dark shadow of the soldiers 
on guard with rifles Saracens and batons
the child is present at all assemblies and law-givings
the child peers through the windows of houses and into the hearts of mothers
this child who just wanted to play in the sun at Nyanga is everywhere
the child grown to a man treks through all Africa

the child grown into a giant journeys through the whole world 
Without a pass

Einstein's ghost

Walking by a bulletin board, I saw that a local writing group has an open mike next week; the topic is "Mystery." Somehow, the first two lines of a poem immediately entered my mind. I was too busy at school  to scribble down my thoughts, but before I left my office, I tucked "a woman's notebook," an old empty journal Margaret from the Northern Women's Bookstore had once given me, into my packsack (backpack), pedaled home in the dusk, then wrote these lines. 

image source

Einstein’s Fears

The mystery is how did Albert Einstein’s

ghost appear before my eyes this morning?

He’s a genius, I know, but I wasn’t expecting

his time-traveling shape-shifting presence

on my screen. He wasn’t a hologram

His message from the other side was clear:

A warning to the American people. Materializing

from “the existence of another kind of matter, the ether”¹

he warned of the rise of a new political party,

the Freedom Party, whose name belied its “gangster methods”

“the terrorists,” he said, “have preached an admixture

of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority."²

Before he went back through the pixel portal

of his Letter to the Editor, NYT 1948

He warned of a violent future for Israel

if Menachem Begin’s party gains power on a platform of

Jewish ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.

“Albert,” I called before he disappeared into the

“ether of the general theory of relativity,”³

“Your worst fears have come true.”

Albert Einstein’s words from

²  Letterto the Editor, New York Times, Dec. 4, 1948

¹ and ³ “Ether and the Theory of Relativity,” address delivered May 5, 1920, University of Leyden.