Discorder Magazine
June-July 2021
Tawahum Bige Tawahum Bige [he/they] is, in their words, “the whole gamut”: poet, performer, land defender, rapper, musician, writer, as well as an uncle and little brother.
ige, a Two-Spirit, nonbinary utsel K’e Dene and Plains Cree writer, began their poetry career while studying at Kwantlen University. They remember being struck by the power of imagery while hearing spoken word poet Hannah Johnson perform at Slamming the Binary: “They had this work about mermaids and their experience with gender, and pushing against it, but what I remember most was just being pulled into this underwater world they were creating […] I was enamoured. I’m just in this world [now] and I want to know more about how to do that myself. That was my biggest question coming out of it, was not just ‘that was amazing’ but ‘how would I do something like that?’” When Bige started taking creative writing classes a year later, they found that the classes helped them engage in a process of healing, and that the tools they learned in their poetry classes helped them “honour [their] story better.” After working with professors such as Aislinn Hunter, Nicola Harwood,Billeh Nickerson, Jen Currin and Kathy Stonehouse, Bige had the opportunity in 2017 to put together a spoken word theatre piece with the Urban Native Youth Association and the Talking Stick Festival. The Talking Stick Festival opened countless opportunities for Bige, who has since facilitated the Telling It Bent mentorship with Frank Theatre, was the poet-in-residence at Burnsview Secondary, and has facilitated workshops and worked one-on-one to mentor poets just entering the competitive scene. In their own work, Bige is grateful for the support of members of the community, including Kimmortal, Jillian Christmas, Sho Wiley, Mitcholos Touchie and Janet Rogers, and has been influenced by internationally known poets such as Saul Williams, Kate Tempest and Julian Randall. Their work has also been shaped by the lyrics of Zack de la Rocha: “Nothing’s ever not an image,” Bige says of Delarocka’s lyrics, “it’s revolutionary and full of resistance.”
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esistance, for Bige, is at the heart of poetry. “I’m very critical of contemporary CanLit and even just the poetic movements that have come out of Europe [...] I feel like they are disconnected from a lot of resistance and speaking truth to power, and that is one of the biggest roles of the poet” Bige explains. “It’s one of the biggest reasons that [poetry is] not the most affluent venture to get involved with, because we do speak truth to power, and that’s scary for governments and that’s scary for any power structure, really.” Bige understands that one cannot separate their lived experience from the lens through which they view the world. As someone involved with land protection work, Bige’s activism and their role in political movements naturally fits into their poetry. “All poetry is political,” they affirm, “but we come to art from whatever realm it’s in; our lived experience, that place we are in, and so for me it is tightly tied to [politics].” Bige understands the intersections of identity, perspective and art. “For Indigenous poets […] we have been speaking poetry since time immemorial,” Bige explains, “We’ve done this funny thing in colonial society of separating arts from everything else, and even separating the arts from each other, but our poetics have been tightly tied to storytelling for so, so long.”
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Photos by Alistair Henning Illustrations by Meghan Lok Words by Katherine Gear Chambers Layout By Sheri Turner
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“Tawahum Bige”
