The Voice: Literature and Critical Theory Student's Union Journal 2020

LCT JOURNAL 2020

The Voice: Resonounces in Literary Studies

Literature and Critical Theory Students Union Journal 2020

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Editor’s Letter For this year’s Literature and Critical Theory Undergraduate Conference, we asked students to submit work surrounding the theme of “The Voice: Resonances in Literary Studies”. We attempted to ask questions related to: What is the place and role of the voice in academic literary inquiry? How do the voices of the translator, editor, critic, reader, and student of literature intersect to create literary disciplinary discourse? What are the implications of privileging textual models of communication over the oral in our disciplines, and what could alternative approaches to the voice and orality contribute to literary inquiry?

Our 2020 journal includes eight academic papers from our conference, and four works of poetry. These pieces cover a wide range of topics. Rosalind Owen presents her linguistic study of metaphors in Cuzco Quechua. Beck Siegal analyzes the implications of a narrative form as a mode to critique narrativization of history in Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell.

Jewell. Julia DaSilva offers us a series of poems which borrow language from John Milton’s Paradise Lost in order to trace a resistant reading of Biblical and mythological figures. T Williams explores orality and the silencing of voices, by discussing how Settler Colonialism threatens Indigeneity by severing the relationships which reproduce it. These are only a few examples of the fascinating work that has been done by our students over the past year.

I’m very thankful to have had the opportunity to work with these creators to present a journal highlighting their work and am hopeful to see both the Literature and Critical Theory program and its student publication continue to grow.

Sincerely, Ellen Grace Parsons Editor-in-Chief

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Journal Team Editor-in-Chief Ellen Grace Parsons Design Editor Rebecca Gao Associate Editors Julia DaSilva Sana Mohtadi Copy Editor Beck Siegal Cover Illustration Emily Fu

Contributors Padraic Berting, Julia DaSilva, Jonathan Labao, Sanghoon Oh, Rosalind Owen, Ellen Grace Parsons, Beck Siegal, Katrina Vogan, T Williams, Eva Wissting, Sylvia Woolner, and Meg Jianing Zhang

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Table of Contents Conference papers Sanghoon Oh

7

Rosalind Owen

13

Ellen Grace Parsons

20

Beck Siegal

25

Katrina Vogan

33

T Williams

40

Eva Wissting

44

Meg Jianing Zhang

47

To Handle the Truth; the transition in the representation of truth between Neoclassicist and Romantic Eras Sweet Songs and Soft Hearts: Metaphors in Cuzco Quechua The Censored Voice: Redefining Agency in Stalinlaw Lem’s The Mask The Ownership of History and Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell Spoken World Poetry: bpNichol and Eco-criticism Relationality, Indigenous Resurgence, and Settler Colonialism in Grounded Normativity / Place Based Solidarity and road salt Race in St. John’s Anglican Church and in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia Debilitating Legacies: Alleviating the Anxiety of Female Authorship in Munro’s “Meneseteung”

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Poetry Padraic Berting

53

Julia DaSilva

54

Jonathan Labao

56

Sylvia Wollner

57

Acknowledgements

59

Sounded Blue

Lilith’s Apology to Eve IF YOU CAN

Early February in a Glass City

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Conference Papers

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To Handle the Truth; the transition in the representation of truth from between the Neoclassicist and Romantic eras Sanghoon Oh

W

hile the notion of truth is a fluid principle in it of itself, its representation is one that presents itself with equal fluidity. When comparing the topics focused by the Neoclassical and Romantic literary movements, it may appear that the former was dedicated to giving voice universal truths, whereas the latter seems keen on displaying subjective truths.

As popular as this distinction is, even by its contemporaries, I hope to show that this is a false dichotomy between the two eras; the apparent shift in the philosophical paradigm of the Neoclassicists to the Romantics was due to a shift in the representative modes of literature, particularly in the changes in literary conventions, as both eras strived towards the same universal truths albeit in different forms.

When comparing the Neoclassicists to the Romantics, it seems the two hold fundamentally different philosophical views of the truth. For the Neoclassicists, a poem’s greatness comes out of the poem’s independence from its creator. Such a sentiment can be found in Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Criticism,, a poem/essay which embodies many of the poetic opinions of its Criticism time. Lines like “those rules of old discovered, not devised/ Are nature still, but Nature methodized” (lines 88-89) indicates that the structure of poems are not the products of human creation, but the product of nature manifesting in the poet. To put differently, rather than recognizing truths in the world, the poet merely gives acts as a vessel for nature to speak its own truths. Consequently, if all worthy poems are instances of nature’s formalist conventions, then the truths embodied by the poetic works are embodiments of nature itself, giving the truths of a poem a universal scope. By this assessment, poetic worth is determined by the accuracy of the writing in embodying literary conventions, as these rules of nature are both the criteria for the creation and assessment of a poem. While Pope does acknowledge the presence of natural geniuses (lines 9-11), particularly the likes of Virgil and Homer, he believes that their genius comes from being able to access different parts of nature through previously

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undiscovered rules of poetics (Pope, lines 68-69,142-145). The failure to comply with these rules (by selecting a subject unworthy of praise or improperly amount of praise for the subject) is an act of hubris, “mimic[king] ancient wits at best” (Pope, lines 331). This externalized view of a poet’s responsibility to their work means the poet is important in so far as they are able to access natural truths, but not intrinsically important, and the truths embodied in the work are the byproduct of the natural conventions.

In contrast, Romantics like William Wordsworth claim that the focus of poetry should be on inherently subjective experiences. In the preface to the 1800 edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Ballads, a popular poetic essay of its time, Wordsworth claims that the subject of poets should be common experiences written in common languages (“Preface” 305). To Wordsworth, the Neoclassical mode of elevated diction and thematic focus fails to capture the real experiences of humans (“Preface” 308-309), and by extension, fails to fully embody truths the poet is aware of (“Preface” 310). A similar view is echoed by his contemporary Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Biographia Literaria, Literaria, noting that poetic genius “produces the strongest impressions of novelty while [rescuing] the most admitted truths” (“Biographia” 495). Though Coleridge would disagree with Wordsworth’s use of common diction (“Biographia” 502), he would concur with Wordsworth’s reaction against Neoclassical writing’s complete concession to poetic rules. Coleridge emphatically makes a distinction between poems and the “superficial form” of a poem (“Biographia” 499), making the Neoclassic commitment to form insufficient for a poetic work, as a work is poetic only if it conveys truths the poet experiences (“Biographia” 499-500). Consequently, this gives the poet far greater creative freedom in the mode of representing truths, including the types of truths to represent, as they are not bound by any normative propositions of the type of content they must represent. In this regard, the poet not only decides the subject of exploration, but brings out truths from their own personal experience.

This emphasis of subjective truths would explain the frequency of man’s relationship to nature as a topic of Romantic literature. While nature was a topic that the Neoclassicists also explored, the Neoclassicists saw nature as an inherently interconnected with the presence of humans (Pope, 493). In contrast, the Romantics see nature as an entity both distinct from but interconnected with humanity, as it is an alternate entity which induces human experiences.

Consider Tintern Abbey, Abbey, a self-meditative poem by Wordsworth. The poem begins with the poet in the titular abbey, relaying the beauty they experience in free verse. The setting provides the conditions for the speaker to reflect, allowing them to overcome their existential crisis. The repetition of the isolating terms like “secluded” (“Tintern” lines 6,7) alongside natural imagery indicates the speaker’s solitary presence in the setting. These descriptions not only make

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the speaker the subject of the poem but makes the poem subjectively dependant on the speaker’s experiences. Combined with the absence of other characters (something common in Neoclassical writing), there exists no means to counter to the speaker’s view, creating a solipsistic world where the speaker and their subjective experience is the world itself. Not even nature, the catalyzer of these subjective experiences, is independent of the speaker (“Tintern” lines 121-134), thereby making all truths revealed subjective to the speaker and its experiences.

It is one’s personal relationship to nature which brings out the sublime experience that catalyzes one’s own personal growth.

However, this dichotomy of universal-subjective truths between the Neoclassicists and Romantics respectively fails to account the way the Neoclassicists addressed the self, particularly through their choice in abstract topics. Take, for instance, the topic of death. In Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country Courtyard, Courtyard, Gray explores the possibility of his own demise while maintaining Neoclassical conventions, such as iambic pentameter and a consistent ABAB rhyme scheme, to create a strict poetic structure throughout the poem. Furthermore, the passive descriptions diminish the presence of the speaker and detaches them from their surroundings. We only realize the presence of the speaker as a character after they address themselves as “thee” (Gray, Line 93), creating detachment and humility in the inherently subjective topic of their own demise. The result is that when the poet-as-speaker is killed, the reader knows little of their internal thoughts. Yet despite the speaker’s demise, Gray explores the nature of the speaker’s death through the voice of a commoner and through an epitaph. Their placement into the text not only legitimizes their commentary on the speaker but reveals to the reader the universal truth that when one is killed, it is others who experience one’s demise. While one could criticize Gray’s writings for its limitation in the exploration of the speaker’s thoughts, as Neoclassical conventions limits self-placement in a poem, Gray’s commitment to poetic rules of the time makes us experience the inherently impersonal experience of death. Furthermore, the disconnect between the speaker and their internal thoughts, combined with melancholic diction, only furthers the uncompassionate nature of death to the victim. It is through the poems’ obligation to Neoclassical conventions that these universal truths arise; a poem that contemplates the speaker’s experience of death makes it impossible to present others’ experience of one’s own demise, as all these external perspectives are filtered through the speaker.

Similar results can be found in Jonathan Swift’s Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, Swift, where Swift’s poet-as-writer speculates about others’ reactions to his own demise, with the demise of the poet-as-character of Swift. While Swift’s verses are less melancholic and more theatrical, the effect of self-reflection via others produces the same effect as Gray’s work. Through this poem, Swift

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reveals the universal truth that our lives are lived vicariously by those around us, indicated by the snide comments on Swift’s degrading health (lines 80104), the cacophony of comments following Swift’s demise (lines 153-169) and eventual erasure from public consciousness (lines 245-249). Ultimately, the Neoclassicists like Gray and Swift address the self through the form of their writings, rather than being limited by its conventions. It is through form’s dispassionate exploration of subjective views that produces an epiphenomenal effect that conveys universal truths regarding death, made only possible by the strict use of literary conventions.

At the same time, even when their work seems detached from society, the Romantics are fully aware of the inherent socially entrenched nature of their work. As previously established, the Romantics see their work reflective of their own subjective views, isolating it from an epistemic position to establish universal views. However, many romantic poems are catalyzed by social positions to provide universal truths. In Wordsworth’s We are Seven, Seven, a little girl shows complete ignorance of the concept of death. By portraying the subjective innocence of the girl, we become aware of the inevitable enlightenment she will face regarding the universal truth of death. Only by positing the girl’s subjective truth about the non-existence of death as a contrast with the seemingly obvious truth of death’s omnipresence is the reader able to cognize new formulations regarding death. As adults, our subjective experience of ennui, degrading physique and increasing lethargy makes us forget that at one point, we too were like the girl, lacking the capacity to understand death. Despite our ownership of this knowledge, we become accustomed into forgetting it over time until it is brought to our attention once more. Thus, the mere representation of subjective truths, no matter how different they are, expand our knowledge of universal truths by acting as an antithesis for a dialectical discourse.

This notion of attaining universal truths via numerous subjective truths is expanded upon in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Mariner, a poem that evokes the subjective experience of the mariner. While the Mariner’s tale is fantastical and supernatural, he is cursed to universalize the seemingly subjective truth that one should give all of nature the same dignity and respect one has to other humans (“Mariner” 612-617). Both the mariner and the poem itself convey the truth by warning the wedding guest and reader respectively, satisfying the role of a poet as “a man speaking to men” (“Preface” 310) so long as the truths revealed are thought to be universal by the subject. While the truths revealed may initially be subjective in scope, the poet’s proliferation of their subjective truth universalizes subjective truths. Thus, the intersubjective nature of society means any subjective truth brought into social consciousness is (or has elements of) universal truths. As a result, any expression of “ordinary things presented to the mind in an unusual way” (“Preface” 305) exposes society to

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subjective descriptions of universal experiences, indicating that the subjective truths the romantics seek are focalized perspectives of objective truths, or that these subjective truths are universalized through proliferation, moving the reader towards a universal truth.

While the distinction between Neoclassicists and Romantics explored as a distinction between subjective and objective truths may initially seem compelling, the reality is that both eras strived towards the writer’s view of universal truths. The Neoclassicists’ dedication to form brought forth universal truths that could not otherwise be expressed, as a singular subjective explication would inhibit the representation of other subjectivities. In contrast, the Romantics’ seeming focus on subjective truths was a way of approaching universal truths, as presenting a singular perspective induced a dialectic relationship with the reader. One could argue that the Romantics viewed the universal truth as far more fluid, as indicated by their willingness to deconstruct poetic forms to convey truths, but it cannot be denied that both eras strive towards a universal truth in their own respective manner.

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Works cited Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “Biographia Literaria”. The The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. pp 492504.

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Gen. ed.

Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. pp 448-464.

Gray, Thomas. “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century.

Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. Vol. C. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. pp 998-1001.

Pope, Alexander. “An Essay on Criticism”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century. Gen. ed.

Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. Vol. C. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. pp 490-506.

Swift, Jonathan. “Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century.

Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. Vol. C. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. Pp 258-269.

Wordsworth, William. “Lines composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798” The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period.

Period. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. pp 299-302.

Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed. Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. pp 304315.

Wordsworth, William. “We Are Seven”. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: The Romantic Period. Gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed.

Vol. D. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018. pp 288-289.

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Sweet Songs and Soft Hearts: 1 Metaphors in Cuzco Quechua Rosalind Owen 1 Introduction 1.1 Quechuan Culture With a history rich in mythology, poetry, and unique forms of arithmetic, Quechuan culture lends itself to a transdisciplinary approach to modeling the world, based in its mythopoetic roots (Urton and Llanos 1997; Almeida and 2 Haidar 2012). In a case study of Ecuadorian Quechua, Almeida and Haidar argue that these roots create a cognitive continuity between nature, culture, science and religion not found in Indo-European languages (2012). Traditionally, space and time have been conceptualized as a spatiotemporal unit, and in (Almeida and Haidar 2012).

Nature terms have infused metaphorical and spiritual meanings in addition to their literal meanings. Examples in modern Quechua are shown in (1a-b).

(1) a. orkob. patʃa-mama mountain mountain-mother “mountain/god”[Dative, 128] “earth” (holy centre/core of Earth) A point of contention is whether Quechua has a conceptualization of space-time that runs in the opposite direction (2a-b) to that of space-time metaphors in languages like English, in which the future is “behind” the speaker and the past is “in front of” them (Almeida and Haidar 2012). The logic is that the past can be seen, while the future is unknown and unseen.

(2) a. “ñaupa”b. “kay”c. “k’ipa” past, and forward present, and here future, and behind While idioms in Quechua of the Peruvian Andes in the domains of “distress and suffering” have been documented for psychological study within cultural context, figurative language has not been thoroughly studied in the Quechuan languages (Pederson, et al., 2010).

1.2 Theory in Metaphor Conceptual metaphor theory claims that metaphor is not merely a linguistic expression but a result of cognitive processes that link concepts in the mind (Cameron and Maslen 2010). The metaphor links two domains, drawing on a more concrete concept to describe a more abstract one (Lakoff and Turner 1989). For instance, physical location can describe time as in (3). A domain is a cloud of entities, attributes, and relationships stored in the mind. Metaphor can add structure to, distort, or highlight the target domain and creates a “common conceptual apparatus” for a culture (Cameron and Maslen 2010; Lakoff and Page 13

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Turner 1989).

(3) metaphor: The event is here. concept: EVENTS ARE LOCATIONS (Lakoff and Turner 1989) 1.3 Research Questions and Hypotheses Much literature in cognitive semantics has investigated conceptual metaphor, though typologies have only covered Indo-European and Asian languages (Shen and Gil 2008). This paper investigates how metaphor manifests in Cuzco Quechua, whether epistemic traditions have influenced the conceptualization of time and space, and asks whether the reverse time model is present.

The language is likely to be rich in metaphor in all conceptual domains, with many relating to nature, reflecting its historical cosmogony. The reverse time model is likely no longer present in the language. There many terms for time (4a-d), each entry all translating to “what time is it?” suggesting that time metaphors may nonetheless be abundant.

(4) a. duda ɲatʃu b. tʃima pudac. imaj hurasdad. iman timpu karparin dark time what time what time what time kar-parin [Dative, 1230] [Dative, 1625] [Dative, 1626] [Dative, 1223] 2 Materials and Methods The data were collected using questionnaires and translation. Specifically, “Metaphors Across Languages,” the questionnaire by Gil and Shen for work on the typology of metaphors, was used during elicitations. It covers semantic categories rich in metaphor, including perception, sensory, body parts, texture, travel, emotions, mental states/activities and time terms. The consultant was informed that the goal was to collect metaphors and was given examples in each category in English. At times the consultant simply spoke freely, inspired by the subject. Additionally, “Time and space questionnaire” by Levinson et al.

(1970) was used to elicit periods, measurement and passage of time, in order to investigate spatiotemporal phrases described in Almeida and Haidar (2012).

Some metaphors were found in folktales, poetry, and on the student database. Hong elicited a folktale, which was later analyzed for metaphors.

Poetry, online and print, was translated. Some translations were provided by Dumais. Specific examples and translations used for comparison were found on the student database “Dative.” The collected metaphors were grouped and compared to metaphors analyzed in previous studies of conceptual metaphor.

3 Results The results are presented in order of Shen and Gil’s questionnaire, with an added nature category. Semantic threads are compared to attested conceptual metaphors in other languages.

3.1 Perception Terms The perception category includes words such as see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. A recurring metaphor involves sight as a form of feeling, as in (5), where

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sight is used as introspection, and as in (6) where sight is used to express feeling emotion. (6) is particularly notable as a heart metaphor that conceptualizes THE HEART FOR THE PERSON (Pérez and de Olavide 2008).

(5) kawa-j soŋko-j kita look-INF heart-POSS 2.SG.POSS “to look at your own heart” (when you look inside yourself, metaphorical use) (6) tʃaska-ŋ panta hamoxtiŋ q’axtʃa-ka riku-kun Chaska-ŋ Panta coming fear-ka see-kun “When Panta was coming Chaska feels scared” Additionally, smell was used in a similar way to the English expression “nosey,” shown in (7).

(7) muʃki-pakox smell-pakox “nosey; trying to know everything” Taste was a productive sense (with more in section 3.2), used in (8) to describe experience.

(8)ɲoka-n maʎi-ni kelkan-ta 1.SG-NOMtaste-ni letter-ACC “I know the book; I read the book” 3.2 Sensory Terms The sensory terms elicited primarily described people and their character through the sense of taste, as in (9-10).

(9)a. warmi sumax-mib. q’alma woman delicious-mi unseasoned “nice woman, inside and outside” “boring person, unemotional” (10) a. miʃki simi b. miʃki taki sweet mouth sweet song “person who speaks beautiful words” “beautiful song” 3.3 Body Part Terms Many metaphors elicited revolved around the heart. The physical qualities of the heart are relevant for one’s character and emotional state, as in (11a-b) where the stone comparison (11a) implies a hardened or selfish person, showing perhaps that THE HEART IS A MATERIAL, and the emptiness (11b) referring to a loveless person, perhaps showing THE HEART IS A CONTAINER FOR EMOTIONS (Pérez and de Olavide 2008).

(11) a. rumi soŋkob. tʃ’osax soŋko stone heart empty heart “selfish person; hardened heart” “loveless person” The heart can also be an object to be broken, as in (12) where “open” can be used to mean “break a heart.” Thus, THE HEART IS A BREAKABLE OBJECT

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(Pérez and de Olavide 2008).

(12)a. ʎiki b. pakic. kiri open broken wound “to open, break” “broken” “to wound” The heart may be a locus of love and emotion, as in (13) where one literally asks someone to “sit on my chest” as a plea for love.

(13)kasko-j-man tija-jemuj chest-j-ALL sit-jemuj “come to me and love me” A metaphor for control (14) found in the folktale involves being under someone’s foot.

(14)tʃakipampa-mpi purenka sole.of.foot-mpi walk “To be controlled by someone” (Hong 2019) 3.4 Texture Terms Texture metaphors can also describe people’s character. In (15) is another example where the quality of the heart is described, again showing THE HEART IS A MATERIAL. (15) ʎampu soŋko soft heart “gentle person” In (16) the textural adjective is compared directly to the person’s character.

(16) mantʃa paku mantʃa prickly “prickly person” 3.5 Travel Terms The only metaphors elicited in this domain are for saying goodbye, either as one is leaving or as a goodbye to the dead. (17) shows different conjugations of this verb, literally meaning “drop.”

(17) a. katʃar-pari b. katʃar-pare-ska drop-pari drop-pare-PST “(to say) goodbye” “said goodbye” 3.6 Emotions Emotion was the most productive domain, often revolving around the heart and the eyes. (18) shows that physical feelings of the heart stand in for the emotional state. (18) may indicate THE HEART IS THE SEAT OF LOVE. (18) a. soŋko-mi kara-ʃanb. soŋko rawrari-ʃan heart-mi sting-PROG heart burn-PROG “I am upset/angry” “heart burning with love” Eyes are also salient for describing emotion, with different substances emerging from them depending on the emotional state. (19-21) show an array of eye and

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tear metaphors.

(19)tʃaj runa-xka ɲawiŋ-kuna-manta-raxmi nina pawa-ʃan that people-xka eyes-PL-ABL-raxmi flames fly-PROG “flames are flying out of this person’s eyes” (because he’s so upset) (20)ɲawi-mi jawarta wakan eyes-my bleeding tears “my eyes are crying blood” (severe sadness) (21)weka-ki majun apaj-uwa-ʃan tears-ki river take.way-uwa-PROG “the river of tears is taking me away” There are multiple approaches to describing an overwhelming physical sense of emotion, as in (22) with a “wall of sadness” and (23) where fear is fully embodied.

(22)ʎaki-kakan ɲit’u-wa-ʃan sadness-huge press-wa-PROG “a huge wall of sadness pressing on me” (23)ʎapan kurkuj-mi q’axtʃa-ska (khatatatan) all body-mi fear-PST (shaking) “all of my body was (shaking) with fear” 3.8 Time Many expressions for time include non-literal meanings. Time is measured with 3 “ties” for years and the word for clock literally means “to tie the sun,” as in (24).

(24)a. ti-watab. inti-wata-na ti-tie sun-tie-NOM “clock” “solar clock” The word for “month” also means “moon,” as in (25a). In expressions of the future (25b), times moves toward the speaker, showing the metaphor TIME MOVES (Lakoff and Turner 1989).

(25)a. nintʃa kiʎab. hamo-x wata next moon come-x year “next month” “coming year” The time model has the future in front and the past behind, contrary to Almedia and Haidar’s record (2012). However, there are still some potential semantic connections which may suggest diachronic change or borrowing. The past can be described with /ɲawpa/, as in the expression in (26a); while the consultant denied a possible connotation of “forward,” /ɲawpa/ can also be used to mean “ahead” or “forward” in certain contexts, as in (26b).

(26) a. ɲawpa kawsa-j b. ɲawpa-j before live-INF go.ahead-INF “old times” “go ahead” The present is described with a separate word than “here,” each shown in (27),

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showing that these are in fact distinct concepts.

(27) a. kuna b. kaj now here “now” “here” The future (28a) is described with a separate word from “behind” and is not /k’ipa/. /k’ipa/ is solely used as a term for potato crops, as in (28b), which is also used as a derogatory term for stepchildren. The consultant explained that /k’ipa/ is when potatoes are harvested and the leftover roots resprout the next season, implying cyclicity within the word.

(28)a. pakariŋb. k’ipa tomorrow potato.crop “tomorrow; future” “new potato crop” Space and time do not seem to be any more unidual than in other languages.

Time can be referred to with distance and space expressions, as in (29-30). This suggests the metaphor EVENTS ARE LOCATIONS is present and productive in the language.

(29) ɲaŋ ɲawpa-ri wantʃiʃna already ahead-ri wantʃiʃna 4 “(The event is) already in front of us/ahead of us” (30) kaj ʎaʎpiɲa kaʃan here event is “the event is close” 3.9 Nature Relatively few metaphors related to nature. Some describe and somewhat anthropomorphize water in (31).

(31) a. maju-n waka-ʃan b. maju-n qapari-ʃan river-NOM cry-PROG river-NOM yell-PROG “the river is making so much noise” “the river is noisy” A relatively common comparison is between people and birds. Perhaps there is a cultural metaphor, PEOPLE ARE BIRDS, which may arise from the plethora of birds in the mythology. An endearing term for daughter in law implies “beautiful, nice, fragile girl,” while just referring to her as a bird, as in (32).

“Dove” can also be used as a term of endearment as in (33).

(32) katʃu-n urpi daughter-n bird “daughter in law” (33) may-pi-punitaq kankiri urpi-llay where-who-EMPH be urpi-mine “My dove where are you?” (Pacheo Alvarez 2015) (trans Dumais 2019) 4 Discussion The most productive domains were emotions and metaphors related to the heart, with several cross-linguistically common concepts. Further research is needed to determine if cultural significance can explain the significance of the sense of Page 18

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taste and measurements of time. Time and space are comparable and thus are separate domains. However, it is unclear if the historical reverse time model is influencing modern time orientation.

5 Conclusion Metaphors were found in all tested semantic domains in Cuzco Quechua, with a notable number of metaphors taking description from the sense and perception of taste. Many metaphors relate to the heart, which can express a wide range of emotions and states. Time and space seem to be separate domains, contrary to historical models. Further research could include corpus studies to collect a wider range of metaphors and lend significance to their frequency.

References Almeida, I. and Haidar, J. (2012). The mythopoetical model and logic of the concrete in Quechua culture: Cultural and transcultural translation problems. Sign Systems Studies, 40(3/4), 484–513. doi: 10.12697/ sss.2012.3-4.12 Cameron, L., and Maslen, R. (Eds.). (2010). Studies in Applied Linguistics: Metaphor Analysis: Research Practice in Applied Linguistics, Social Sciences and the Humanities. Oakville, CT: Equinox Publishing Ltd Dative. (n.d.). Dative. Retrieved from https://app.dative.ca/.

Dumais, Gabrielle. (2019). Elicitation notes: “tuya alvarez.”

Gil, D., and Shen, Y. (n.d.). Typological tools for field linguistics. Retrieved from https://www.eva.mpg.de/lingua/tools-at-lingboard/questionnaire figurative-language_description.php.

Hong, Seo Hyun. (2019). Elicitation notes: “Quechua folktale.”

Levinson, S. C., Bohnemeyer, J., and Enfield, N. J. (1970, January 1). Time and space questionnaire.

Pacheco Alvarez, Wilbert. (2015). “Urpi”. Youtube video.

Pedersen, D., Kienzler, H., and Gamarra, J. (2010). Llaki and ñakary: Idioms of distress and suffering among the highland Quechua in the Peruvian Andes. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 34(2), 279-300.

Pérez, R. G., and de Olavide, P. (2008). A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Heart Met aphors. Revista Alicantina DeEstudios Ingleses, 21, 25–56.

End notes 1. Many thanks to consultant W. P., Professor Lima, and the Field Methods class for their invaluable work.

2. This is the same Quechuan language (Quechua II) spoken in Cuzco, Peru, where the consultant is from.

3. This may be related to the traditional record keeping using khipus, complex knot syste.”

4. Here is another example of /ɲawpa/ meaning “forward.”

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The Censored Voice: Redefining Agency in Stanislaw Lem’s The Mask Ellen Grace Parsons

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n his paper “Nation-Building as a Communist Rational Planning Strategy,” sociologist Marian Kempny describes the methodology of identity control by the ruling party in Communist Poland. “The official propaganda forged the reality of one, indivisible nation and promulgated the idea of the superiority of a single-nation state over a multi-national one” (Kempny 350). Kempy also emphasizes the importance of storytelling in nation-building. He notes that narrations of individual experience “provide versions of reality that contribute to the flow of meaning which rests at the heart of any society” and “allow the members of a particular community to challenge the metanarratives of ‘great’ national tradition” (Kempny 360-361). Stanislaw Lem began his career as a writer of science fiction in Soviet-occupied Poland, a time and place where selfexpression was hindered by the regime’s censorship of all published materials.

This control centered curation of Lem’s Poland led to a difficult habitat for identity building.

Scholars wonder what drew Lem to science fiction– the rise of Science fiction is often attributed to countries engaged in imperialist projects and fast technological advancement, which lead to the necessity of its citizens imagining what this industrialized future might bring.

While the Soviet Union as a whole may have fit into this theory, Poland did not. The experience of the average polish citizen did not demonstrate the ideal post-war industrialized life. Scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronan in his paper “Lem, Central Europe, and the Genre of Technological Empire” poses this question: “ What could have inspired a man living in a famous medieval city, forbidden to write about the leading edge of science at the time by the forced mythology of Soviet science, to write the most influential science fiction to come out of non-techno-imperial culture?” (144). He argues that the purpose of Lem’s science fiction was “to mediate Polish national culture from an insular national role to that of a global culture” (Csicsery-Ronay 144). Lem was drawn to science fiction because it was a place for world building – a place to speak what was unspeakable, so that he could begin to create his own narratives.

Throughout his career, Stanislaw Lem wrote countless novels, short stories, and in the latter part of his lifetime, focused on essays and non-fiction.

I’ve focused here on his short story The Mask, simply because it demonstrates the necessity of agency in identity building – the narrative that the Polish people were attempting to grasp. I posit that The Mask aims to prove that being able to

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understand what is influencing you and how you are being influenced is a crucial step to forming your own identity. The Mask tells the story of a robot who is programmed by a corrupt society as she tries to understand her own identity independent of those who made her. By exploring the issues that arise as the robot pieces together her own narrative, we can begin to divulge the issues that come when forming identity in a place which actively tries to form it for you, such as Communist Poland.

Lem wrote The Mask in 1974, and it was first published in 1976 in a book of short stories, Mortal Engines. It tells the story of a female robot created by the King of this fictional kingdom to kill a man named Arrhodes, who is described as “a wise man who had dared to raise his hand against the throne” (Lem 221). The robot is programmed to love Arrhodes as a methodology of getting close to him in order to kill him, therefore, creating a problem of identity for the robot: does she love him and want to be with him, or does she want to kill him? While the narrative at the forefront follows the robots’ mission to kill Arrhodes, a more thorough analysis demonstrates her self-progression as she comes to understand her own identity, where she comes from, and what motivates her. As we follow her on the mission she has been programmed to do, we also witness her independent mission to understand herself and her place in the world.

Emphasis is put on the fact that authority in the land where the action takes place is corrupt. When the robot finds out that Arrhodes has been abducted, she asks what she should do in order to help him. She is told that she “cannot appeal to the law for help, for the law is the King’s” (Lem 227).

The story begins as the robot awakes as a conscious being in this universe. From the start, we see the emergence of competing forces within her selfhood. Before she refers to herself directly, she refers to herself as “the me” (Lem 182), combining both first person and third person. She speaks as if she is both inside and outside of herself. She doubts that she possesses any features within herself that are incompatible with each other. Upon realizing her physicality, she feels something hard underneath her skin and thinks “impossible, not in keeping with my beauty, its absoluteness” (Lem 205). This is the start of her inquiry into her own narrative. She has trouble conceiving of her identity as she recognizes there is knowledge about her origins that is censored from her. When she first meets Arrhodes, she notes that she “did not tell him that night who I was, not wishing to lie to him and not knowing the truth myself” (Lem 192). She does not feel as if she has enough knowledge to define herself.

Her lack of knowledge directly affects her sense of agency in this situation, as it deprives her of identification and self-assertion. She only has the agency necessary to understand that she, for unknown reasons, has not been given this knowledge. For the robot, a sense of agency is required in order to understand

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her own identity.

When she realizes that the outside world offers her no proof of her internal selfhood, she must go deeper into herself to define her identity. This comes through in a literal shedding of skin, as she attacks herself in order to find what lies beneath. After cutting off her human-looking exterior and seeing the mechanical robotic structure underneath, she reiterates the language of being outside herself. Looking in the mirror, she thinks “I understood that it was not it, a foreign thing, different and other, it was again myself” (Lem 213). The tension she felt existed inside her is not “foreign” from her but is part of what makes her who she is.

These competing identities prompt the robot’s desire to escape her own reality and circumstances. Not knowing whether her desires for Arrhodes come from a place of good or evil makes her unsure of her ability to control her own actions. She tries to take blame away from herself by positing that she is suffering from some sort of sickness or madness. She thought that if she “were a madwoman, then everything would end well. From insanity, as from a dream, one could free oneself – in both cases there was hope” (Lem 192). The wording that Lem uses here, “insanity” “dream” and “madwoman”, all show her desire to take away her own culpability in relation to the desire she feels to kill Arrhodes.

If she were merely dreaming, there would be an easy solution: to simply wake up. If she were insane, then reality would be unable to hold her accountable for her actions.

To cope with this desire for removal of guilt, she concludes that this life and mission were forced upon her; she did not choose them. She determines that she is “a mind imprisoned, chained at birth, born into bondage, but a mind still” (Lem 208). Through the use of “birth” and “born into”, Lem reminds us that the robot was thrust into a situation she had no control over. Whereas the conclusion of illness or dreaming seem to fight directly against fate. This example shows her acceptance of her fate and how she can use it to her advantage. The change comes in this example when she concludes that she is “but a mind still”.

Even though she knows that there are many external forces controlling and manipulating her, she realizes she still retains some sense of agency. Questioning her own situation and motivations in a sense prove her agency, as she is able to conclude that there is something wrong within her that must be explored.

The robot’s ultimate conclusion ends up being that the dualities that exist within her can be a part of her identity. When she finds Arrhodes neatly dead, as he has been killed by his captors before she got the chance, she realizes that both her “love and the venomous prick were from the same source” (Lem 209). She learns that there are multiple narratives that have been implanted within her. A physician who examines her describes the driving mechanisms of her machinery as “a multiple memory of things superfluous to a hunting machine” (Lem 229) which is made up of “recorded feminine histories” (Lem

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229). The King implanted in her mechanism the lives of multiple women, whom he believed each provided her with valuable skills and expertise for conducting her mission. Her motivations are not driven by the history of one woman, or even simply the commands of the King, but a combination of all these influences. The robot’s creators end up achieving the exact opposite of their desired outcome. In an attempt to create the perfect narrative for weaponization, they take apart multiple narratives and splice them together. What we realize by examining the suffering the robot endures, is that lack of agency in identity building is impossible to bear. Picking and choosing from the pasts of others and imposing them on a subject as a singular narrative only creates further mental unrest and confusion, instead of fusing together to create an ideal past.

“Lem’s science fiction represents the unique voice of the witness in the belly of the beast: the witness who has given up interest in the outcome of the collisions between competing political-technical forces”. (Csicsery-Ronay 149).

Just as the robot is a witness who has gone to the depths of herself to create identity, Lem seems to have done the same for us. While the setting of The Mask is drastically different than Soviet Poland, there is a way in which this works in its favor. Lem’s imaginary world takes away outside context and creates a new scenario in which readers can immerse themselves. Without all the external connotations that would have been present in a story set in Communist Poland, Lem is able to focus solely on exploring the conflict of forming one’s own identity against the one that the state has forced upon them.

In “Understanding Dual Identities in Poland”, national identity is described as something that “should properly be considered part of the individual’s imagination – a choice not a given, but a choice that is responsive to contemporary as well as historical influences” (Markowski, McManusCzubinska, Miller and Wasilewski 125). A person should have the right to decide which sources to be influenced by, and to understand where these influences come from. When agency is involved in interpreting the various influences of society, the individual can choose how to relate to their own country without fear of being reprimanded. Without the freedom of choice and uncensored self-expression, people suffer because they cannot feel secure in their identity.

This is what Lem is attempting to prove in The Mask. The robot suffers precisely because she does not understand her identity. She does not trust those who made her, nor is she able to trust herself, as she does not know how she is being influenced.

Through the lens of science fiction, Lem was able to circumvent the structures of censorship, and tell a compelling story that effectively represents the cultural struggles of the time period in which it was written. The robot’s desire to escape, her desire to know herself and gain knowledge, and her desire to design her own identity are all displayed as constraints which actively cause

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her suffering. Only when she begins to understand her own duality and how her mechanisms operate is she able to feel agency. For citizens to feel like they have the right to create their own national identity they must be given freedom and agency to create their own narratives.

Bibliography Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. “Lem, Central Europe, and the Genre of Technological Empire.” The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem, edited by Peter Swirski, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006, pp 130-151.

Kempny, Marian. “Nation-building as a Communist “Rational Planning Strategy” Subverted by Local Narratives.The Case of Identity Politics in Cieszyn Silesia”. Polish Sociological Review 4:349-365.

Lem, Stanislaw. “The Mask,” in Mortal Engines, trans. Michael Kandel (New York: Avon, 1982): 181-239.

McManus-Czubińska, Clare, et al. “Understanding Dual Identities in Poland.”

Political Studies, vol. 51, no. 1, Mar. 2003, pp. 121–143.

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The Ownership of History and Clint Eastwood’s Richard Jewell Beck Siegal

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ichard Jewell’s story, his varied passage through the collective imaginary, serves as a tool to think about the implications of claiming the right to narrativize history, especially through a fictional format. Clint Eastwood presents his fictional film as a representation of reality through which he might set right the errors of an irresponsible media’s false objectivity. He refuses, even, to acquiesce to criticisms about his film’s representation of reality with regard to clearly invented aspects of his narrative. In this way, his film presents itself as an ultimate end to the multiple narratives of history in tension with each other around the events of Richard Jewell’s past; Richard Jewell, Jewell, the film, becomes the holder and knower of history. The film’s critics engage with it on this level, claiming that their ownership of the historical events surpasses Eastwood’s. In the warping of history around new and successive narrative modes, we see that Richard Jewell undergoes several stages of being owned and directed through the medium of the public imagination by individuals who claim that they can make and decide, or set right, history.

Eastwood’s Richard Jewell makes a claim of ultimate alignment with Jewell’s historic voice, and, in doing so, positions itself as able to critique the narrativization of history from within its own historical narrative. It fails to acknowledge the unknowable place in history held by Jewell, especially following his 2007 death: its re-narrativization of Jewell’s life is simultaneously above history and deeply historically symbolic. As Hayden White writes in his essay, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” the events of Jewell’s life are variously positioned as part of an “extended metaphor.” White continues, “As a symbolic structure, the historic narrative does not reproduce the events it describes; it tells us in what direction to think about the events and charges our thought about the events with different emotional valences” (290). The significance of Jewell’s involvement with the Centennial Park Bombing is nebulous and unknowable, intimately tied to the narrativizing efforts of historian-subjects within the history of Jewell’s life and death. The facts of Eastwood’s narrative slide around to accommodate public perception while claiming that they are a subjective representation of events where the subject is Jewell.

At one point in the film, viewers find themselves submerged in a flashback which is later revealed as a nightmare. Jewell dives to the ground and hugs the Centennial Park bomb to himself, bracing for impact. Earlier, we saw the diegetic reality of these events: Jewell upright and evacuating people from Page 25

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the area. This sequence has two related functions. First, it introduces an alternate history into the narrative. While the dream-sequence does not have a claim to factuality within the film, and there is no suggestion that Jewell actually behaved like that within Eastwood’s invented universe, the viewer is reminded that the film’s narrative emplotment represents only a possibility, and that it must always coexist with other factual interpretations. As White puts it, “historical accounts always represent attempts both to emplot the historical events adequately and implicitly to come to terms with other plausible emplotments. It is this dialectical tension between two or more plausible emplotments that signals the element of critical self-consciousness” (White 294). In the context of Richard Jewell, however, this use of dream-flashback conflation as plot pluralizer does not represent cultural responsibility on the part of Eastwood-as-historian, but rather functions as a deflater of the obvious irony in Eastwood’s reclamation of the reclamation of history. When Eastwood tells his audience that there could exist an alternate history with which his story is in tension, he absolves himself of the false-objectivism and unjust claiming of history for which his film indicts The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Rather than placing his narrativization in dialectical tension with the other narratives of Jewell’s story, Eastwood uses this cursory acknowledgement of alternate history-narratives to place himself above and outside of the interlocking cultural exchange as a representor of history, rather than a part of it. Eastwood’s story claims to be subjective, a function of Jewell’s understanding of events. Despite the multiple histories in Jewell, one is treated as true.

This subjectivization is concretized when we are totally focalized through Jewell, such as in the flash-back/dream sequence. As we enter his consciousness, we are completely aligned with Richard Jewell as protagonist.

This not only avoids claims of objectivity, but places Jewell in a recognizably fictional framework. When we pass through Jewell’s consciousness into what George Wilson, in his essay “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film,” calls “a subjective shot,” that is an imagined series of events which is not “intersubjectively accessible” (81). Eastwood’s claim to authenticity transmutes from making a claim of ownership over the course of events, to one of ownership over Jewell’s perception of those events. The significance of this is multi-dimensional. In one sense, the effect is similar to that of the alternate narrative explored above: Eastwood’s fixation on one narrative angle–Jewell’s perception–sets the film apart from the project of representing history, a project which is shown to be ethically fraught through the subject matter of the film.

Eastwood does not engage in what Marie Brenner, in the Vanity Fair article upon which the movie is based, criticizes as “voice of God” reporting. Rather than claiming the voice of God, Eastwood claims the voice of Richard Jewell.

This is an equally fraught project, which both recognizes and avoids the public concerns around a claim to objective narrativization. Eastwood is careful not to claim authority over the narrative of events, but by inhabiting Jewell, he Page 26

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claims a perspective while also suggesting that this perspective should be able to hold authority over events. The fictionalization of Jewell’s understanding is thus presented as outside of narrativized history. He is supposed to have really experienced the story. Through him, Eastwood seems to make two claims: that history can be primally experienced before it is narrativized, and that he can grasp this primal experience of events and reflect it back to the viewer, even through a narrative. This can be conceptualized as the central assertion of the film: that it represents the phenomenological experience of undergoing the making of history, engaging with the event rather than the narrative. Further, in aligning the film to Jewell’s experience of events, Eastwood performs something which might be usefully thought of as a suturing of the film into public imagination with closed edges. Eastwood’s direction of history and authorial voice, and with these his blind spots and biases (which are made more obviously concerning because of the problematic location of Eastwood himself in the public consciousness) seem less clear to an audience who is given an explicit epistemology of the film. Focalized through Jewell, the film uses perspective to protect itself from claims of shortsightedness, while still performing the operations (the unjustified claim to history) which would garner these critiques.

Of course, though, Jewell did not succeed at bypassing everything, or even most things, that might raise the hackles of its viewers, or at claiming history for itself in a culturally notable manner. It was a box-office failure, Eastwood’s worst opening weekend in forty years (Rubin). Most critics attribute this failure to the controversy which preceded it, notably around the character of Kathy Scruggs. Eastwood’s creation of a totally unsubstantiated sex-scandal within his otherwise historically accurate film is significant. The symbolism of the Scruggs scandal is primarily outward-facing; it references the hot-button issues which Eastwood seems to want Jewell’s history to engage with, ‘fake news,’ the Me Too movement, even when an experiential place does not exist for them in Jewell’s universe. Eastwood’s response to the suggestion that Scruggs’ representation is a sexist caricature comes as an appeal to factuality. Warner Bros’ claim that “The film is based on a wide range of highly credible source material,” (Lang) represents a shirking of the responsibility of narrativization.

Further, this negative argument of factuality, that it is not disprovable rather than that it is provable, suggests the unsubstantiated filling in of gaps which Jewell so thoroughly condemns in the media. Eastwood responds similarly: “You can’t live inside people because they no longer exist. We know as much as anybody knows…Kathy Scruggs was a very interesting personality, and she seemed to, she didn’t define the answer to it, so how she did it, no one will ever really know” (Hasty). In the absence of the experience of events, Eastwood suggests that a narrative must fill the gap left by the dead subject. This raises the question of how dramatically useful conjecture around Scruggs’ sexuality is okay, when the same is not true for Jewell’s half of the story.

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us that false ownership of history, an unfounded claim to narrative voice, is an irresponsible thing, that it might ruin a man’s life. There are explanations to be found in the misogynistic assumptions around female journalists, assumptions about sexuality and journalistic ethics that are familiar to Hollywood stories like this one. When Kathy Scruggs trades sex for information, it recalls a history of sexist tropes which were clearly at work in the writing of Scruggs.

For Eastwood, after all “Kathy Scruggs was a very interesting personality,” a reference, most likely, to her recurring description as ‘a wild-card with hard edges,’ is evidence enough that “it could have certainly happened this way” (Day). This question can also be studied through the switch in focalization and purpose which the film undergoes, from representing history to creating an analogy. This of course, is not unrelated to the implicit misogyny of Scruggs’ character: Richard Jewell, the misunderstood, all-American, is a person, while Scruggs, the immoral female reporter, is a symbol. Nonetheless, the film privileges experience, the experience of Jewell, over narrativization, the feeling over the telling of history, and this is where it places itself for much of its action.

Looking back at our entrance into Jewell’s head, we understand Eastwood’s narration as a subjectivization of event, which is not present within Kathy Scruggs. When we switch frameworks to the newsroom, we undergo something like Wilson’s epistemological shift. Epistemological shifts, Wilson says, depend on “surprising, systematic violations of narrational transparency,” (81) where narrational transparency is the clear identifiability of a viewer’s subjective positionality in viewing a film: with whom are we aligned, whose mistakes do we assume? For Wilson, the point of an epistemological shift is usually shock, we see this most clearly in thriller and horror movies.

For example, when in Psycho we learn that Norman Bates was actually his mother the whole time, we undergo an epistemological shift from the errors of Norman’s perception to the film’s non-subjective reality. This concept is employed in Jewell as a tool to bridge the gap between history and fiction. Here, the epistemological jump allows for an interpretive double-standard on the part of Eastwood. He is able to consecutively critique the authorial voices which turn history narratives into broader symbols divorced from their objective experience and create his own hyper-symbolic history narrative.

When the film undergoes its epistemological shift from Jewell’s perspective to the authorial narration around Kathy Scruggs and Agent Tom Shaw, we enter the extended symbolism of the film. Eastwood’s claim that “you can’t live inside people because they no longer exist” becomes a suggestion that there is no longer any event after it has ended and all histories are equal.

The implications of this on Eastwood’s claim that he accurately reflects Jewell’s voice are inconsistent, but so too is the purport of the film, which alternatingly embraces and dismisses White’s claim that “histories ought never to be read

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as unambiguous signs of events they report, but rather as symbolic structures, extended metaphors, that ‘liken’ the events reported in them to some form with which we have already become familiar” (White 291). He justifies his conversion of historical narrative into extended symbol thusly. Kathy Scruggs and Tom Shaw are not to be understood as subjects or voices within the film’s universe, as evidenced through their shaky historic referentiality. Jewell’s power within Richard Jewell is his realness, the implication that his character understands the history perfectly, and to see through his eyes would be to approach the reality of the situation. Kathy Scruggs is different; she “certainly could have” felt or acted that way, and, from Eastwood’s perspective, the media acted unjustly in the same way she did. Her historical referent does not explain or even necessarily correlate to her character’s action. This is even more clear with regard to Tom Shaw, who is literally an amalgam of FBI agents and investigators. Scruggs and Shaw are symbolic gestures within a universe that claims historical veracity.

The coexistence of direct historical referents and indirect cultural symbols within one fictional plane has far-reaching implications for Eastwood’s claim over a disputed history. The symbols which Scruggs and Shaw play out are a bridge between Jewell’s universe and ours. As symbolic agents in the plot of the film, they refer both inwards to the film’s “real eventhood” and outwards, to the real universe of the audience. This is how Eastwood suggests a contemporary resonance for the events of Jewell. This resonance depends on the condemnation of unjustified narrativization, and the implicit understanding that all ‘objective’ narrativization is unjustified. In order to make the appropriate connections to public discourse, (where else are false accusations and trial by public opinion to manifest in the conservative consciousness but in the spectre of the Me Too movement) the film’s viewer must see that narrativization equates to unfair judgement, and that unfair judgement is the tragedy of Richard Jewell.

Here, we see evidence of the tension between the film’s message and the vehicle through which that message is delivered. Scruggs, the vehicle, is narrativized out of existence. When her brother, Lewis Scruggs Jr. protests that “the world needs to know she was as good a journalist as the world has ever seen,” (Brett) he is engaging with the wrong epistemological framework of the film. He says that Eastwood’s narrativization misses crucial historical detail and is too hasty to make judgement, when really Eastwood’s narrativization of Kathy Scruggs is indifferent to crucial historical detail. She is a symbol. The interaction of her scenes and those of Jewell feels phony within the framework of the film because they have drastically different dramatic purposes. Scruggs acts almost parodically; she pops up in the back of a truck and winks at the startled driver or pulls down the front of her shirt for an ogling FBI agent, whispering probing questions in his ear. Her irresponsibility and loose ethics are not character flaws, but the entirety of her character. When we see her crying at the press

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conference of Bobi, Richard Jewell’s mother, she matches the film’s emotional apex. These hasty tears, primarily a device to further condemn her actions, are essentially all of her character development and the only sign that she might be internally complex. In contrast, Jewell’s complexity is almost obsessively recalled; Richard Jewell will not let its viewers forget that its titular character is multi-faceted. When Watson Bryant holds up the headline “Savage or Saint?” the irony is palpable. Having understood him in the way this film claims it alone can communicate, the viewer knows that Jewell snaps at his mother but then immediately backs down, that he is not very bright but knows when he’s being made fun of, that he oversteps his jurisdiction but only because he cares about law and order, and so on, and so on. Jewell, in short, is neither savage nor saint, but human, experiencer of history. This, though, is not the case for nearly anyone else in the film.

These two epistemological frameworks and their contrasting narrative assumptions and character archetypes bump up against each other in ways which help to explain the type of historical repurposing which is being done in Jewell.

These two types of fiction, only one of which maintains a claim to historicity, co-exist uncomfortably. By comparing Jewell and Scruggs as case studies of two different understandings of the role of narrative in history, we can tease out the ethical implications of each, a function which is crucial for a movie as obsessed with the ethicality of history stories as Jewell is. This can be thought about through the framework of Aristotle’s Poetics. Aristotle writes: “Poetry… is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history, in that poetry tends to express the universal, history rather the particular fact. A universal is: The sort of thing that (in the circumstances) a certain kind of person will say or do either probably or necessarily, which in fact is the universal that poetry aims for.”

(Aristotle 54).

Understanding poetry as applicable to fiction broadly, reading Eastwood’s two character-types through this lens teases out the question of what is different between these two character extrapolations from historical referents.

Richard Jewell and his claim to historical veracity might be understood as a history narrative. His frame of reference is tightly contained: back to the historical Richard Jewell, rather than outwards to this type of thing, a universal principle. His actions seem picked primarily to bolster truth-claims, rather than for their symbolism. Despite the strict particularity of the Jewell character, the story of Richard Jewell undoubtedly holds universal symbolism. Eastwood achieves this without crossing the boundary between historic and poetic representation by putting Jewell and his subjective history narrative up against the objective poeticism of Scruggs.

Jewell’s character next to Kathy Scruggs holds an interesting double function, wherein his very humanness affords him a type of universality and his particularity comes to be highly symbolic. Scruggs as all irresponsible

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journalism, a randomly chosen particular case of a phenomenon with broad narrative and societal implications, who “could have been” like that, victimizes the individual in Jewell. She transgresses the boundaries of fiction and impacts a real person. Jewell’s particularity becomes poetically symbolic of all particular figures. If the undefinable forces of poor journalistic ethics and trial by public opinion, uncarefully shoved into the form of Kathy Scruggs, who happens to have a historical referent, can affect Richard Jewell, the individual, why can’t they affect the individual viewer as well? The ethical implications of this hedge Eastwood in on both sides. He simultaneously is not particular enough, haphazardly indicting an individual for a point which he wants to make about society, and too particular, claiming ownership over a real voice which he has no way of knowing or representing through a supra-narrative mode.

Eastwood’s Richard Jewell is multiply flawed in its claims to history, but through this it makes several interesting arguments about the nature of historic narrativization. It critiques history narratives for their false “voice of God” objectivity and gestures at the possibility of a subjective representation of event before narrative, which it suggests is achieved through its alignment to the voice of Richard Jewell. Further, it introduces two types of historical veracity: the ultimately true event, which is positioned as an end to historical narrativization, a trump card over alternate stories of the same events, and the not-untrue story, which is narratively useful above all else. A look at these multiple impulses (the poetic and the historic, the event and the narrative, the universal and the particular, the subjective and the objective) elucidates some of the choices at work in stories about historical events, even when Eastwood’s gesture ends as gesture and he fails to choose one form of representation.

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Works Cited Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics: Poetics: the James Hutton Translation: Ancient Contexts, Interpretations. Translated by James Hutton, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1982. 45-79.

Brenner, Marie. “American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell.” Vanity Fair,, February 1997, 100-165.

Fair Brett, Jennifer. “‘Richard Jewell’ Reporter Portrayal Draws Criticism.” The Detroit News, Dec 12 2019.

Day, Nate. “‘Richard Jewell’ Cast Responds to Backlash Over Portrayal of Journalist.” Fox News, Dec 3, 2019.

Hasty, Katie. “Clint Eastwood Only Hurt Himself With ‘Richard Jewell’s’ Worst Cliché.” Entertainment Weekly, Dec 16, 2019.

Lang, Brent. “Warner Bros. Hits Back At Atlanta Paper Over ‘Richard Jewell’ Legal Threat.” Variety, Dec 9 2019.

Psycho. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Paramount Pictures, June 15 1960.

Richard Jewell. Directed by Clint Eastwood, Warner Bros. Pictures, December 13 2019.

Rubin, Rebecca. “Clint Eastwood Suffers Worst Opening Weekend in Four Decades With ‘Richard Jewell.’” The Chicago Tribune, Dec 16 2019.

White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” CLIO, vol. 3, no. 3, Jun 1 1974, 277-303.

Wilson, George. “Transparency and Twist in Narrative Fiction Film.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 64, no. 1, Winter 2006, 81-95.

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Spoken World Poetry: bpNichol and Eco-criticism Katrina Vogan

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t is a common trope in nature poetry that language seems to have a limit when describing the non-human. We might cite E.J. Pratt, who wrote in “Sea-Gulls” that “The language had no simile” (2); or Duncan Campbell Scott, who in “The Height of Land” speaks of an “inarticulate part” (53), and asserts that “no man may tell/the secrecy of that spell/golden and inappellable”(57-59); or Robert Bringhurst in “The Anecdote of the Squid” who describes an “unspoken/word, whose muscular/non-pronunciation the squid/ alone is known to have mastered” (29-32). In this context, there is something distinctly refreshing about the philosophies of Canadian poet bpNichol. A researcher and lover of language, bpNichol’s theories encourage a redefinition of what counts as poetry and an expansion of how poets use language. In his hands, language ceases to be a restriction and becomes an apparatus for discovery.

Barrie Phillip Nichol, commonly stylized as bpNichol, was a Canadian poet who became famous for his works in the genres of visual, sound, and concrete poetry. Born in Vancouver in 1944, he would publish “30 chapbooks, books and pamphlets” (Poetry Foundation) before his death at 44 in 1988. He was a “great believer in the power and reach of collaboration” (Barbour), as evidenced by the number of his works dedicated to other figures of the Canadian art scene. He was a member of the editorial board of Coach House Press and a founder of grOnk literary magazine and Ganglia Press. He was also a member of the sound poetry collective “The Four Horsemen”. He won the Governor General’s Award for poetry in 1970.

Nichol’s poetry is notable for its experimental forms. His visual poetry often incorporates cartooning, comic strips, and other forms of illustration.

Nichol called this technique “borderblur”, borrowing the term from Dom Sylvester Houédard. Borderblur is “poetry which arises from the interface, from the point between things, the point in which poetry and painting and prose are all coming together” (“Interview: Nicette Jukelevics” 134).

A key feature of his aesthetic is a formalized curiosity. In an interview with Nicette Jukelevics, he said “In a way, what I am into is research. I know that, I am into research writing...there is an element of research in most of what I do.” (137) The area that Nichol researched most rigorously was language.

Nichol was deeply fascinated with the structures and systems of language: he “constantly explored the dualism of language as both container and content” (“Visual Poetry”). His poetry reflects an ethos of experimentation. Nichol isolated variables and repeated procedures in the same way that a scientist Page 33

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designs an experiment, both over the course of his career as a whole and in individual poems. See, for example, the “probable systems” series of poems: probable systems 25 the empty place – some signs of the existence of anti-earth Preliminary Notes: apoetic atheistic asymbolic asymmetrical etc.

If “a” as a prefix (from the Greek ‘a’ (negative)) means, essentially, ‘anti-’,* is an opposite, then, logically, we are lead to the following… (“Probable Systems 25” 373) Nichol’s “values in writing tend to be governed by sound and the music [he heard] in the spoken word” (“Interview: Nicette Jukelevics” 135) This focus on sound is fundamental to Nichol’s understanding of language structures. It is also fundamental to Nichol’s understanding of how to communicate and represent properly.

Nichol’s critical writings references a “Hopi Indian creation myth” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 105) in which a son of spider woman called “palongwahoya” (Ibid.) was given the task to set the world in motion by singing: “when he did this he set the vibratory axis of the earth in motion so that the earth vibrated in tune with the vibratory axis of the universe […] then men ceased singing & retreated into their homes & began to use speech only to communicate between themselves & the world began to vibrate out of tune & the creator destroyed it…what is their creation myth telling us if not that man as an organism must be in harmony with the organic universe he lives in & that the medium thru which that 1 harmony can be achieved is human sound” (Ibid.)

It must be emphasized that by “human sound” Nichol does not merely mean “language” or speech. Human sound is also the visceral “howling screaming & crying” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 104); “human sound” is in some ways primordial.

“Sound is an expression of the total organismmuch of what we know about a person we know because of the sounds he makesthere is a close link between body & breath between breath & sound between sound & articulation (which can mean conceptualization)” (Ibid.) “take the classical case of your lover saying to your “i love you”meaning here is not conveyed by the words but by the feeling within the words by the nuance & tonethe words themselves have become hackneyed & meaninglessit is what the sound conveys that gives the credibility” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 109)

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Nichol argues that written communication, especially the advent of type, caused a fundamental shift in communication style. As “the emphasis on sound [is] dropped” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 107), the dominant cultural institutions of “linguistics & philosophy tend to...…remove ambiguity… there is an emphasis on a ONE STATEMENT = ONE MEANING”( “Sound and the Lung Wage” 108); “society looks with fear & suspicion upon a real use of vocal sound & hence multiple meaning” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 110).

The pun is “one of the more powerful uses of language” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 108) because it consciously takes advantage of sound’s multiplicity – “because it links sound & meaning (uses similarities in sound to pivot between many meanings)” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 109). The use of the pun “always referred to as ‘the lowest form of humour” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 108) removes some of languages rigidity and formality. In a note titled Sound & Poetry, he writes: “so—d--human so—d--has become dignified. the scream is a social taboo. music and singing tend to take us far away from our own soun”s.” (27) Nichol views this discomfort with sound and the resultant reliance on rigid language structures as a symptom of a larger cultural discomfort and disconnect with the biological and the organic. In the most extreme cases, this disconnect can become outright fear. In Sound and the Lung Wave, he writes: “man has a strange fear of vowel sound nowhere is this better illustrated than in the tragic story of the gradual extermination of the wild wolveswhat we know of the wolf comes from the SOUND of his how howling & our feelings about it& it is our FEELINGS about it (the terror & loathing) that governs our handling of the wolves.” (104) In a note dated August 28, 1966, Nichol entreats poets to “let the sound out…it’s sound first. it was sound first. it will become words later. find your own sound. relax. rest. now speak in the calmness of your sound. listen to your own words. fight the withdrawal symptoms by following your words back thru your sound to your core.” (22).

To borrow a popular dichotomy: we might classify “language” as cultural institution and “sound” as nature experience. By setting nature and culture at opposites and by separating language from pure sound, we willingly ignore that we ourselves have a bit of the messy, not-easily-classified organic in us. Nichol’s innovation is to insist that language is not a wholly cultural artifact.

Nichol instructs poets to be conscious of the origins of sounds. He is also highly aware that the use of sound might create connection between seemingly disparate objects: humanity and the wolves both howl. It should also be noted that what Nichol is looking for specifically is harmony, not unity. He seeks connection, commonality or co-existence, not assimilation. Man does not need to become one with the wolves; he needs only not to close himself off from Page 35

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them. As Nichol wrote in a statement written November 1966: “now that we have reached the point where people have finally come to see that language means communication and that communication does not just mean language, we have come up against the problem, the actual fact of diversification of finding as many exits as possible from the self (language/communication exits) in order to form as many entrances as possible for the other.” (18) “Human sound...must be released again & the full potential explored” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 111); “we use only a fraction of [human sound’s] potential & if we are to believe the Hopi myth this could be the...world’s downfall” (“Sound and the Lung Wage” 112). There is an urgent need for experimentation.

There is also a need to willingly disregard language rules if those language 2 rules are restrictive. Nichol advocates for the discovery of a more holistic communication style that has fully realized representative abilities in both the visual and the auditory senses; and a use of language that is fully cognizant of its roots in organic sound.

Nichol inspires critics to pose two sets of questions. The first set of questions focuses on the aesthetics of the poem. Does the poet or poem seek out the full potential of sound or language? Does the use of sound/language succeed in “finding as many exits as possible from the self … in order to form as many entrances as possible for the other”? Does the poet succeed in creating “harmony”? The second set of questions are useful specifically to eco-critics and pertain to the historical relationship between environmental and organic sound, language and meaning. Is language a purely cultural artifact, or is the critic in agreement with Nichol that language is in some way rooted to the natural history of the planet through the sounds we have in common? What is the relationship between our use of language and our use of the planet?

There are certain poets who seem to be a natural fit to consider under such a paradigm because they share key values with Nichol; the most obvious are his fellow Canadian concrete poets. Another would be Gerard Manley Hopkins. A fellow researcher and innovator of language, Hopkins invented and codified “sprung rhythm”. A word list written by the poet as a student is strikingly similar to the probable systems poems: “Grind, gride, gird, grit, groat, grate, greet ...

Greet, grief, wearing, tribulation. Grief possibly connected. Gruff, with a sound as of two things rubbing together. I believe these words to be onomatopoetic. Gr common to them all representing a particular sound. In fact I think the onomatopoetic theory has not had a fair chance. Cf. Crack, creak, croak, crake, graculus, crackle. These must be onomatopoetic.”(Lewis onomatopoetic.”(Lewis “Extreme Welsh Meter”) A complete comparison of the two author’s philosophies and aesthetics is outside the scope of this paper but would be a natural extension of the theories proposed here.

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To this point, Nichol has been discussed primarily as a theorist.

However, restricting discussion of his work in this way does him a great disservice. Nichol was also a highly regarded poet, and his contributions to nature poetry should not be overlooked.

His poem “Pastoral” forces the question of what “counts” as a pastoral poem. “Pastoral” consists of a reproduction of logo of the 4-H Club of Canada, and a dedication to “Mike Ondaatje” – Nichol’s friend and fellow Canadian poet. As the poem is simultaneously poem and illustration, it can be confidently classified as a borderblur work.

The dedication of “Pastoral” locates the poem within the Canadian poetry landscape. It is a clue that the title is meant to be read within a poetic tradition: pastoral is not just an adjective, but is also a genre. In this context, the poem is a visual pun. The 4-H club is a society traditionally associated with youth agricultural learning in rural areas. The four Hs in the logo represent 3 “head, heart, hands, and health”. Put tritely, 4-H members are “modern shepherds”; they are ambassadors for the benefits of a connection with traditional environmental living. As an illustration, the clover shape is more at home with the common use of the word: it is a representation of the rural ideal.

As a logo, it recalls the historic roots of the pastoral genre: dialogues between shepherds. It is also an examination of the origins of language. The leaves of the clover grow Hs; language emerges from nature.

I will finish this paper with discussion of an untitled poem which is poured into concrete in bpNichol Lane, on the University of Toronto campus.

The poem, which I will henceforth refer to as “A/LAKE/A/LANE…”, is iterative. It is structurally based on repetition and variation. Through each cycle, there is a visual change of one letter, which results in a slight change of sound, which in turn results in a shift of meaning. The lines of the poem are not centre aligned but are instead aligned by their first vowel, creating a strong line of pure vowel sound which the reader must confront. (As discussed above,

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Nichol believed that such vowel sounds were underused).

When this poem is read “in the wild”, the physical location of the poem and reader is part of the interpretative experience. The physical linearity of bpNichol Lane itself emphasizes the connection between “A/LANE” and “A/ LINE”. The reader (the “LONE”) is in the lane: what is missing is the “LAKE”.

Because “LAKE” is missing, perhaps it is best to read the poem through the lens of “probable systems 25”: where “A” might be used “as a prefix (from the Greek “a –” (negative))…essentially, ‘anti-’…opposite”? Such a reading forces the question: what exactly is the opposite of a lake?

“A/LAKE/A/LANE” has no particular sentence structure: the meaning does not come from the relationship between the words as determined by syntax, but from the relationship between the words as determined by sound. The poem is nearly a tongue twister: to read it aloud is to be forced to be conscious of the movement of your tongue as it shapes sound into meaning. The act of reading the poem aloud in the lane is an exercise in hearing the sound of your voice through the city sounds.

On August 19, 1966, Nichol wrote: “how do you approach the poem?... where are you going?...you’re behind the words. come out with them. be in them. let the sound come.” (22) The relationship he describes is literalized in “A/LAKE/A/LANE”. Has one approached the poem with purpose? Does the effect change if the poem was discovered by accident? In order to read the poem, one must stand “behind the words”; when the word “LANE” is read, the reader is physically “in” the lane.

The poem asks for an examination of proximity and distance: how are a lake and a lane a-like? bpNichol lane and Toronto’s lakefront are separated by at least a 45-minute walk; the lake and lane are separated by one “LONE” letter.

Concrete poetry is a genre which is historically underrepresented and underexplored in academic discussion, and Nichol’s inclusion in the eco-critical cannon would help to address this lack. However, the true value in considering Nichol’s work, and the work of his fellow concrete poets, in an eco-critical context lies in their formal innovation – their examination and re-invigoration of language and communication strategies. Nichol’s eschewal of a “dignified” use of poetic sound and language illuminates the tremendous representative potential of language used without dignity. His writing exposes the commonalities between the cultural structures of language and naturally occurring organic sound.

Don McKay writes that “poets are supremely interested in what language can’t do” (“Baler Twine”). Nichol’s contribution to eco-criticism might simply be that Nichol instead interests himself with what sound can do.

Sound is not only our link to the wolves: “THE POINT, THE PURPOSE, THE CREATIVE REASON FOR SOUND POETRY IS TO SET THE BODY’S AXIS BACK IN TUNE WITH THE UNIVERSE” (“Sound & Poetry” 27).

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Works Cited Barbour, Douglas. “BpNichol.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 10 Feb. 2008.

“BpNichol.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation.

Bringhurst, Robert. “Anecdote of the Squid.” Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, Poems, edited by Nancy Holmes, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009, pp. 327-328.

Lewis, Gwyneth. Extreme Welsh Meter . Poetry Foundation.

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. Pied Beauty. Poetry Foundation.

McKay, D. “Baler Twine: Thoughts on Ravens, Home, and Nature Poetry”. Studies in Canadian Literature / Études En littérature Canadienne,, Vol. 18, no. 1, Jan. 1993.

Canadienne Nichol, bp. Meanwhile: the Critical Writings of BpNichol, BpNichol, edited by Roy Miki, Talonbooks, 2000.

Nichol, bp. “Pastoral” a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts, edited by Stephen Voyce, Coach House Books, 2013, pp. 209.

Pratt, E J. “Sea-Gulls.” Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, Poems, edited by Nancy Holmes, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009, pp.

111–111.

Scott, Duncan Campbell. “The Height of Land.” Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, Poems, edited by Nancy Holmes, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2009, pp. 94–98.

“Visual Poetry” BpNichol: We Are Words and Our Meanings Change, Carleton University Archives & Research Collections.

End notes 1. Nichol’s use of capitalisation, punctuation, and spacing was often unconventional. I have striven to reproduce these aspects of his writings as closely as possible.

2. However, at no point does Nichol advocate for the complete abolishment of language structures in favour of pure sound, as this too would remove access to the complete potential of language. In a Letter to the Editor of Open Letter written in 1996, in which he defends visual poetry, he writes: “You speak of rhythm as tho it were only of the OOM PIDDY PIDDY BOOM variety … by OOM PIDDY PIDDY BOOM i don’t mean that you got that old chunka chunka rhythm going but rather that you concentrate purely on sound & ignore the facts that there are other kinds of rhythm.” (17) Sound by itself is not enough to communicate properly either.

3. Nichol had an oeuvre-spanning obsession with the letter H, depicting it over and over in different poetic forms. See his poems “Sonnet Sequence” (a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts 158) “Line Telling” 1,2,3 (a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts 164, 182, 195), “A Study of Context: H” (a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts 185), “I.T.N.U.T.S 8” (a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts 205), “Angel of Mercy” (a book of variations: love-zygal-art facts 237) among many many others.

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Relationality, Indigenous Resurgence, and Settler Colonialism in Grounded Normativity / Place Based Solidarity and road salt T Williams

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rounded Normativity / Place Based Solidarity by Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and road salt by Leanne Simpson both describe how Indigeneity is threatened by settler colonialism’s attempts to sever the relationship between Indigenous bodies and land. While Grounded Normativity finds resurgence in the reconnection of bodies to land, road salt suggests through its orality that Indigeneity can still be resurgent after bodies are alienated from this vital relationship.

Grounded Normativity / Place Based Solidarity describes Indigeneity as tied to relationality. Coulthard and Simpson describe the Mississauga Nishnaabeg, Wendat, and Haudenosaunee Confederacy in terms of their relationality. They write that “these nations negotiated and continue to practice diplomatic relationships with each other” (Coulthard and Simpson 250) and that “each nation also exists in deep reciprocal relationships with [… ]all the physical and spiritual forces that connect them to this place” (250). The characteristics of this network of relationships, that they are reciprocal, meaningful, and connect specific nations with specific places, form an important part of each nation’s being. These relationships create Indigeneity. Coulthard and Simpson identify two places where Indigeneity can be found: Indigenous bodies and the land. It is bodies which “generate knowledge, political systems, and ways of being” (254) and the land which “provides [Indigenous nations] with the material culture to rebuild their political orders and conceptualizations of nationhood (255). Of the two, the land is most important. From their relationship with the land, Indigenous nations receive all that is necessary to exist “in relation to other people and nonhuman life forms in a profoundly nonauthoritarian, nondominating, nonexploitative manner” (254). The relationship that Indigenous nations and bodies have with the land makes all the other relationships which inform Indigeneity possible.

Settler colonialism’s primary aim and function is the continued destruction of Indigeneity through the disruption of the relationships which produce it. Coulthard and Simpson write that Canada’s settler colonial project consists of “impeding and regulating the generative relationships and Page 40

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practices that create and maintain Indigenous nationhood, political practices, sovereignties, and solidarities” (254). Settler colonialism will not be done until Indigenous people no longer exist, until every relationship which creates their Indigeneity has been completely effaced. Until that point arrives, however, settler colonialism is not yet victorious because Indigeneity still exists and provides the tools necessary to resist settler colonialism. Their relationship to land gives Indigenous nations “the practice and knowledge that allows them to critically interrogate capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and white supremacy” (255) so that their nationhood can exist “without replicating the heteropatriarchy or anti-Blackness normalized in our settler colonial reality” (255). Indigeneity inherently challenges settler colonialism and the injustices that accompany it. Furthermore, it can build political orders outside settler colonial influence.

In light of this, indigenous resurgence seeks to “reconnect Indigenous bodies to land” (254), to foster the relationships which generate Indigeneity. All the practices, knowledge, and solidarities which resist settler colonialism are produced by the Indigenous body’s relationship to land. As long as Indigeneity exists and is regenerated, settler colonialism can be resisted.

In road salt by Leanne Simpson, the abusive relationship which settler colonialism creates with Indigenous people is portrayed through a deer’s relationship to road salt. The deer’s relationship with the salt is described as an addiction, she is “sweating for one more hit” of the salt and “one lick turns into three” (Simpson 3; 6) as she cannot stop herself from consuming it. The road serves as figure for settler colonialism. Roads dissect landscapes and endanger animals crossing them. These structures interrupt the relationship of animals with the land as they move across it just as settler colonialism disrupts the relationship between Indigenous bodies and the land. Land itself is nowhere in the poem. The poem’s subjects are the deer, the road, the salt, aandeg, and the passing of time. The deer’s relationship to the land is not merely damaged but missing. Now the deer participates in a relationship with the road instead.

The deer realizes the harm this relationship does: “licking the road is its own humiliation / just like hostages first trap themselves” (13-14). The deer blames herself for her addiction but recognizes how the act both degrades and constrains her. Being herbivores, deer require minerals like salt in their diets. The deer needs the salt but it is now provided by the road instead of her habitat. Her relationship with the land has been replaced by the road and makes her addicted, dependent on the road for nutrition. The deer is aware that this relationship has lethal consequences: “the snow will drown without suffering / the road salt still managing dreadfear / aandeg hacking overhead / until we’re mid-road again next year” (21-24). The winter endangers the deer’s life, perhaps food is scarce due to damage done to the land, but the salt offers comfort. The deer is not dead, but it is caught in a downward spiral. Her dependency on the salt dulls her to a death which is years away. Settler colonialism alienates Indigenous people from the land but gives them an inadequate replacement for what has been taken: an Page 41

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abusive relationship based on dependency which prepares Indigenous people for their complete destruction.

The road’s relationship to the deer is mirrored in that of the performer to the poem itself through the poem’s orality. The first line of road salt is metrically ambiguous: “pacing the side of the highway” (1). The first foot of the line is a trochee while the next three are iambs. The whole line flows comfortably whether it is performed iambically or in trochaic meter because none of the words overflow the foot they begin in and there are no awkward pyrrhic or spondaic feet. The first foot invites the performer to perform the poem in one way, but the next foot suggests another interpretation both of which create a pattern in the meter. The meter is connected with the cars speeding down the road. The deer is “waiting for rhythm to break” (2) so that she can lick at the road salt. In suggesting different meters for the poem to be performed in, road salt suggests that the performer can choose to rupture the meter and allow the deer to lick the salt or keep it from doing so. But the performer is not really free.

As the poem continues, it becomes clear that whether or not the deer eats the salt is unambiguous and the lines become more difficult to perform in an iambic or trochaic fashion. The deer describes how “road salt makes me twitch / & more comfortable in my skin” (9-10). An iambic or trochaic performance of these lines is upset by the pyrrhic ‘road salt’, the four syllables in ‘comfortable’ that make it awkward to put the stress on an abnormal syllable, and the half foot at the end of each line. The rhythm must break, and the deer must eat the salt. The steady rhythm, which once prevented the deer from eating the salt breaks down further through the poem. The frequency of lines with half feet increases, such as in the sixth stanza whose lines all end with a hanging syllable (21-24). There are also more irregular lines, such as “just like hostages first trap themselves” (14). It is as if the salt is corroding the poem now that it is being consumed by the deer. road salt gives its performer the illusion of power over the poem’s outcome through its meter. The performer is still at the mercy of the poem and the flow of their performance is irritated and disrupted just as the deer is by the salt. The performer is put into the same position as the deer, seemingly free but ultimately dependent on a force which corrodes them as their tongue stutters over saline half feet.

Though Simpson’s poem describes Indigenous bodies as trapped in the settler colonial present, it still points to resurgence through the deer’s relationship with aandeg. The fifth stanza offers this warning: “this is how to die in a war / they insist doesn’t exist / aandeg never sees the whites of my eyes / unasked questions, / unsurveyed cysts” (17-20). Ultimately, the lack of communication with aandeg will kill the deer. The crow “sits and surveys” (7): she can help the deer and acknowledge her illness, but two do not communicate. The deer and aandeg have a solidarity, but it is not being drawn upon. Resurgence cannot exist within the corroded meter of the poem or the Indigenous body’s doomed relationship with settler colonialism and so Simpson Page 42

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gestures outside the poem, to a better relationship which could save the deer from its addiction.

Grounded Normativity / Place Based Solidarity by Coulthard and Simpson describes Indigeneity as being created through relationships between bodies and land, as something which inherently resists settler colonialism. road salt, salt, through its orality, describes how settler colonialism replaces the relationship with Indigenous bodies to the land with a lethal, dependent relationship. Still, road salt points to a vision of resurgence located not in relationship with the land but in the relationships between Indigenous bodies.

Works Cited Glen Coulthard and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Grounded Normativity / Place-Based Solidarity.� American Quarterly 68.2 (June 2016): 249255.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, This Accident of Being Lost. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2017, pp. 63.

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Race in St John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia Eva Wissting

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hat can a church’s list of baptisms tell us about the society of a Nova Scotian town two hundred years ago? It might seem like an impossible task to draw much information about the people and their lives from a long list of names and dates when there is no cohesive narrative on the pages. However, text can work in astonishing ways, even in scantiness––and not just through the words placed on the pages, but also through what has been left out. The list of baptisms from St John’s Anglican Church in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, from the emergence of the church in the mid-1700s up until 1869, may have been created with a different intention, but today we can read in them signs of inequality and discrimination. A combination of notes included in the list with names and other details that are omitted show us that even though people of different races were included in the congregation, those deviating from the white European norm were underprivileged, and their identities were suppressed.

While a great majority of the names on the list of baptisms in St John’s church signal European descent, there are a few instances that tell us that there were people with other backgrounds in this congregation. Family names like Heckman and Wentzel, Moreau and La Grace, Richards and Bailey (1-2) suggest that these families stemmed from Germany, France and England. A few names, however, are accompanied by the note “Mi’kmaq” and the letter “(I).” On this list of approximately 6,000 names, there are eight baptized children on the list that, along with their parents, are identified as Mi’kmaq––all between April and December of 1764 (14). Interestingly, they are all identified with names that sound European, such as Margaret, Marianne, Peter and Paul––and even more interesting is that within this limited group of people (24 individuals), several names appear multiple times. For example, there are three each of Margarets, Mariannes and Peters and as many as five Pauls. This odd limited name variation, in combination with the lack of any traditional Mi’kmaq names, may suggest that these names either were used specifically when interacting with Europeans, or that it might even be the church that chose to use these names––possibly because that seemed more practical to the settlers, or more Christian––rather than that these names were an identifying choice of the people themselves. Apart from the eight baptisms of Mi’kmaq people in 1764, there is no other information in the list that shows any presence of Indigenous Peoples

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in St John’s congregation. The list itself does not tell us if this means that there were no other Indigenous congregation members. It could also be the case––as the European names of the Mi’kmaq individuals suggest––that they were there but their Indigenous heritage was suppressed. Regardless, the presence of the Indigenous members in the congregation about whom we do know through these eight baptisms, suggests that they were not included as members on equal terms with the congregation members of European descent, who could participate in the church while preserving their culture and heritage and without being labelled according to race. Instead, Indigenous members of the church had to (at least regarding their names) conform to a European norm.

Another signifier of race in the list is the letter “N”. Between the years 1759 and 1846, there are 18 instances of “(N),” once accompanied with the term “Negro” (9) and once with “Mulatto” (21). One time it is also accompanied with “slave of Peter RUDOLF” (16) and another time with “serv to WILKINS” (28).

Furthermore, the use of a letter in parenthesis is only used for “(I)” and “(N),” never for any other letters. “(N)” therefore apparently signifies a Black person, even in the instances when the “(N)” is not accompanied with any further explanatory notes. Noteworthy is that a larger proportion of these children are noted as “illegitimate” than in the list in general. The term “illegitimate” occurs many times throughout the list, 97 times, but as many as eight of the 15 Black baptized children on the list (three of the 18 Black people on the list were adults when they were baptized) are either noted as “illegitimate” or have no note on either one or both of their parents. The one example that stands out the most is the first baptism of a Black person on the list, on May 27th, 1759, where there is no name noted whatsoever––no father or mother, no name of the child and not even a note on an owner or master, but simply “Negro boy Lunenburg” (9).

None of the non-racialized children on the list lacks information in a similar way. Furthermore, three of the “illegitimate” children on the list are children of a woman named Silvia (20, 23, 25), but never accompanied by a name of a father. In March 1824, however, there is a Silvia who is baptized at age 70 noted as “servant J Creighton” (41). If this is in fact the same Silvia all through and she really was 70 years old in 1824, then she was 36 when her third child was born and 18 when she had the first child that was baptized at St John’s. A John Creighton appears on the list as father of three children with wife Lucy Clapp between 1774 and 1781 (21-22) and either the same or another John Creighton had three children with wife Catherine between 1800 and 1813 (29, 34, 36). It appears that Black people were not only discriminated against by being racially labelled in the list of baptisms, but that the circumstances their children were born into was quite different than for the European congregation members.

Looking closely at the details of the list of baptisms from St John’s church in Lunenburg makes it easy to start imagining the lives behind the names, but since there is only limited information available, we can only be sure of part

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of the whole picture. The fact that people of colour and Indigenous peoples were baptized could be interpreted as acceptance into the congregation. However, the fact that so many of them are described as “illegitimate” and listed without the names of either or both parents (or any name at all), or––in the case of the Mi’kmaq––the strange pattern of repeated European names, show that they were treated differently than the rest of the members of the church. Maybe most telling of all is the fact that race was only relevant to note when it differed from the white European norm of the congregation.

Works Cited “Lunenburg St John’s Anglican Baptisms 1749-1869 (Chronological),” Lunenburg County Church Records, transcribed by Robert Kim Stevens, http://sites.rootsweb.com/~canns/lunenburg/church.html, accessed 6 November 2019.

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Debilitating Legacies: Alleviating the Anxiety of Female Authorship in Munro’s “Meneseteung” Meg Jianing Zhang

T

he second chapter of Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination opens with the voices of S. Weir Mitchell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Sexton. Only after their epigraphic input do we hear the authors’ voices in the form of a question: “What does it mean to be a woman writer in a culture whose fundamental definitions of literary authority are…both overtly and covertly patriarchal?” Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar respond to Harold Bloom’s androcentric “anxiety of influence” with what they call an “anxiety of authorship.” I will turn to their critique of Bloom to investigate how Alice Munro’s short story, “Meneseteung” explores methods of alleviating this anxiety of female authorship.

Almeda Joynt Roth, the protagonist of Munro’s narrative and a nineteenth-century poetess herself, is surrounded by spheres of patriarchal authority. Her primary influence is her deceased father whose literary legacy simultaneously cultivates her love for poetry and prevents her from birthing poetic daughters of her own. “Meneseteung” juxtaposes Queen Aggie (the town pariah) and Almeda to depict the dilemmas that women writers confront in their attempts to relieve their anxiety. Extreme aggression transforms Aggie into a monster. Extreme passivity manifests into debilitating isolation and pathological illness in Almeda. Ultimately, “Meneseteung” offers means of alleviating the anxiety of authorship. Despite her physical and mental decline, Almeda poetically triumphs because of she celebrates her female body and returns to a forgotten matrilineal heritage of literary strength.

Gilbert and Gubar purport that Bloom’s “anxiety of influence” predominantly applies to the male writer in a patriarchal context. According to Bloom, the (male) poet develops his own style by engaging in oedipal warfare with his poetic forefathers. His strength is a product of his precursors’ eventual invalidation and defeat. Bloom’s model of authorship also asserts a cyclical relationship. The son who defeats his father becomes the father his own son shall surpass. Meanwhile, the woman writer is not subject to such luxuries. For the woman writer, her (male) precursors are not outdated opponents over whom she inevitably triumphs, but rather extant forces of authority that nip her creativity in the bud. Moreover, the patriarchal system in which she resides forbids her Page 47

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from readily issuing a lineage of her own. Even if she manages to foster her own voice, there is no one to take her place. Rather than an anxiety of influence, the woman writer suffers from an anxiety of authorship: “a radical fear that she cannot create, that because she can never become a ‘precursor’ the act of writing will isolate and destroy her” (Gilbert and Gubar 1929). The woman writer, then, rarely procures the chance to exert the Bloomian violence of overtaking her predecessors. Instead, she bears the brunt of blows dealt by her male-dominated literary tradition.

“Meneseteung” depicts this oppressive male authority by way of Almeda’s father. Although he does not make any physical appearances, Mr. Roth is mentioned significantly more than other members of the Roth family.

His presence manifests in the house itself. Almeda lives alone in her father’s creation. Although she has the whole house to herself, she does not dare to move into the large bedroom which was formerly “the solitary domain of her father” (Munro 72). Even though her father has passed, Almeda cannot surreptitiously or violently replace him. His lingering authority isolates her in the back recesses of his work. “Meneseteung” suggests that Mr. Roth’s authority occupies literary spheres. It allows Almeda to develop a poetic voice while simultaneously preventing her from becoming a precursor of authorship. Not only was her father a skilled builder, he was also a well-versed reader who “could quote by heart from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the writings of Edmund Burke” (65). Indeed, Almeda inherits her love for reading and writing from her father. The narrative, however, does not wholly characterize this legacy as positive. Jarvis Poulter attributes Almeda’s homely state to her “proud, bookish father encouraging her” to write and publish (76). Almeda remains uninterested in men “except for her father” because they seem deprived without any artistic curiosity (78). Her relationship with her father prevents her from biologically producing daughters to whom she might willingly (or unwillingly) relinquish her poetic authority.

According to Gilbert and Gubar, the woman writer cannot hope to comfortably “fit in” with her patriarchal culture. Others consider her to be “anomalous, indefinable, alienated, a freakish outsider” (Gilbert and Gubar 1928). The woman writer’s alienation stymies her poetic creativity and relationships. For her to overcome her anxiety of authorship, she must risk crippling illness and social persecution. Passive isolation can manifest into pathological illness. Active reactions against the dominant patriarchal literary culture can induce female monstrosity.

“Meneseteung” illustrates the woman writer’s dilemma with its ambivalent portrayal of Queen Aggie. The turning point of Munro’s story takes place when Almeda is awoken by what she perceives to be a drunken brawl.

The descriptions are fiery and violent. The noises become “knives and saws and axes” that jab and bore into Almeda’s head (Munro 81). Almeda quickly realizes she is not witnessing a two-person scuffle, but rather one prostrate figure

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against a bloodthirsty mob. The crowd beats Queen Aggie (the infamous town drunkard) until “her mouth seems choked with blood” (82) In retaliation, Queen Aggie tauntingly beckons the group to kill her. Though her mouth is battered and bruised, her voice is not hindered. And yet, in her attempt to aggressively resist this mass, Queen Aggie’s actions become branded as monstrous by the protagonist. Terrified by what she sees, Almeda wants no part in Queen Aggie’s fight. The morning after, Almeda notices the woman’s body slumped against her fence. Her description of Queen Aggie is grotesque and dehumanizing. Poulter’s kicks and insults compel the “body” to “[heave] itself onto all fours…the hair all matted with blood and vomit” (86). As Queen Aggie crawls away, she bangs her head loudly and rhythmically, finding “her voice and [letting] out an openmouthed yowl, full of strength and what sounds like an anguished pleasure” (86). The conflicting descriptions of Queen Aggie convey the text’s ambivalence towards female aggression in the face of patriarchal suppression. There is an unstable and monstrous quality to Queen Aggie’s approach of relieving her anxiety of authorship. Not only are her tactics stifled by her patriarchal society, they are also held in contempt by her fellow female neighbours. When Poulter grabs Queen Aggie by her hair and tells her to “Gwan home” where she belongs (86). Almeda does not react to his overtly misogynistic actions with disgust.

Instead, she grows increasingly passive and unsure of herself. Indeed, as the plot unfolds, Almeda’s uncertainty and estrangement mutate into pathological illnesses.

Just as the woman writer’s anxiety of authorship manifests into aggressive monstrosity, so too does it morph into debilitating illness. Gilbert and Gubar do not present pathological illness as metaphorical, but rather a genuine consequence of the woman writer’s isolation and estrangement. They assert that “culturally conditioned timidity” and “patriarchal socialization” literally make women sick, “both physically and mentally,” delving into common “female diseases” of the nineteenth century including hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia (Gilbert and Gubar 1930, 1932). On the one hand, conditions like anorexia and agoraphobia allow the woman writer to refuse the intake and confrontation of patriarchal toxins. On the other hand, they force her to ruthlessly suppress her poetic voice and authorial presence. Gilbert and Gubar cite Wendy Martin’s observation concerning the societal perception of intellectual women in the nineteenth century: there was a “fear of the intellectual woman…[a] thinking woman was considered…a breach of nature” (1935). Indeed, the female diseases from which the Victorian woman writer suffered “were not always byproducts of [her] training in femininity; they were the goals of such training” (1933).

“Meneseteung” invokes pathological language throughout its narrative.

For instance, Poulter attempts to diagnose the cause of Almeda’s unmarried state. He identifies “all that reading and poetry” as “a drawback, a barrier, an obsession” (Munro 76). According to the men in her life, Almeda’s identity as

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a poet is not only detrimental to her social reputation, but also to her physical and mental health. A doctor reaffirms Poulter’s diagnosis. When Almeda asks him to treat her insomnia, he tells her not to read or to study as much. Instead, she ought to busy herself with domestic chores such as housework. In fact, “her troubles would clear up if she got married” (80). Though he prescribes her bromides, this (male) doctor considers marriage to be the best medication he can offer. Almeda’s health rapidly declines after she witnesses Queen Aggie’s beating. After Poulter banishes Queen Aggie from her doorstep, Almeda begins to menstruate. The text initially portrays her menstruation as an illness.

Almeda “feels sick. Her abdomen is bloated; she is hot and dizzy” (86). While the pugnaciously resistant Queen Aggie morphs into a grotesque monster that is stripped of her femininity and humanity, the passively submissive Almeda suffers from severe isolation and estrangement brought on by “female” symptoms. She rejects Poulter’s ride to church and secludes herself in her room, anxious to leave the house. Her thoughts grow ever more frantic and bewildered.

She steadily increases her laudanum dosage as her insomnia worsens. An obituary in the town newspaper records her steadfast decline: “the sad misfortune that in later years the mind of this fine person had become somewhat clouded and her behaviour, in consequence, somewhat rash and unusual” (9293).

Gilbert and Gubar offer few explicit solutions for the woman writer to overcome her anxiety of authorship. However, they attribute the woman writer’s “deep sense of alienation and inescapable feeling of anomie” to the notion that she has “forgotten something” (Gilbert and Gubar 1937). What she has forgotten, Gilbert and Gubar suggest, is her “matrilineal heritage of literary strength” as well as her “female power” that exists “because of (not in spite of)” her mother (1937). They also note the woman writer cannot effectively adopt androcentric forms of succor. Instead, she must transform the illnesses that cripple her into remedies that restore her.

Indeed, Almeda’s menstruation prompts other forms of fluidity. As menstrual blood swells, flows, and pools from Almeda’s body, “a flow of words” emerge from her mind (Munro 90). These words compel the poetess to write “one very great poem,” her greatest poem, depicting a rushing river (90). She names her work after the Meneseteung, a river with “deep holes and rapids and blissful pools under the summer trees” (91). The apogee of Almeda’s creativity courses through and out of her female body. The fluidity Munro evokes contrasts the aggressive overtaking of power in Bloom’s model of usurping authorial influence. After Almeda formulates her idea, she notably invokes her mother’s creations rather than rejecting or surpassing her father’s. Almeda poeticizes her mother’s crocheted roses at the story’s conclusion. She pairs the imagery of these roses with the imagery of the flowing river. The roses, which do not resemble real flowers, float independently and assuredly. Almeda deems their

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simple pleasure and efforts to be “admirable… and hopeful” signs (91). Despite her death at the end of the story, “Meneseteung” praises Almeda’s final creative process. It is only after she rejects the authority of Poulter and turns toward the influence of her female body and her mother’s creations that she produces her greatest work.

In conclusion, “Meneseteung” reflects Gilbert and Gubar’s answer to Bloom’s patriarchal “anxiety of influence” as anxiety of authorship. While passive submission can result in incapacitating isolation, unrestrained aggression can bring about damaging perceptions of female monstrosity. Gilbert and Gubar’s work as well as Munro’s text ultimately call upon the woman writer to reclaim what she has forgotten. She must embrace her female body and return to the matrilineal heritage of which she was deprived for so long.

Works Cited Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “Infection in the Sentence: The Woman Writer and the Anxiety of Authorship.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2nd ed., W.W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Munro, Alice. “Meneseteung.” Friend of My Youth, Youth, Penguin, 1995.

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Poetry

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Sounded Blue Padraic Berting I wish December air spoke words of confidence, but all it does is cut my face with the precision of a novice Boy Scout wood carver.

We walk through cold sand awash in the blue light of the fading sun on the water.

The only words on the beach come from the boys sledding down the hill (I wish I remembered how to talk like them).

Grey pigeons beat against the crying air, but fall into arranged place on the sinking wooden pier.

I open my mouth to let the sound loose, but my jaw locks up, and the wind does the talking.

What it said I don’t know, but we skip rocks like children in the hum.

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Lilith’s Apology to Eve Julia DaSilva There is a world where I leapt over the garden gates with Satan on my heels, and reached you first.

There is a world where I climbed the forbidden tree and you dropped your basket of fresh flowers like Adam might have dropped a spring garland —your crown— when he learned you ate the fruit.

But this deflowering only freed your arms to reach for mine, and where the serpent might have slipped you a bite or two of apple I brought armfuls of satanic peaches and kissed the juice from your lips.

There is a world where we looked back at the shared flesh of our regret, where he paused at the edge of the lake he told us would do for a sky— and we climbed skyward outward back over the garden wall, to laugh as he tasted the fruit we left as if it would work for him.

There is a world where your eyes met mine and you found what you thought you’d lost the morning you saw reflected in the pool what you never saw in your other half—and submitted to being but half of your paradise.

There is a world where we are whole with the knowledge of our reality.

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There is a world, now where my life is strung between the moments you are folded in my arms, where May flowers raise their heads at our embrace, forgetting the Jupiters above who would impregnate the clouds.

For spring is over and summer has brought us out of Eden.

But there is no world, love, not yet, where Adam did not meet us first.

Where he does not spit chewed apple pulped with bitterness on our garden, like we fed it to him and not to each other. I wish there was a world where I was the one on the green bank to say when you woke, “That was only your shadow.”

I’m sorry it took me so long to find you.

And without that world this is the world, where we twine our tresses and manly grace and wisdom and submit to fighting Eden’s attempts to take us back.

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IF YOU CAN Jonathan Labao Teach me the names of mga matandang dios The ones that were wiped by the Spaniards In the name of their dios verdadero Teach me how to make sinigang and kaldareta Without measuring cups and hardcopy recipes So that it becomes more natural than breathing Teach me to dance the tinikling To weave through the dancing bamboo As they drum and clap a song of resistance Teach me to speak Tagalog So that I can tell you how With every sound that leaves my lips With every breath that enters my lungs And every word I don’t understand in your lullabies I want to cry And it hurts so much more When hindi ko marunong mag sabihin an entire sentence Because the words slip from my mind or maybe they were never there

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Early February in a Glass City Sylvia Woolner Winter lands softly on your forehead Whispering wishes under turtleneck sweaters as eyelashes fall from your cheek The scrape of wool scarves against polyester The creak of old handles as warm hands push hard against cold metal A rhythm of swallows and sighs accompany a hot morning coffee Small unprepared boots hitting slush, snow and ice Contained cyclones within city boulevards Hatless pedestrians hurrying towards open doors The neon vibrancy of store signs reverberating down sacrilegious streets Exits closing with quiet precision Calls to distant voices on familiar topics Pages turned on books unread and over worn Red and black ink dexterously hitting a page aggressive to catch up Alarms repeating with ever increasing frequency Discussions had outside of thin walls Faint articulations of fear and frustration Hopeless knocks hitting an empty room Kettles boiling three times over without water being poured Zippers caught on sweaters Ripping, tearing followed by a curse Humbled repetitions of similar verses with divergent meanings Running on linoleum Water fleeing into a public sink Breath caught in a tiny throat Words too quickly uttered to be undone Phrases forgotten by novel friends Broken timers and harsh chalk board scribbles One squeaking boot against a grey speckled pavement Paper being cut Garbage landing at the bottom of a chute Over animated parties – bodies, beer, and music crashing into chaos Lighters switched on Lonely porches and the rain Cars speeding down a one-way street A mop wheeled out onto an empty stage Page 57

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Cashboxes closed Hands gripping hair Squirrels bristling in the bare boned bushes Coins and cash tossed out onto a waxy bar table Slurred shouts of glee and mournful thoughts spat out into incoherent poetry Steamy warm dumplings cut into pieces with inefficient forks Dishes breaking in wet hands Salt tracked onto ineffectual doormats Quotes repeated by seasoned friends Incorrect pronunciations cried out into coffee shops Plows preening ice into perfect pilings Heels hitting warped floorboards and muffled footsteps on a static carpet Sirens berating bare forsaken ears and then discordant silence my life is heard as a dissonant refrain.

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Special thanks to: Coach House Press, The Department of Literature and Critical Theory, The Centre for Comparative Literature, Professor Shaun Ross, Professor Sarah Dowling, Professor Ann Komaromi, and Victoria College.

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Literature and Critical Theory Undergraduate Students’ Union 2019-2020 Co-Presidents

Maral Attar-Zadeh Kathleen Petsinis

Events Coordinator

Arra Oman

Social Media

Maia Harris

Treasurer

Yilin Zhu

Journal Editor

Ellen Grace Parsons

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