Kama La Mackerel, ZOM-FAM

 

every space in this house
                        our house
                        my house
                                                                        the house i left behind
                                                                        the house i ran away from 

every space in this house
speaks of my father

the surfaces smell of his cemented hat soaked in sweat
the roof heats up like the burnt skin of his cheeks
the tiled floors slip like his glasses off his nose
the walls have the callused texture of his dried hands like sandpaper

every door frames his pout
            his lower lip pushed forward
every window reflects the assiduity of his gaze
            the empty depth in the black of his eyes

for twenty years i watched my father build this house

creating his life’s work
in the language of men

                                    who were forced
                                    to cut their tongues

                                                                        hang them in the wind
                                                                        like cautionary tales

                                                                                                on sugarcane stalks (“twenty years of brick”)

From Montreal-based multi-disciplinary artist, education, community-arts facilitator, performer and literary translator Kama La Mackerel comes their long-awaited debut, ZOM-FAM (Montreal QC: Metonymy Press, 2020), a book of unfolding questions, innovations and performances. Comprised of eight extended poem-performances that explore the past and the possibility of positive ways forward, ZOM-FAM is a flourish of lyric monologues examining family, family history; it is a book of gender and social structures and expectations, writing out a history of birth, rebirth, affirmation and resistance. “in 1986,” they write, as part of the extended “twenty years of brick,” “my parents absolve themselves from plantation heritage / signing themselves into a lifetime of repayment / their consent redeeming ancestral bonds // they buy a piece of land on which leans / a room / an outdoors toilet / an outdoors kitchen / formerly the residence of bann domestik / servants, on the edge of white people property [.]” The poems here are expansively performative and very physical, stretching out the possibilities of narrative flourish through the lyric, writing on race and gender, and notions of identity around colonization and the body. There is such an energy to this collection, and a performance that comes clearly through and across the page. As part of a 2020 interview posted online at Room magazine, conducted by Amber Dawn, Mackerel responds:

I wrote about Mauritius from a very specific context, which is the context in which I grew up, through the lens of family history. I think there are many ways of being Mauritian and there are multiple ways of writing Mauritius. Mine is just one narrative of the island.

In writing the family history, I was definitely interested in exploring the relationship between the personal and the political. I wanted to write about the multiple ways in which the colonial regime slipped into the intimacies of the family home. Ultimately, my family and I experienced colonial violence as an experience and not as a historical, theoretical or intellectual concept.

I was also keenly aware that I was writing this book from the vantage point of being an immigrant in Canada, one who had gone to university and who was writing a book about Mauritius in English, in an imperial language! So I wanted to create a pastiche of image-making that was grounded in everydayness: with everyday objects and everyday rituals of the island. I wanted to bring the smaller details of the quotidian to life.

In doing so, the use of Kreol and other hybrid, Mauritian linguistic “quirks” became increasingly relevant. Within the language itself, and the ways in which language is deployed in ZOM-FAM, I wanted to honour the ancestral and colonial languages that were part of my upbringing, the mixture of Kreol, English, French, Bhohpuri, Tamil, Hindi etc. I think of those two lines, for example:

kolez sin zozef
established by the Frères des Écoles Chrétiennes (p 54)

Within the span of two lines there are three languages being activated— exploring language in such a distinctive and hybrid way allowed me to create a poetic space that captures the cosmopolitanism of Mauritius as an island.

Chelene Knight, Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir

Dear Current Occupant—House we all shared on Forgotten Street

Ten people in a three-bedroom upper suite. Vancouver Special. The walls covered in tiny fingerprints. Bugs in the bed, crumbs on the stove, broken Transformers and Lego pieces, and Cheerios and dirty mismatched socks scattered on the beige carpet. I kept my small treasures under my pillow. We were visitors there. On a small couch with sixty dollars under my pillow, I slept. Never saw the shadow of a body get closer. Never saw her walk away when she had second thoughts at the last minute. Never felt the hand that reached underneath my head. Never felt the tingling of fingers accidentally grazing the small hairs behind my ear. Never heard the rustling of bills between sly fingers. Never woke up to see the sadness in the whites of eyes or the remorse as she placed the money in her pocket. Never saw her turn back and double-check that I was still asleep and maybe even feel sorry enough to offer me a short, warm kiss on my cheek or tuck the edge of the blue blanket into the crook of my sweaty neck. I didn’t wake up in time.

The latest in Book*hug’s essais series is Vancouver writer and editor Chelene Knight’s Dear Current Occupant: A Memoir (Toronto ON: Book*hug, 2018), a creative non-fiction lyric exploration of her years growing up through the twenty houses she eventually lived in with her mother and brother in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The short prose-sections of Dear Current Occupant work through poverty, dislocation and racism (as a mixed East Indian/Black child), attempting to capture the nebulous idea of home her experiences provided. Composed as a series of letters, predominantly written to the current occupants of the variety of buildings they lived in, from rentals to squats, Knight displays, with a deceptive ease through some remarkably difficult material, how it might be possible to acknowledge and explore one’s past without being overcome by it. As is already obvious, this is a book about survival, and Knight does so honestly, unflinchingly and gracefully, and yet, there remain elements that any survivor can’t help but carry, reminiscent of British writer Jeanette Winterson, when she wrote of her Pentecostal mother in her own, more straightforward memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Knopf, 2011) [see my review of such here]; Winterson’s mother would regularly lock the young Jeanette out of the house overnight, causing her adult self to still keep her own kitchen jar perpetually ajar. What does the idea of home mean to someone perpetually in motion? At the opening of the “Endnotes,” Knight writes:

home. A one-syllable word like walls, doors, and roof. A house. Something many of us take for granted. I was drawn to the concept of home and belonging for many years, and bits and pieces of both came to life in my first book, Braided Skin (Mother Tongue Publishing, 2015). After this dip-my-toes-in-the-water book, I saw an unfinished thread poking out from within the pages, a story, a missing piece that needed to be told in another form, another book. Dear Current Occupant has been in the works for many years, even before Braided Skin, but it took that first book to pave the way. It took reading and listening to many other voices speak of home and lack thereof for me to start piecing together the fragments of home I have so desperately been looking for.

Genres are crossing, bending, merging, melting, and morphing into new subgenres, and this is what happened with Dear Current Occupant. And just like genres, the same can be said when it comes to belonging—the bending. I can never let go of the bending. The squeezing to fit into a place, a home. How many doors have to slam shut? How many windows can I look out of, trusting that the view will remain the same?

The book exists in short bursts of prose, composed akin to a series of photographs; not composed in any particular order than that of memory, moving through and across time, experience and stories as they occur, from having to move suddenly, and with no more than what she could carry, to her mother’s continued drug use and an adult stranger’s hand upon her knee. As she responded as part of an interview with Amber Dawn for PRISM International:

Trauma affects memory. Memories are fragmented, distorted, unorganized, cracked, so that’s how I wrote the book. I thought about the ordering of the sections, which piece would lead into the next and why, but not in terms of chronological time. There were two sections I wanted to act as book ends, and I needed it to be clear that I was an adult in these. In the first piece, I am an adult going back to one of the old places and the young girl I am watching is me. I am in a non-verbal, observant conversation with myself. In the last piece, I am moving out of the last house I lived in with my mother. And I am writing to her, but I am writing to myself.

As much as this is a book of survival, part of the strength of this work is in knowing just how little the perspectives within have been explored, knowing that there are most likely numerous children who have been raised and perhaps still exist in poverty and uncertainty, whether in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, or anywhere else. What makes this book so engaging is in knowing that Knight writes from a perspective built from the inside, and not from the outside, peering in; and knowing that she managed to pull herself out, and not only survive, but thrive. And, throughout the events described in her memoir, this is a book that works, just as much, to honour the strength of her mother, writing:

Most people may read this book and think, wow, that’s really sad, or they may say they feel bad that a little girl experienced these things. But that’s not the purpose of this book. It took me twenty-five years to figure out that my mother saved my life. And even though it was most likely not her intention, she showed me what could happen if I didn’t have a dream. She showed me what could happen if I didn’t work hard. She showed me what could happen if I let the wrong people in, or left the door open for too long maybe, for me, she was the only one who could do that.

Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine

Wittgenstein wrote: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. Incomplete in several languages, I grow heartened in the places I rub against the edges of different tongues. The world’s languages push against this English I write, they work their way in, ingeniously trespass. Writing, I imagine my text will become a conduit for illegal traffic, a body to incubate a different type of future—fractured, polyphonic, cacophonous, but sutured with silence, with all that remains impossible to put into words.

Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe, most experiences are unsayable. They happen in a space that no word has ever entered and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

Another library, endless rows, enough space: the shelves are populated with volumes of complicated questions phrased with uncommon beauty. (Najwa Ali, “Writing, In Transit”)

Edited by Meghan Bell and the “Growing Room Collective” and co-produced through and by Vancouver’s Room Magazine and Caitlin Press is the anthology Making Room: Forty Years of Room Magazine (2017), an impressive four hundred pages plus of poetry, fiction, essays, translations and interviews covering the first four decades of a journal dedicated to publishing, supporting and promoting a series of diverse voices of Canadian writers. Sectioned into decades, part of what is fascinating about this volume is the way in which each section opens with an interview with an editor from that period, from co-founder Gayla Reid (“The First Decade (1975-1987)”), editor Mary Schendlinger (“The Second Decade (1988-1997”), editor Lana Okerlund (“The Third Decade (1998-2007)”) and former Managing Editor Rachel Thompson (“The Fourth Decade (2008-2016)”). The interviews provide an essential context for not only the journal and its activities, but the surrounding culture and communities. As co-founder Gayla Reid responds in her interview:

We felt very much that we belonged in the feminist landscape. High time that women had their own space to write about whatever we wanted. Women’s voices needed to be heard. Silent no more. There was no requirement that submissions should explicitly address sexism. We wanted to publish writing by women that was good writing, and we were convinced that there would be a lot of it around—and there was. At the time, writers typically got started by publishing in a little literary magazine (usually edited by men). So, Room would be a place where women could get started. Our voices could be heard, we could emerge, develop, blossom—all those growing images.

What becomes interesting, as well, is in beginning to understand, by creating a thoughtfully-edited journal of great writing, just how much Room helped to carve out a real and sustained space for feminist writing and conversation, opening the door to multiple writers, conversations and journals, including more recent publications such as Canthius and Minola Review. As Reid continues, in her interview:

At first we were busy choosing from submitted works. After a few years, we also sought out specific Canadian female writers. The first adventure we had in this area was a special issue on Québécoise feminist writers [4.1], which was tremendously exciting because we did not know their work—very little of it was available in translation

            In terms of literary writing, I’d say we were most often looking for what Doris Lessing called the “small personal voice,” which is what poetry and short fiction writing is particularly good at rendering.

Featuring work by seventy-eight Canadian writers—including Marie Annharte Baker, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Juliane Okot Bitek, Nicole Brossard, Lynn Crosbie, Leona Gom, Jane Eaton Hamilton, Nancy Holmes, Aislinn Hunter, Amy Jones, Fiona Tinwei Lam, Jen Sookfong Lee, Erín Moure, Dorothy Livesay, Susan Musgrave, Sina Queyras, Rebecca Rosenblum, Carolyn Smart, Ayelet Tsabari, Betsy Warland and others—Making Room attempts to track some of the shifts in and responses to the culture, from shifts in language to responding to rape culture as well as the Montreal Massacre, conversations around gender issues and multiple other subjects. Just as often, by simply providing a space, Room was at the forefront of some of those conversations, as Vancouver writer and editor Amber Dawn writes to end her introduction, “Overturning Scarcity: Forty Years of Abundant Change”:

Room changed CanLit when Cyndia Cole’s groundbreaking “No Rape No” (p. 24) was first published in the 1970s. Room has shown CanLit that women’s complex bodies are indeed a bit, with fiction like Juliane Okot Bitek’s “The Busuuti and the Bra” (p. 109) and with poems like jia qing wilson-yang’s “trans womanhood, in colour” (p. 376). Room continues to recognize that trans and non-binary gender narratives are an inherent and esteemed part of feminist literature by calling attention to Ivan Coyote’s “My Hero” (p. 195) and Lucas Crawford’s “Failed Séances for Rita MacNeil” (p. 364). By honouring work like Doretta Lau’s “Best Practices for Time Travel” (p. 388) and Eden Robinson’s “Lament” (p. 221, Room challenges tired notions that social justice and Indigenous speculative fiction are anything less than synonymous with great literature.

             As you read this anthology, you will undoubtedly regard it as a timely collection of seventy-eight exceptional literary works. Please also take a moment to marvel at how scarcity and shame have not claimed a single page, not a single line or word of this anthology. You, dear readers, and I, and the seventy-five remarkable contributors are both teaching and learning a new message, right now. Say it with me. There is Room. We do fit.