Author’s Note:
This excerpt is from a manuscript in progress which works with one of the most popular Western pulp novels ever writ- ten—Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer—and Western comics published in Canada from the 1940s and 1950s.
This project is deeply personal. Parts of my life could well have come from the plot of a cheap Western: I was named after Shane and come from a long line of alcoholics, farmers and ranchers. Growing up a white settler in the West means I lived most of my life in an imaginary landscape that hovered above the real. Attempting to see behind this painted screen is to try to see how Westerns (whether they be novels, movies or comics, old or new) continue to obscure and rewrite the history of North American colonization and settlement and the racism that fuels them. It’s Here All The Beauty I Told You About tries to unravel some of this, and see how settler stories of the Great Plains function within the larger apparatus of colonial mythmaking.
This is occupation
I said, square by square, song
By song.
We held each other
As we had asked to be
In the exit interview,
Our shirts buttoned
So they’d remain fastened
As we passed over the nail strips
Laid across the highway.|
The restrictions
Of the authorizations
We issued, were issued, our bodies
Lit by the soft
Searchlights scanning
The fence line. I will
Endeavour, I said,
To be a stronger
Citizen, my commitment
To annihilation
More true.
*
A woman in a hazmat suit finds a tooth in soft, sifted shovel-fulls of dirt.
The saskatoon berries near the concession fenceline, heavy with sugar and seed.
Still surprised by the force of it, a man tears up describing the life of his mother.
On this highway, you mustn’t stop to pick up ghosts.
Shane Rhodes is the author of six books of poetry, including Dead White Men, which won the 2018 Ottawa Book Award. Shane has also won the Alberta Book Award, the P. K. Page Founder's Award for Poetry and a National Magazine Gold Award. Shane lives in Ottawa, on unceded Algonquin, Anishinabek territory.