The Response of Weeds. A Misplacement of Black Poetry on the Prairies,
Bertrand Bickersteth
NeWest Press, 2020
Through fur traders, singers, writers, actors, and cowboys, Bickersteth invokes women and men who lived through their own erasure, and whose memory was subsequently erased from the history and stories of the Prairies. He also places himself clearly within the collection, indicating where other speakers appear, and referring to himself, notably in the section titled “Now I’m the One that’s Looking” where many poems begin with variations on the phrase “Now I’m looking at a field.” He propulses us into a here and now that remains within the flow of time, a moment in history that maintains the past within itself, that continues it, that is not entirely novel: “This is my first sighting of this / particular field. / I know it yet. / Without any reflection or remembering / or effort of any sort / the image of this field relaxes / against some familiar notch in my brain.” (“Second Sightings,” 59)
Blues and jazz musicians are also among these historical figures – and several poems are themselves either bluesy, or openly take on structures from the blues like “The Athabasca” which by its ending stanzas morphs into a blues. Likewise, throughout the third of three poems titled “Three Mills on the Prairies” Bickersteth uses a straightforward blues structure. And in the remarkable “Out of Darkness” he begins with the same three-part repetition and reversal structure (“today I came [...] Said I came [...] but I’m sitting / here now [...],” 66), repeats a passage that functions as a chorus, sparingly uses rhyme, and repeats many lines and words, creating through contraction and spacing of repetition a rhythm that is at once obsessive and calming.
The collection is formally diverse, showing the plurality not only of experiences but also of the structures that frame them: very short poems, a story dipped in irony (“The North Saskatchewan”), a series of tercets (“The Magpie’s Place”), an occasional placement of words off lines that shows shifts in balance, found poetry (“Notice”). Many poems offer lines with few or single words, adding to the carefulness of the speech, a slow cadence that demands attention and knows how much there is to teach to most readers. Others offer longer lines that create a space for reflection and allow for the occasional telling of stories. In other cases, an enumeration (“Harlem Farming”), and a commentary on a writer (Ralph Ellison, in “The Invisible Man on the Prairies”) manifest the direct ties between Black communities across the continent, showing these historic ties and reestablishing them in the present all at once.
One of the strengths of this project of writing about the Prairies, of re-placing Black poetry on the Prairies, is the attention given to relations between Black and Indigenous peoples. They range from displacement, claims to land, and juxtaposition to kinship, marriage, and dual Black Indigenous belonging. The stories of Henry, Dave, and Harry Mills recall how some of such kinships were created, and how Black Indigenous people have been forced to choose one belonging over another. The image of the edge of the reserve goes a long way in illustrating the divisions created around whiteness and its lack by colonialism. Poems also allude to the misnaming of Black and Indigenous peoples through made-up or parallel derogatory names – which Bickersteth refuses to erase in order to show, with care, their violence (“The Bow” and “King Kong on the Prairies”).
In placing or misplacing Black poetry on the Prairies, Bickersteth shows the relations of Black people to the land by a rigorous naming of places. This naming creates a space within Alberta, which is its primary (mis)place, and extends it to Montana, Oklahoma, Kansas, Michigan, and Harlem. The borders of Alberta are part of the situation, yet their artificiality is revealed by the paths taken by Black people and their relations to and on the Prairies. This is especially true in the first section, “Rivers,” which follows the paths traced along rivers; whereas the second section, “On the Prairies,” speaks of imagined places far from Alberta which serve to define its space as lacking (the North pole, El Dorado, for instance – but also reserves). As the named geography is set, the latter sections allow for an exploration of lived geography, where names of places cease to matter as much as what memory attaches to them.
Erasure and invisibility are the central themes of this collection, invisibility being the result of a wilful erasure. An analysis of these themes would help counter prevailing myths, as does simply reading this book. And Bickersteth has published other pieces on this erased history of Black people on the Prairies – one very recently, as I’m (finally) writing this, on “Slavery and the Making of Alberta.” But the book is also about crossing borders and refusing limitations, and about the active role played by Black people on the Prairies and their symbolic effects, writing about the invisible man that “More than just looked over / he is inverted presence / that unexpectedly / shapes / the landscape you / walk on // unrevealed / unvisible / unwholed.” (“The Invisible Man on the Prairies,” 73) There would be a lot to be said about incredible poems such as “The Wrongness of a Word,” “The Magpie’s Place,” “Space Overhungry for City,” and “Accidental Agriculture” where Bickersteth uses poetic devices to create surprises and bring together beauty, sorrow, and action.
If poetry is meant to let readers experience what generally remains private to the writer, The Response of Weeds fulfills this intention by its focus on what Canadians, and especially white Canadians, have been taught to ignore. It involves a redirecting of sight, and an explanation to go with the sights. While much is described and expressed through polyphony, every voice also speaks directly, naming, explaining. Such direct passages often shift slowly into more abstract, illustrated ideas, as in the poem “Noticing”: “Notice how / invisible black is / when / you grow it in / storied soil / deep and dark / nurtured by an / anecdotal composition / rooted in / gleysolic hyperbolic / and stemming from / weightless whiteness” (27). In three titles (Notice, Noticing, Noticed) Bickersteth calls us to notice, take note, see, finally – and pulls us along once we do so that we do not simply see, but transform our vision of ourselves and of the Prairies, of the Canadian project.
