What do you do with an apology?
Groundling was written to make use of some letters I received between 2012 and 2016 from men who had abused me in my teens. The apologies were unprompted, came long after I had made a request of no-contact, and neither named what the writers had done to me, although both wished—in the same words—for the events to be “ancient history.” At the time, for me, these apologies felt threatening, like a reassertion of control. While I do name, in these poems, what happened, this book is more interested in what it might take to disentangle us from structures of abuse when accountability and justice are elusive, and hopefully in a way that breaks the cycle of abuse. While some poems in here are confessional lyric, several are erasure poems generated from these letters.
In matters of form, then, I am both the author and not the author.
Apology is both an action and a literary genre stretching back to antiquity (apologia), the chief function of which is to defend the reputation of the one issuing the apology. While apology, in practice, can be healing if done well and if accompanied by meaningful, reparative action, it can also be weaponized, used as a shield to protect the reputation of the entity that has caused harm, and used as a mechanism of silence against a victim. It can garner support from others to demand forgiveness. It can reassert or build power. But accountability, some kind of recognizable gesture of sincere change, is necessary for repair.
Confessional lyric, too, shares the kind of slippery double-nature that at first appears sincere in apologia. In these double-voiced erasures, my goal was to open an unsettling, but potentially reparative, liminal (if you’ll forgive the use of the word liminal!) space. The lyric “I,” appearing to be the direct representation of the poet’s voice on the page, is of course not the poet at all, but a projection meant for any reader to inhabit. Who is speaking, if the “I” is suddenly, simultaneously, multi-voiced, suddenly somewhere in the space between victim and abuser, where the violence was made possible?
Much has been made of forgiveness in pop psychology as
a passive process: “letting go” of what happened, “moving on.” This is a sense
of forgiveness more like denial, harmful to a person who has been victimized
and changed. At the same time, for our own good, we do need to find a
way to disentangle ourselves from shame, guilt, and self-blame, and sometimes,
too, from genuine affection for the people who hurt us. When we are terribly,
unforgivably hurt by someone we trust, we often get stuck—we assume we can’t
grow and that neither can they, that they will always be monstrous, their
characters (and everyone else’s) immutable. We are told often that we can
untangle this bind with forgiveness in this passive sense, an unsatisfying and
often harmful denial of the severity and seriousness of what happened to us,
and the lasting impact of the other person’s actions on our lives. In this
state, there is no possibility for repair.
With this little book I was trying to find my way underneath the things that
were too frightening for these men to admit and find something more human, to
make repair possible. The goal of these poems is not forgiveness, but
compassion. Compassion sees a person’s behaviour as harmful but sees them as
human. It recognizes the mirror self in that we, too, have the capacity to
cause unforgivable harm. Everyone does. In the absence of possible official
justice, these poems try to find the courage to approach the abuser and lower
the screen of apology, take the power away, level the playing field.
In the act of reading through compassion, the magic trick is that the “I” approaches itself and faces its own dissolution in the Other. This was, for me, the usefulness of form—erasure, in this context, is a form of seeing through.
“I see you,” neither forgives nor absolves. It recognizes.
Jennifer Baker is a poet and Adjunct Professor of English Literature living and working in Ottawa. She is the author of three chapbooks: Abject Lessons (above/ground press, 2014), Memento Mishka (with David Currie, Apt.9 Press, 2023) and Groundling (Trainwreck Press, 2021; above/ground press, 2023). Her poetry, reviews, and articles can be found in ottawater, Dusie, Canthius, The Bull Calf, Canadian Literature, The Journal of Canadian Poetry, and Robert Kroetsch: Essayist, Novelist, Poet (University of Ottawa Press, 2020), among others, and she is the 2022 honourable mention recipient of Arc Poetry Magazine’s Diana Brebner Prize.
