Continent,
Aaron Boothby
McClelland & Stewart, 2023
Among those who are concerned about the ongoing harms of colonialism and genocide, a rule of composition is emerging. We must position ourselves within our texts; point to beginnings and structures that go far beyond the words we are about to share; and then inhabit our words with an understanding of how our bodies are touched and targeted or protected, in contrast to the lived experiences of others.
Aaron Boothby follows this rule in his collection Continent: he positions himself in relation to his family and ancestry, through his body, through his personal origin and history, and the movements across countries, and within as well as against the country, all amid the facts of colonialism, racism, exclusion, and genocide. As in all grand, new, patient writing, the rule disappears within the writing, carries it and supports it. It gives it character – think of massive exposed beams, logs, or poles, with traces of their past lives showing, as they support new life.
Boothby adds forms of his own to this rule. Within each section, a semi-regular form appears, cloud-like or in cloud formations, always wth some variations through blank spaces and pauses, without titles. Neither linear nor non-linear, these arrangements give us fragments of speech, interruptions, jumps – and the knowledge that there is more at the angles or behind each element than we can see from our vantage point.
Taken as a whole, and in each poem, Continent is a meditation on being a settler and on taking on an anticolonial stance and existence. It would be unfair to this meditation to comment on a single poem by itself, since the collection is held together by the oppositions and contrasts between the experiences on which the poems reflect. Each poem offers glimpses into what the others let us imagine without unveiling.
An example of this interrelatedness of poems can be found in one that recounts the discovery of unmarked graves at residential school sites (page 24) and in another that describes the blockades that Indigenous groups had been building in order to stop different colonial projects (page 27). In the first, we read “What’s name without place to be held” and “What’s name // when one is not held,” alongside a deploration that people have become “anomalies,” “aberrations.” In the second, he creates an arresting impact through a caesura that reproduces the work of the barricade: “they said with their flesh you do not // have permission.”
In these poems Boothby does not hesitate to place himself where the country places him. In this second poem, he places himself within the group represented by the government and opposed by the blockade: “We said we do / We said words like critical infrastructure.” And with this last line, we can see the work that well placed ambiguity can accomplish, showing here that words of negation become like critical infrastructure in the functioning of the settler state.
In this careful position, Boothby also displays his sensitivity to history and its repetition, tying the blockades of the moment to those of the Kanesatake Resistance, when “we threatened children.” In the first poem, he maintains a different form of distance with the people whose graves had been located and numbered, only indirectly referring to Cowessess First Nation and Kapawe’no First Nation through the numbers they announced. At the same time, he measures what he knows and mostly does not know about them, carrying enormous emotion through a great economy of words. In a similar fashion, he ends the second poem with what could be read as a utopian perspective of reconciliation, but which I read as a recognition of settler responsibility, since the “we” of the book is the settler “we” rather than the “we” of Indigenous and non-Indigenous togetherness:
If we are fragmented we still have common
ties
no matter
anguish our legal bonds our claims
These two poems offer but one example of the parallels that are created throughout this book. These are not mirrors, but continuities and refusals of realities that exist side by side. Within poems and across the collection, grand and powerful speech coexists with small, pointed questions; compare:
We who break
earths in thresholds (32)
what does a map of
our presence look like (48)
Through these poems Boothby explores the problem of saying “we,” the difficulties of being claimed by a country and favoured by its repressive institutions (the police is omnipresent in the collection, but wholly unconcerned with his speaker and turned toward Black bodies and queer bodies, who also resist it). His phrasing of “we” and reversals of expectations suggest a path to the recognition of collective responsibility that does not entail solidarity or support for the group as a whole – indeed, where “we” becomes a “curse” (26):
We called this our own country we were
herald of
ruin Who did we think would stop us
(23)
The myths that support the continuation of colonial, liberal Canada are a frequent target of the often direct, concrete critique that runs through the poems. “I have questions about Paradise,” we read, twice, and find that “Our myths are nightmares laws / their maintenance” (51).
Yet critique is not the central element in this collection. Boothby’s poems offer us ways to situate ourselves as well as ways to move differently, especially in their reflection on the relation of language to land, water, and sky.
These elements – these bearers of life – undo our language, and so undo our current relationship to them. By seeking a closer relationship to water and land, Boothby finds both transformation and lack of pre-existing profound relation: while “Water’s touches unsentence land” (26), he finds “what’s capitalized null in meadows” (59). He also connects to a different language that emerges from the land, water, and sky – not only in non-urban spaces, but within the city, or as city. He attempts to hear this language, to hear what things call themselves. He lets himself be taken away by the “syntax undertow” (60), to join his voice to a different choral than the Canadian settler “we.” The finality of this attention of the relation of language to land is practical and existential at once: “Could I learn perhaps to be gusted // to be guest” (65) – a possibility without an interrogation.
