Oh Witness Dey!, Shani Mootoo
Book*hug, 2024
What I love about Shani Mootoo’s new poetry collection, Oh Witness Dey!, and what I loved about Cane / Fire before it, is how Mootoo’s work is alive and breathing on the page. Her poems take up space, aren’t anchored to the traditional margins on a page, and spread out to raise their voices and make themselves heard. The craft, in all her poetry, is clear, and the great amount of thought and care that’s put into deciding where lines begin and end, and where they dance across the page—or even when the font changes in size—is poetic architecture of the highest order. In Oh Witness Dey!, Mootoo continues with her examination of colonial violence, speaking to the way newcomers migrating to various countries must always first encounter and learn to live within patriarchal and oppressive structures, but must also, at the same time, fight furiously against them. The energy that would take is exhausting just to even imagine.
In “We,” a long poetic sequence that sits almost as a centrepiece in the middle of the book, the poet explores family ancestry, recounting an encounter with a university professor who poses ignorantly framed questions about identity. The professor asks her student what it feels like to come from other places, and then cockily assumes that she already knows the answer, just based on her own academic research: “she advises/Regale us, rather, with tales of/Contemporary Indo-indenture despair/And the cut-out mother mother mother mother tongue.” The speaker thinks, “What am I, wherever I go, if not somebody’s/forever-victim/forever-coolie?” and then poses questions of her great-great grandfather: “did you walk? how? with verve? were you /running? from what? to what? at what speed? approximate for the sake/of story—were you, for instance, panting? looking over your shoulder?” Was his departure calm, or frantic? Prepared for, or unexpected? The speaker pleads, “talk to me even if I don’t understand—and then so I understand, in hindi, bhojpuri, hinglish, whatever, just talk, pepper—or haldi, as you wish—your/my origin story with aromas, how about some recipes? hardships, hardships overcome…” Through it all, the reader is left sharply aware that the professor hasn’t given the student the space to speak, but has spoken over them, in true colonial fashion. The voice that has been erased is that of the student, the person who has the actual lived experience, and who is searching to find more parts of themselves as someone who understands diaspora from the inside.
Another theme that weaves itself through the book is the racism that is inherent to the European systems of historical and systemic colonization of the world. Mootoo’s great-grandparents were brought to Trinidad from India by the British as indentured labourers. The poet herself was born in Ireland, raised in Trinidad, and now lives in Southern Ontario. The idea of movement, of migration and the slave trade, as well, is a current in these poems. In “Brown Girl in the Ring,” the speaker says, “Two-timer I am, infatuated/With the country in which I love/Yet yearning always for the one I left behind//I scratch my head until/Inner sores weep,” and refers to the European explorers who sailed the ocean in search of ‘new worlds.’ Those worlds weren’t ‘new’ to the people who already lived there, and so weren’t available to be ‘discovered’ as they already existed.
In “The Nevertheless Queen,” the speaker refers to Spain’s Queen Isabella, as well as to the vicious damage that was done by the Inquisition and Catholicism. This wave of brutal colonization is full of “royal fanaticism and paranoia on steroids.” The damage that is done to Caribbean nations, under Isabella’s ruin, is obvious as the poet refers to “Isa dear” as the force behind “all those expulsions, your forced conversions/The Inquisition, the burnings/The centuries you spawned of/Caribbean poverty/Blood and killing.” This historical background, so multi-layered and complex, is beautifully conveyed in Mootoo’s work, with poems that stretch out and take up space to allow the poet to explore and convey the multiplicity of historical timelines, identities, and voices of those both dead and alive.
In “Being Here,” the poet addresses her role as a settler on Indigenous land, as well, noting that displaced people from other places have come to Canada, landing and settling on First Nations lands. The poet writes: “I, too, have settled here…I, too, had not asked, nor was permission granted/What is the weight of gratitude brandished/For what’s not given, but rather, taken.” The complexity of a migrant’s place in a historically colonized country is complex, and multi-layered. Mootoo alludes to treaties on ceded as well as unceded land, writing: “I endeavour to be forever cognizant of my complicated good fortune/not as uninvited guest, not as an admitted settler mea culpa-ing/nevertheless onward/but as one who stands in every way I can with Land’s protectors,/Water’s protectors…in the struggle against, a through line of past, of contemporary/injustices/against Land, her First inhabitants, all her descendants.” Colonizing empires that invaded and pillaged continents and countries around the world ended up shifting people from their Indigenous lands, and the ripple effect is felt on a global scale with waves of migration.
Oh Witness Dey! also touches on the ways in which humans have so thoughtlessly treated the environment. In “Cosmic,” the speaker talks about her friendships: “Global, I, my circles and friends, we surely are,” moving beyond specific geographic communities and regions because of access to long distance flights and the zoom of virtual technology. Further on in the poem, Mootoo refers to “the original globalization: empire expansion,” writing of various wars, as well as the downfalls of global travel. Global warming and the climate crisis are alluded to in “Wondrous Cold,” with a poem that touches on “Air pollution from wildfire smoke” and “The castles we have built:/Nuclear, biological, chemical.” Human greed to colonize and extract natural resources is addressed, too, when the poet writes of the “Decline in bee and bat biodiversity/Pandemics bioengineered,” and the “quench” for the “insatiable hunger” of capitalism that is big business around the globe.
This collection is rich in its content, as all of Mootoo’s poetry is, so it’s a thorough and rich immersion in overlapping voices and textures that requires the reader to read carefully and listen closely. One voice might ask a question or make a statement, while another might weave itself in to show—even in the way the poet structures and lays out her work on the page—that there is not one single way of witnessing the damage done by European explorers and monarchs as they made their way around the world. So many places of origin, so many people forcibly displaced by slavery and indentured labour, and all their voices seem to speak as you read these pieces. Readers need to listen, to not speak, and then they might hear what’s being said.
In some ways, it feels a bit heretical to try and review this collection because it is all about listening rather than speaking. The reader is asked to open their mind and heart, to thoughtfully consider the various strands of identity or origin, the many movements of people around the globe through history (mostly forced upon people and not undertaken by choice or free will), and to consider the role of witnesses. As readers, we become witnesses to the speakers in Mootoo’s poems, but we also become more aware of the ways in which our own settler ancestors behaved very, very poorly. Perhaps, in reckoning with our own ancestral histories, we become witnesses to the potential of how we can hope to work together make the world a more equitable place. Oh Witness Dey! calls its readers to think through our own family histories, to listen to our own voices and stories, and to ask questions of them so that we can examine ways in which to move forward in making the world a better, brighter place than it is right now.
Kim Fahner lives and writes
in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest full collection of poems is Emptying the
Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022) and she's just published a poetry chapbook, Fault
Lines and Shatter Cones (Emergency Flash Mob Press, 2023). She is the First
Vice-Chair for The Writers' Union of Canada (2023-25), a member of the League
of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada.
Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46
Publishing in Fall 2024. She may be reached via her author website at
www.kimfahner.com