eat salt | gaze at the ocean, Junie
Désil
Talonbooks, 2020
how to write about
what you carry but don’t know?
strange
inheritance one carries
everyday code understandable if borne of Haitian soil
submerged in salt
sea bracing rivers falls (“origins | beginnings | of sorts”)
In Vancouver poet Junie Désil’s full-length poetry debut, eat salt | gaze at
the ocean, she writes in fractals, fragments; composing three sections of
poem sequences stitched together with phrases, research, lyric fragments,
memoir and first-person accounts. Her poems stagger, pause, call out and reach
for impossible distances. “i start with origins / i was not here i am not there,” she writes, as part of the opening
sequence, “ rather // the line from here
today tethers collective trauma
umbilical / centuries old // those bones a bridge over oceans /
triangulated passages [.]”
Of
Haitian ancestry, Désil is “Born of immigrant parents on the Traditional
Territories of the Kanien’kehá꞉ka on
the island known as Tiohtià꞉ke (Montréal),
raised in Treaty 1 Territory (Winnipeg).” “faces blue-glowed / unwavering our pursuit toward more numbness / feel but not too much / don’t look up / wear human-cancelling headphones resolutely /
earplugged / hearts too,” she writes, as part of the sequencec “zom-bie | / ‘zambi
/.” Utilizing depictions of the zombie, an image centred in Haitian culture but
referencing a variety of western adaptations as well, she works to write her
way into, or back into, being and belonging; discovering the roots of her
displacement and placing them. As she writes: “colonial words crowd your mouth / still your tongue / and / sever the
connections / between land language self [.]”
The
back cover of the collection offers: “eat salt | gaze at the ocean
explores the themes of Black sovereignty, Haitian sovereignty, and Black lives,
using the original Haitian zombie as a metaphor for the condition and treatment
of Black bodies. Interspersed with textual representations of zombies, Haitian
society, and historical policies is the author’s personal narrative of growing
up Black and Haitian of immigrant parents on stolen Indigenous Lands.” To zombie
is to leave, be brutalized or broken; to zombie is to become changed, often by
forces beyond one’s control. To animate, reanimate. To zombie is to become
soulless, having had one’s soul removed through violence, or changed through
the loss of culture, community or place. How does, through all of this, retain
or even regain one’s own humanity? “Just bone on bone,” she writes, “weary
grating questions [.]”
There
is such incredible pacing through this collection, composing a deeply personal
and ambitous book-length poem of great longing, hurt, heart, patience and precision.
“this poem you are reading took me three years to write.” she offers, close to
the end of the collection. “if we’re counting / and being accurate, it took me
over twenty years to write. i took a snapshot / of 2016. i counted over two hundred
deaths in one year. if we’re being / comprehensive, this right here does not
include the dead from the / transatlantic slave voyage, those who leapt to
their deaths, who died / beneath the cargo hold, once stolen from their
ancestral lands, those who / died in violent capitalist servitude, who died in
violent encounters with / white holders of enslaved Black people, this
list does not include those / who died scattered about the various colonialist projects
and expansions / on stolen lands.”
Désil
utilizes archival accounts of insurrections, of the slave trade and colonialism.
She writes of men working in the sugar fields, and contemporary violence upon
black lives and communities. She writes of Alice Walker and Nora Zeale Hurston;
she writes “I can’t breathe.” She writes of western depictions and references
to the zombie, attempting to understand how the term has shifted, evolved, and
remained intact. “(forgive) the repetitious,” she writes, “a long-winded
account / we tell stories twice / sometimes more different angles / so you feel the
story” (“transatlantic | zombie | passages”). Or, as she writes as part of the
third and final section, a sequence-section that shares the book’s title:
the point of all
this scudding back and forth through history
the
thing
about secrets in water a piece of lumber with
square
nails in it
ghost ship from
the 1850s they may not
stay submerged
we still need to talk about the ocean
In
Why must a black writer write about sex? (Toronto ON: Coach House Press,
1994), Haitian-born writer Dany Laferrière famously wrote that he composed his
first novel, How to Make Love to a Negro (Without Getting Tired) (Coach
House Press, 1987), in order to save his life. Through eat salt | gaze at
the ocean, Désil appears to be driven by a similar impulse, working to regain
what she has lost, as well as what a scattered community has lost, through the
ongoing violence of colonialism. At the end of the collection, she asks:
if i gaze at the
ocean
can i undo the
zombie curse
no longer be “proximate
to death”
i look at the
ocean
it breathes loudly
i stare at the ocean
and wonder
when will i feel
alive
rob mclennan’s most recent poetry
titles include A halt, which is empty
(Mansfield Press, 2019) and Life
sentence, (Spuyten Duyvil, 2019), with a further poetry title, the book
of smaller, forthcoming from University of Calgary Press.
