I started reading Harriet Books' review of Tawahum Bige's new book of poetry, Cut to Fortress:, and something clicked for me, but it felt more like whacking my funny bone. You know how that feels . . . excruciating for a split second. Here's how it went:
I was reading:
"Cut to Fortress, the debut collection by Tawahum Bige, a ... utselk'e Dene, Plains Cree poet, wrestles with topographies of colonization, both in Canada and within the speaker's personal relationships, which often involves confronting and contradicting received knowledge from authority figures. In one poem, a writing professor considers colonization 'too abstract', so the speaker concretizes the idea:
Colonization is a two-man saw:
a signed-in-blood, written-in-English
contract atop a forest cut to stumps
called fortress . . . "
Me: Oh my god, this hits me like I just submerged my whole head in a stream and opened my eyes under water. I raise my dripping head and look around and just for a second or two as my eyes / brain readjust to my surroundings, I see differently.
I see what someone else is feeling (!) and it snaps me to alertness and to a sense of anxious wonder, that I could have been so blind before. (Before when?) But already the blindness that I just snapped out of is returning, like a migraine of surreal colors across my field of vision.
Wait. Not so fast. What was that? Colonization is what?
"a two-man saw:
a signed-in-blood, written-in-English
contract atop a forest cut to stumps
called fortress . . ."
. . . "a two-man saw."
OK, got that, two men sawing with a big two-handled blade, back and forth, so neither one can say, "it's just me" or "it's just you". It's the two of them sawing this last tree down. Sweating, stupified by their labor, anxious to finish, so they can call it a day.
Next line: . . . "a signed-in-blood, written in English / contract". . . So, there is more to this. English is my native language. So, I'm implicated. Back in the poem . . . I am on one end of the saw, sawing.
I am revealed. I zoom in, and sure enough, one of those men is me! And I'm really exhausted. And I should be! Look at all the trees we have sawed down . . .an entire forest!
Now for the zinger! The forest is called "fortress".
What does that mean?
Quick, before the old blindness of the surreal colors of the rainbow brainfog sets in, the clear-cut forest is called "fortress".
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