Foreword

What is this book? That should be an easy question to answer, but Bertrand Bickersteth has the unwieldly mind of a poet, and, in Numinous Animal, he lets readers into that kaleidoscope world. He reveals history where we’ve only known blanks. He argues for unity where authorities have consistently portrayed contradictions. He finds fractures and fragments in narratives previously perceived as linear, whole, and uncomplicated. By Bickersteth’s own admission, he has written an “odd” book, and he wonders how its wide-ranging ideas come together or if they should even come together at all.

To summarize the project most simply (too simply!), Bertrand Bickersteth has created an original typeface formed from cattle brands of Black cowboys, and Numinous Animal explains why he did so and what he hopes to achieve with this esoteric alphabet. Bickersteth claims that the creation of his new font is a political act of reclamation. In explaining the project, Bickersteth shares his own personal history, the history of Black cowboys, particularly in Alberta, and some of the history of Sierra Leone, where he was born and from where he moved to Canada as an infant. In short, then, Numinous Animal provides a history of Bertrand Bickersteth, as well as a rational and political context for Bertrand Bickersteth’s font.

But the book does more. To attempt to summarize this text is to diminish it. Numinous Animal is a poet’s creation — complex, non-linear, fluid, unexpected, full of juxtapositions and original leaps. Is it a history? A theoretical treatise on race? A decolonization project? A poem? A memoir? An instruction booklet? An introduction of a new font? A genealogy? A reflection on the role of poetry? A rebellion against historical and ongoing stories of erasure? A linguistic analysis? A research report on immigration history and its effects? An act of theft (wherein Bickersteth finds a history stolen from him and steals it back)? Is the book a gift? A reclamation? A promise?

Yes. Numinous Animal is a bit of all of that. The narrative is sprawling and unrestrained, as are its ideas. Sometimes Bickersteth looks backwards to untold, forgotten histories, and other times he reaches forwards to a promise for tomorrow. Sometimes his style is academic and formal, other times relaxed and colloquial, and, at yet other points, poetic. Sometimes the author shows up on the page rigorously interrogative. Other times he comes across as playful or self-deprecating or nostalgic. Sometimes he tells stories. Sometimes he dismantles stereotypes. Sometimes he shares strategies (for recovering lost histories, for understanding identity and hybridity, for survival).

Each time I come back to the pages of Numinous Animal, I find a different kind of text, a different way of knowing, a fresh understanding. I try to hold the book up to the light, get a good grasp on it, know it for what it really is — but full control slides away. Each attempt is a kind of failure in that I always fall short, again, of being able to claim full understanding, to clearly name it. But each attempt is also a success because with each reading, I see new aspects, another throughline, a fresh insight to explore, an original idea to play with. This slippery, sometimes ineffable, quality of Numinous Animal, its resistance to easy labels, is perfect, given the insistence with which it calls into question the very act of naming. Leave it to a poet to make certain that the structure and style mirror the content.

In his reflection on hybridity and identity, Bickersteth poses many interesting questions specifically relevant to himself and his own experiences, like how can a Black writer appropriate Black history? He explores whose histories he can claim and whose stories apply to him, helping to build his own story as an African in Alberta and an Albertan out of Africa. He also poses questions more wider reaching, questions which might apply to any reader’s experience, like how do we relate to home when home feels inhospitable? Or how does one create a coherent identity out of a fractured and sometimes opaque past? That’s one thing that becomes very clear in these pages: Bickersteth quite likes questions. He never passively accepts any (hi)stories. He always investigates, questions, disrupts.

In fact, we might say that the alphabet-by-cattle-brand project has its genesis in a series of Bickersteth’s questions — what if I created my own typeface? How would I do so in a way to capture this lost history (an erasure that has caused us to forget that one in four cowboys was Black)? Is it even possible to create a font out of cattle brands? What is the connection between cattle brands and fashion brands? How does the physical reality of branding as scarring connect, literally and metaphorically, to the history — and erasure — of Black cowboys?

And so on.

Bickersteth’s questions are infinite.

This interrogative spirit is central to Numinous Animal and to Bickersteth’s larger project. I suspect that the same energetic, insatiable curiosity is a key quality of Bickersteth himself. Numinous Animal is the product of that beautiful curiosity. My hope is that readers meet the book with the same deep, playful, dynamic curiosity. Doing so will be rewarded and rewarded again, as the pages offer up new gifts with each new engagement.

Angie Abdou

Writer in Residence Program Committee,

Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Athabasca University