10    Poetry

Learning Through Embodied Language

Sheila Stewart

The way my words yearn to be embodied, visceral, pulled from the mind’s dull corridors to the world’s bright flesh.

Maureen Scott Harris, from “Epistemology:
The World Speaks,” Slow Curve Out (2012)

November 11th

In the library basement my yoga teacher

announces a few minutes of remembrance

—the whole building silent. I prefer

yoga’s own silence.

My friend beside me leaving a lifetime’s

teaching to write poetry—her last

Remembrance Day assembly. Final time

leading a straggle of children

into the auditorium. The principal talks

peace, but fills the students with Flanders Fields.

(I was good at standing still.) My friend tells me

of Nathan who screams in class as if a bayonet

pierces his side. She says to the children,

Have you ever been hurt? I have. She lets

them see her cry. The statue in the park

tells us courage is a man on horseback.

Grandfather returned from the war,

beat Gran. (My uncle told my brother told

me.) For the woman in the far corner

coming to yoga class is an act of courage—

leaving her room, combat. Stillness

on any ordinary day, an act

of remembering and not. Let

your spine sink into the ground.

(Stewart 2012, 72)

What does “yoga’s own silence” have to do with pedagogy and decolonization? Yoga has everything to do with my own embodied learning, helping me to ground myself and quiet the busy, critical mind that tells me I am not enough. It helps create a sense of space and rest, from which I am more open to learning of all kinds. The Saturday yoga class I have been attending for the past fifteen years also creates community and supports the yoga practice I am developing at home, which in turn supports my writing process.

Conscious embodiment might be described as an attempt to decolonize body and spirit. Sheila Batacharya (2010, 6) describes embodied learning as “a deepening of one’s awareness of sentient-social lived experience.” Her work highlights how our experiences of our own and other people’s bodies are shaped by social location, dominant discourses, and material realities. As Batacharya points out, the individualistic New Age ways in which yoga has often been taken up in North America “tend to efface social relations of power” (6), and she challenges us to work with a more complex social understanding of embodiment.

Much occurs in Batacharya’s hyphen between “sentient” and “social.” The concept of sentient-social embodiment helps me think about what poetry attempts to do through language. Poetry is poised in the moment between the sentient and the social, a moment of dialogue. Many poets try to be with and write from the senses, bodily awareness, context, as well as from their poetic interests. Poetry also occurs between the psyche and the social, a place of bodily knowing attempting to become words, with both unconscious and conscious aspects of mind engaged. I do not want to make broad claims about poetry and decolonization, and certainly not all poetry is written or read from a decolonizing point of view, but I find the perspectives of embodiment and decolonization helpful as I consider my intentions as a poet.

What do I mean when I talk about decolonizing body and spirit? Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang’s “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor” provides a caution against the “ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences” (Tuck and Yang 2012, 2). They point out that “decolonization” is often used in a way that separates it from the current uncomfortable realities of colonization, including the material reality of settlers living on Indigenous land. They argue that decolonization cannot be subsumed under the causes of social justice, critical methodologies, or antiracism; rather, decolonization is about the “repatriation of Indigenous land and life” (1) and “offers a different perspective to human and civil rights based approaches to justice, an unsettling one, rather than a complementary one” (36).

In Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (1986), novelist and Kikuya scholar Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o explains how culture is a key tool of imperialism. Ngũgĩ is well-known for having made the decision to write in Giyuku, his mother tongue, rather than in English. “The effect of a cultural bomb,” he writes, “is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves” (Ngũgĩ 1986, 3). I agree with Tuck and Yang that the word decolonization has slid into common use among educators, and I appreciate their caution about using it as a metaphor. I find it helpful to think about decolonizing the mind, spirit, and body, and also to think with Tuck and Yang about how “decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools”(2012, 1). Decolonization is not just a metaphor; the material reality of processes of colonization is deeply entwined with the process of naming and struggle through language.1

My work is situated in the expanding field of poetic inquiry (Butler-Kisber 2010; Prendergast, Leggo, and Sameshima 2009a, 2009b; Thomas, Cole, and Stewart 2012). Poetic inquiry developed from arts-informed research (Knowles and Cole 2008) and arts-based research (Finley 2008), which not only challenge us to think about how form and content work together but also attempt to make research accessible beyond the academy. Poetic inquiry asks questions about how poetry can be a mode of knowing, being, and telling. “Poetry helps us confront ourselves in language; poetic inquiry sheds light on this confrontation” (Thomas, Cole, and Stewart 2012, xii). Poetry as inquiry contributes to new kinds of knowledge in such fields as education (Guiney Yallop 2010), health (Galvin and Todres 2012), and social work (Gold 2012). Poetic inquiry can be a means of analysis, presentation, and representation. As inquiry, it invites different kinds of knowing, including the awareness of not knowing.

My poem “November 11th” brings together themes of memory, schooling, trauma, vulnerability, and the embodiment sought through yoga. In this chapter, I blend poetry and prose in an attempt to disrupt traditional academic language and find ways of writing that are more attuned to my efforts at embodiment. I approach embodiment, pedagogy, and decolonization as an arts-informed researcher, former literacy practitioner-researcher, and poet, inquiring into shame and the challenges of listening and learning across social differences. I write from the position of a settler, a middle-class Irish Canadian, living on the traditional lands of the Mississaugas of the New Credit First Nation in Toronto. Poetic writing can be a way to dwell in the complex space of connections and disconnections among body, word, and place, where learning, integration, and healing are possible. How does this relate to decolonization and the land where I live and write? Tuck and Yang’s examination of decolonization prompts me to consider the ways in which embodiment may allow for a greater tolerance of being unsettled, of inhabiting an uncomfortable space of learning.

A Body Cloaked in Shame

Understandings and practices of embodiment are used in various social service and alternative educational settings, including adult literacy (Miller and King 2011). In the community-based literacy work I did in the late 1980s and 1990s, the other literacy workers and I drew on understandings of learning as holistic and incorporated body, mind, emotion, and spirit into our work.2 My work and subsequent literacy research (Stewart 2008a, 2008b, 2009) was influenced by Jenny Horsman’s examination of the effects of violence on learning, most notably her book Too Scared to Learn (1999). Horsman writes about how her research participants pointed out that “issues of low literacy and violence are both hidden. Neither have a public face, both are unspeakable, and to experience either is seen as shameful” (29).

In literacy classes, students speak of shame, which is shaped by how our society views limited literacy skills as shameful, as an individual lack. Everyday discourses of literacy—which circulate, for example, in government documents, movies, and daily conversation—come from a deficit model in which the person with low literacy skills is lesser than people with stronger literacy skills (Auberbach 1996; Caspe 2003). I recall meeting with a student years ago who spoke of how badly she felt, how much she wanted to get work, how her friends said she could get work if only she could learn to read and write. This particular student had a developmental disability and lived in extreme poverty. Work might be a possibility, but learning to write her name could be a place to begin and a way to value what she did know. In teaching and learning, we often begin with shame, vulnerability, and other intense feelings entwined with coming forward to ask for help and wanting to learn. Who wants to be identified by something they lack?

Similarly, it is uncomfortable to describe oneself as a “victim” of violence. Parker Palmer (2004, 169) defines violence as “any way we have of violating the identity and integrity of another person.” To this definition, Judy Murphy (2008, 180n1) adds some examples: “Experiences of violence can include spousal abuse, child abuse, fleeing homelands because of oppression or war, and marginalization through issues of poverty, class, race, lack of education and/or culture.” Shayna Hornstein (2008, 212) defines violence as “inherently an abuse of power—whether that power is manifested as physical assault, sexual violation, shaming or humiliation.” I was drawn to literacy work in part by a connection with literacy students who had experienced violence of various kinds. Research I conducted with literacy practitioners, on their reasons for being involved with literacy work and their connection with violence, pointed to the complexity of listening. Practitioners talked about the challenges for students and themselves of trust, voice, comfort, hope, and shame (Stewart 2008a).

When we work with students who have experienced multiple kinds of violence, including physical violence, we see trauma in their lives but may not wish to see it in our own. Certainly, there are degrees of violence and trauma, but seeing trauma as belonging to others rather than ourselves can be an attempt to a distance ourselves from it. Whether personal, systemic, or vicarious, trauma is endemic in our society, and its experience is multiplied through the media. It helps me to understand my own life when I recognize that violence is more than physical.

Sara Ahmed (2004) writes about the intersubjective, intercorporeal nature of shame. In her chapter “Shame Before Others,” she refers to “the phenomenological experience of shame in the intercorporeal encounters between others” (103). The social nature of shame is highlighted by other thinkers as well, such as psychologist Judith Lewis Herman (1992). We feel shame before another person, even when the other has become an internalized voice. According to feminist philosopher Sandra Bartky (1990, 85), “shame is the distressed apprehension of the self as inadequate or diminished.” Shame often involves concealment (85), and trauma (Herman 2007). Shame can permeate learning and often arises in a rupture in relationship, making it a potential barrier to learning.

The visceral experience of shame may include blushing and cringing. Maria Mazziotti Gillan (2010) writes about shame and shaming in families in her poem “Betrayals,” which begins with the following stanzas:

At thirteen, I screamed,

“You’re disgusting,”

drinking your coffee from a saucer.

Your startled eyes darkened with shame.

You, one dead leg dragging,

counting your night-shift hours,

you, smiling past yellowed, gaping teeth,

you, mixing the eggnog for me yourself

in a fat dime store cup,

how I betrayed you,

over and over, ashamed of your broken tongue,

how I laughed, savage and innocent,

at your mutilations.

I am struck with the words “savage and innocent,” words that generally portray a dualism in our thinking-feeling; here, the poet joins them with “and.”

Embodied/Disembodied

Embodiment scholars, including Batacharya (2010), discuss embodiment as a way to move beyond the Cartesian duality of mind and body. I use poetry to bring mind and body closer.

Autumn

breath shallow          I flit from articles to books

leaf through dissertations

trying to write

embodiment is not body

pedagogy is not teaching and learning

decolonization not          due in two weeks

today I read, walked in High Park, went to yoga

thought about the chapter I did not write

Tomorrow will be better, tell myself.

I have a start, tell myself.

I don’t write in a scholarly enough way.

How much should I reflect on my own experience? I ask.

Beyond getting the reader’s attention, what is the purpose of poetry? I ask the reader.

are the mice in the ceiling really raccoons, how much would

it cost to remove them? has my daughter in Halifax eaten

dinner?          when will the call come?—

Granny or Granddad died, who will go first,          then what?

I sit at the computer          lost

in pace

check past email

call the dog

step into the sentient world

sidewalk burnt, red and gold

The authority and evaluative nature of academic writing can fill me with fear—of saying something I regret, not saying much at all, being inappropriate, not being smart enough: failure. In scholarly writing, I try to bring tensions to the surface and be clear about what I think. Making a poem is a different process, using words to create a cluster of meanings; an energetic working with words draws in the reader, often evoking sensory experience and memory. I use poems in academic writing to bring in more of the body, the difficult-to-say, other modes of knowing, and the unexpected.

In writing about embodiment, I want to dislodge logic from its pride of place. Poet and essayist Maureen Scott Harris (2004, 74) begins one of her poems with the line “To speak directly would be a new thing.” Poetry can be used as a way of hiding, as can academic writing and other kinds of prose. Prose usually pushes me to speak more directly, but in some cases, I can be more direct and clear in a poem. Prose works with the conscious mind trying to become more conscious; poetry’s purview is wider, working with the unconscious, fragments and shards of memory, and bodily sensation becoming conscious. Poetry prompts us to ask, What counts as knowledge? Working at the border of poetry and prose, I am aware of the privileging of prose in academic writing, but I also do not want to set up “academic writing” as a straw man. Multiple forms of writing and scholarship are needed, as we struggle to think beyond the binaries.

Beginning doctoral studies in my late forties, I encountered traces of my earlier embodied and disembodied states.

Reading Room

The next generation is taller,

smooth skin, angora sweater,

jeans slim over hips, a bit of belly

exposed.

I look at gowned men in ornately

framed portraits, try to imagine

the past.

My young full-faced self, schooled

in another era, another university’s

similar rooms, dark with regal

wood.

I have been buried in the stacks without

a word. Being watched, as if that were

enough.

My essay on Donne,

undone.

Studying philosophy and English at Queen’s University in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I felt “buried in the stacks without / a word.” I very rarely spoke in class and struggled to write essays. I looked up literary criticism on poems, and the weight of scholars’ words and dusty hardcover books, almost all by long-ago European or American men, crushed my words. “Being watched” or feeling I was being watched, I often left my body as I sat in class or walked down the street. My spoken and written voices “failed to thrive,” to use the words of Maureen Scott Harris (2004, 52). Having been a child well trained to obey authority, I failed to find my own authority or relationship with texts, except to adore them and be intimidated by them. Harris writes, “I have floated rootless and drowning, held my tongue, denied the flood” (52).

Living in a Girl’s Body

My understanding of embodiment is rooted in my experience of being a United Church minister’s only daughter growing up in Stratford and Waterloo, in small-town southwestern Ontario. I was born a few years after my parents and brothers emigrated from Northern Ireland in the 1950s. My father served as a Presbyterian minister in a village in Ireland and was excited to join a more open-minded church in Canada. My mother did not want to leave Ireland and her large family. My father’s profession meant that my parents and brothers arrived in Brechin, Ontario, to a furnished manse and a respected place in the community.

My Protestant Northern Irish background situated me in the mainstream of the communities I grew up in. In the 1950s and 1960s, the 12th of July Orange Parade was still a major cultural event in many parts of Ontario. Even though my parents had recently arrived in Canada, I was never asked, Where are you from?

“I was good at standing still”—it’s a line in parentheses, an aside, in this chapter’s opening poem. Comportment, posture, and reserve were important in my family. I watched my mother, other women, and girls for clues as to how to move, how to be, what to say, and what to think. My father was seen as the one who “knew” in our home; my mother’s silence and constant support for my father seeped into my bones. Living in the manse, we attended church because we had to. I notice a struggle to include my girl’s body in this section, in spite of its presence in the words of the title. An absent body.

My first poetry collection, A Hat to Stop a Train, is an examination of my mother’s life and my relationship with her (Stewart 2003). I approached my mother through memories of her stories of childhood, her clothes and hats, her illnesses and role as a minister’s wife. I lingered with memories, attempting to better know my mother and myself.

When I look back at A Hat to Stop a Train, I find my mother’s often frail body as well as glimpses of my childhood body.

Service

Mum touches my knee to make me stop swinging my feet beneath the pew. Her shiny, black purse sits between us. Mum touches my hand when I fidget and shuffle. She looks at me when I bang the pew in front by mistake.

She used to bring me a little notebook to draw and write in. Now I read the bulletin, the little offering envelopes, the welcome card for visitors, Alpha and Omega above the organ pipes. I use the red ribbon attached to the hymnbook to mark the first hymn and envelopes for the others. I count the men and the women in the choir, the bald heads, the glasses. When the choir stands to sing, I watch the orange smudge of lipstick on Mrs. Thrasher’s front teeth.

Then we get to stand up and sing. Taking a deep breath, I belt out the hymn. Mum’s tone deaf. When she went to piano lessons, her teacher taught her how to cover butter boxes instead. Mum mouths the words. Sometimes, I hear a small thin voice coming from her. Mum likes to hear me sing. She says it drowns out her mistakes. (Stewart 2003, 53)

This poem, written around 1999, was part of my early inquiry into the role of the church in our family, which I continue to this day. My writing practice is entwined with efforts to understand a disquieted childhood, shaped by my mother’s ill health, my brother’s mental health issues, and the church’s notions of God looming over being sexualized as a child. I try to illuminate my journey to re-engage bodymind and investigate how trauma shapes lives and learning. Good writing stands at the edges of personal and social transformation, as an invitation. Writers debate about the ways in which writing may or may not be healing; I believe some art to be profoundly healing for the artist and, potentially, for the audience/reader. Writing within the form of a poem contains its own pleasure and ways to work with difficult material. By healing, I mean something different from seeking individual happiness; similarly, in writing poetry, my desire is not to escape into the joy of lyric.

As a child, I was trained to use words in tactful, solicitous ways, upholding the sanctity of family and church, institutions that create and re-create dynamics of authority in multiple ways. Finding new ways to use words is slow and often painful. I have been writing in journals from the age of ten, starting with a three-month visit to Ireland; through my teen years, I wrote to pour out feelings that had few other venues, to feel less alone, and to hold onto threads of self. Writing sometimes felt secretive and I feared my journal would be read.

When I was discussing this chapter with poet Julie Berry, she asked, “Do you remember a time when you didn’t feel ashamed of your body?” (Berry, pers. comm., 29 October 2012). I struggle to remember my childhood body and realize that my poetry is an attempt to write my way back to a more embodied sense of self.

The manse was also a privileged and book-filled place to grow up. My family background placed me comfortably in the centre of school discussions about where parents were from and what they did. There were no secrets there. The privilege of being part of dominant culture was invisible to me.

Being a good girl at home and church prepared me to be the same at school, quiet and obedient. What could be said in the halls of the church and the manse? Be careful what you say. If you say the wrong thing in the wrong place, it may come back to haunt you. That which is unspoken or unexpressed festers and corrodes.

Poetry as Embodied Learning

In Knowing Her Place, poet and qualitative researcher Lorri Neilsen Glenn (1998, 264) describes research as “the attuned mind/body working purposefully to explore, to listen, to support, to transgress, to gather with care, to create, to disrupt, and to offer back, to contribute, sometimes all at once.”

My poetic practice is shaped by growing up in the church and is entwined with the process of creating a more embodied self. Poetry, like a church service, sits at the nexus of oral and written language, and my love of poetry is interwoven with reverence for and suspicion of the written word. But poetry needs to be spoken and heard, embodied. It works with oral language’s visceral quality. Its performative nature includes attention to cadence, rhythm, sound, voice, and breath. In Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry, Lorri Neilsen Glenn (2008, 63) writes, “Only a fingertip’s sensitivity to touch can match the singular sound of a human voice. When I hear a poet speak her words, the poem is transformed.”

Poetry also works with the space on the page, making use of form and the space around and between words and lines. Playing with the arrangement of words on the page is a way to work with body, breath, the sense of delight in pattern, and aesthetic pleasure. Rhythm and the aesthetics of the page can be a way to transform painful knowing and partial knowing. Poetry’s ability to work with visceral experience and the unconscious through language deepens my embodied inquiry.

Walking to the Body’s Rhythm

Through practices of walking and yoga, I seek greater internal and external attunement, reclaiming a sense of body as knowing, unlearning limiting lessons of church, family, and school. Maureen Scott Harris (2012, 16), in “Epistemology: The World Speaks,” writes,

Back up, begin again. There may be snow,

but walking is necessary—my longing to move

through weather as my shoulders unclench

beneath the visible sky. Walking may empty

the mind’s geometry, unhook its angles

from their linked confusion, that oxymoronic

insistence on contained space.

Harris’s words, especially “Walking may empty / the mind’s geometry, unhook its angles / from their linked confusion,” help me think about how my own walking practice is tied to thinking and writing. I am fortunate to live a few blocks from Toronto’s High Park. When we moved to Toronto in 1989, we lived in an apartment with a view of the park. A woman had recently been raped in the park, and I did not go there on my own. A few months later, in December 1989, fourteen women were murdered in what became known as the Montreal Massacre. What happens in the body when we hear of local danger and attacks against women? I recall my twenty-nine-year-old self, cycling to my literacy work in Parkdale.

A few years later, when my daughters were born, I began to go to the park with other mothers, our babies in strollers. I came to love the up and down and curves of the roads and paths and the chance to talk with other parents as our children played in the playground. We needed a place to go, and how lucky to have such a park. Later, writing brought me to the park: when I took a year off from adult literacy to work on my writing, I walked in the park most days, watching the goldenrods turn from yellow to white. I was completing A Hat to Stop a Train and beginning to think of my next book, wanting some of it to be about High Park, as a physical location and a psychic space.

How are we embodied in certain landscapes and certain buildings, living in relationship to our surroundings? My family moved frequently when I was a child because United Church ministers are expected to stay for not more than about six years with one congregation. The Irish landscapes that shaped my parents were Glen Farm, County Down, where my mother grew up, and Tandragee, County Armagh, where my father grew up. These were the landscapes of my parents’ imaginations, and of mine, too. Now, I walk to try to come to know a place.

Memories of certain buildings fill me with emptiness and fear: St John’s United Church and our home, the manse. I lost my sense of being embodied early in life; experience flattened. Fear. Inhale, exhale. My glasses streaked with salt—what do I see?

How do I inhabit my body when writing an academic chapter? Shoulders up, brow furled. Roll out the yoga mat. This discipline is a different kind of learning.

What Poetry Can Approach

Poetry can help us approach topics that are not safe. Poet Julie Berry (1995, 15) writes about sexual abuse in her long poem, “quiet as walls,” the second poem in her collection worn thresholds. “quiet as walls” contains six short poems: “sisters going nowhere in particular,” “family waking,” “queen of shovel,” “quiet as walls,” “hail storm,” and “arrangement.” Here I quote the title piece, “quiet as walls,” to give you a sense of how Berry’s fragmented language conveys trauma:

quiet as walls

of beds full

and beer too

many covers

big sister wakes up

he her cool

fingers he breathing

under hot

under covers

& face

shut & burning red

window up there

door over there

o not

o not

he makes

he her

when she tells

blank mother father

stare the bricks everything

quiet as walls

Berry’s simple language captures a child’s world. The choppy syntax echoes the dislodgement of experience, conveying a sense of shock and trauma. Poetry can express such experience in powerful ways.

Ronna Bloom, the University of Toronto’s Poet in Community and also a therapist, describes what poetry writing can do for university students: “The aim is to make room for people to feel on paper and in the world, to make room for the emotional culture to breathe and shift by including the presence of poetry, to normalize the poetic response and see it as a simple, human one” (Bloom 2012, 424). This approach to poetry invites embodiment, opening space for multilayered learning and supporting possibilities for personal and social transformation.

How Does Poetry Relate to Decolonization?

Poetry can be a means of social intervention, a means of witnessing, a response to colonization and oppression, and possibly a tool for decolonization. Audre Lorde’s (1984) famous essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” is a call to embrace the vitality and social potential of poetry. Poetry is a tool for social change in such strong political work as that of Dorothy Allison (1983, 1991, 1995), Dionne Brand (1983, 1997, 1998, 2002, 2010), Di Brandt (1995, 2003), Chrystos (1988, 1991, 1993, 1995a, 1995b), Marlene NourbeSe Philip (1993, 1991, 2008), Sina Queyras (2009), and Adrienne Rich (1984, 1986, 1991), to name just a few.3 People of colour, gay, lesbian, bisexual, two-spirited, trans and gender variant people, disabled people, women, and other socially disadvantaged people have published poetry in increasing numbers over recent decades, their work a resistance to dominant discourses that ignored their stories or represented them in stereotypical and derogatory ways, sometimes portraying them as less than human. In some ways, the publishing done in adult literacy was part of this movement to circulate the stories of working-class and poor people, to bring stories by people with limited literacy skills into print to be read by themselves, their peers, and hopefully a wider audience.4 As Neilsen Glenn (2011, 87) says, “The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of arts are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice.”

I do not want to romanticize poetry or see it as a cure for an ill society. Adrienne Rich (2007, 21) writes, “I hope never to idealize poetry—it has suffered enough from that. Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, not an instruction manual, not a billboard. There is no universal Poetry anyway, only poetries and poetics and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong.”

Rich helps me to notice how I tend to speak of poetry as a universal and to see it as a plural endeavour coming from “streaming, intertwining histories.” For one thing, poetry has a multitude of forms and traditions, including lyric, narrative, language, experimental, dub, and spoken word. Some poetry, like other forms of literature, perpetuates stereotypes and dominant discourses. Some has the potential for helping us see things afresh and for social intervention. Most poetry exists outside of the economic system that turns art into a commodity. Readers do not consume poems; they take them in, in different ways, often lingering with them, drawn into a state of contemplation.

In Dorothy Allison’s (1995) memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she uses two refrains: “Let me tell you a story” and “Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is . . .” This powerful book about being working class, lesbian, and a survivor of sexual abuse was written originally for performance, changed for each production, and revised substantially for publication. Allison’s stories of family, lovers, conversations with sisters, abuse, and violence are punctuated with her reflections on the ways stories and storytelling work. Allison writes, “Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world” (72). I love the colloquial, plain-spoken quality of the phrase “two or three things I know” and the poetic repetition “two or three things I know for sure.” Allison uses this phrase again and again in an understated, lyrical act of knowledge making.

The Menominee poet Chrystos speaks powerfully about lesbian desire and relationships in their five collections, as well as about colonization, racism, and abuse. Like Audre Lorde and Lee Maracle, Allison and Chrystos take up the erotic as a way to talk about embodiment as sentient and social. They write from lesbian, bisexual, and two-spirited lived experience—in a sense, speaking/writing the body. I might have thought of the act of writing these books as a kind of decolonizing the body and the self, but I am bearing in mind Tuck and Yang’s (2012) caution about metaphorizing decolonization. Chrystos also speak of metaphor, particularly in their poem “Savage Eloquence,” from Not Vanishing, where they write, “No metaphors / Mountains ARE our mothers Stars our dead.” Ten lines later, they write, “Vanishing is no metaphor” (Chrystos 1988, 40).

But what does poetry specifically have to do with decolonization? In a short essay, “Oka Peace Camp—September 9, 1990,” at the beginning of Bobbie Lee: Indian Rebel, Lee Maracle (1990, 57) writes, “The language is battered: battered in the interest of sanctioning the scarring of the land in the interest of profit. . . . For us language is sacred. Words represent the accumulated knowledge, the progression of thought of any people.” Maracle’s assertion about the sacredness of language and her connecting of language as “battered” with the “scarring of the land” speaks to this inquiry into decolonization, pedagogy, and embodiment.

Poet Marilyn Dumont’s words make me slow down and listen. She begins her poem “Sky Berry and Water Berry” (Dumont 2013) with delicacy and lushness:

her sisters, the flowers

her brothers, the berries

emerge from her beadwork

chokecherry red, goldenrod yellow, and juniper berry brown

sky berry and water berry

swell from her fingertips

sprout runners and cleave

to stems near the scent

of warm saskatoons

and sour gooseberries

petal, berry, stem, and leaf

sewn down now in seed bead lines

flourish bright from her hands

through her fingers stretch fields of strawberries

their starched white petals

raised heads above layers of green leaf

Dumont weaves together images of hands working on beadwork with land, sky, water, family relations, and the sensory nature of berries and petals in a kind of praise-song.

Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

Some poetry engages directly with the process of colonization, such as the collection Zong! by Toronto author Marlene NourbeSe Philip (2008). Born in Tobago, Philip is trained as a lawyer and is well known for her 1993 poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks. In Zong! Philip tells a “story that must be told; that can only be told by not telling” (194). In 1781, the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered 150 Africans to be thrown overboard so that the ship owners could collect insurance money for lost “cargo.” Philip limits herself to the words of the legal decision involving the ship’s owners and the insurance company, using the only record of the ship and the people on board, to write poetry that pulls language apart and wrestles with the meaning-making project that is language itself.

In “Notanda,” the essay that accompanies the poetry, Philip writes that she uses the text of the legal decision “to lock myself into this particular and peculiar discursive landscape” (191). Using this limited “word store” raises issues of how “language appears to be a given—we believe we have the freedom to choose any words we want to work with from the universe of words, but so much of what we work with is a given” (191–92). Philip describes how “law and poetry both share an inexorable concern with language—the ‘right’ use of the ‘right’ words, phrases, or even marks of punctuation; precision of expression is the goal shared by both” (191). Philip’s work looks more like language poetry than lyric: she makes use of the space on the page and breaks up words. The first section, “Os,” begins with “Zong! #1” (3):

Some poems are a mixture of words and sounds sprinkled across the page. “Tearing” and “cutting” the language (193–94), Philip says,

I fight the desire to impose meaning on the words—it is so instinctive, this need to impose meaning: this is the generating impulse of, and towards, language, isn’t it—to make and, therefore, to communicate, meaning? How did they—the Africans on board the Zong—make meaning of what was happening to them? What meaning did they make of it and how did they make it mean? (194)

In some poems, Philip uses unusual syntax and spacing to wrestle with meaninglessness. “Zong! #19” (33–34), for example, begins

The poem ends with the words

Philip examines her writing process, including a trip to the Liverpool docks, where slave ships left for the Caribbean. Poetry can work as witness and testimony, often witnessing an individual life and a specific incident. Philip takes on a major colonial practice, the transport of enslaved Africans, and their genocide.

Language comes up against itself in the endeavour to speak about atrocity. Philip writes,

I deeply distrust this tool I work with—language. It is a distrust rooted in certain historical events that are all of a piece with the events that took place on the Zong. The language in which those events took place promulgated the non-being of African peoples, and I distrust its order, which hides disorder; its logic hiding the illogic and its rationality, which is simultaneously irrational. (197)

Philip takes language to its limits, wrestling with words in a way I would describe as embodied. Philip brings us close to an unfathomable experience and, in her essay, repeats “there is no telling this story” like a kind of mantra. She works with deeply traumatic material, approaching this material as a black woman born in Tobago and writing of her ancestors’ lives and deaths. She describes her process as a kind of quest that involves pilgrimages to Africa and Liverpool, lighting candles, and other rituals of writing. Her public readings of Zong! sometimes feel ceremonial or ritualistic.5 She begins with the pouring of libations to the ancestors.

Zong! is a witnessing of colonization’s horrific abuse of authority and power. Philip’s poetry and her accompanying poetic essay give her a way to use language to reflect on the complicity of the English language and the structures of thought that it supports in justifying genocide. Philip allows the pain she writes about to shape her language and writing practice. Dwelling with the materiality of colonization in this way is important. I am interested in how Philip reshapes language, moulding something new, a different kind of vessel that is uniquely shaped for the material at hand.

Where and How to Walk?

I walk from a twelve-storey university tower across Bloor Street down through the Queen Alexandra Gate into Philosopher’s Walk. I need to move, get away from the overheated windowless rooms and windows that don’t open. I am thinking about a writing workshop I will lead for graduate students struggling with thesis writing; I am struggling to write this piece and want the walking to help me think. I want my relationship to the land to be more than that of a tourist. I am a settler here, unsettled, asking, What kind of settler do I want to be? I want something more than that walking serves my thinking. I plan to talk with the thesis-writing students about how walking and writing can work together, walking and feeling more whole, feeling that they have something to say. Near the university, we can walk just north to Taddle Creek Park, named for one of the many streams under Toronto, or we can walk to Queen’s Park, where I head now.

I pause before an oval University of Toronto sign, the U of T crest and name at the top:

Well before European settlers arrived, the natural ravine now known as Philosopher’s Walk was a likely gathering place for Anishinaabe people (Mississauga Ojibway). During the spring, the stream that ran through this site would have been teeming with wildlife and native fishermen would have lined the banks with gill nets and fish weirs to partake of this bounty. For them, the stream would have been a sacred site—a place of powerful and audible spirits.

This sign disturbs me—“the stream would have been a sacred site” and “for them.” The sign assumes that its readers are all settlers. It assumes that at one time it would have been sacred for Anishinaabe people, but what is it now for Anishinaabe or other First Nations people? The sign seems to assume that these peoples are gone.

I walk on along a winding path, which was once Taddle Creek. I come to Queen’s Park to be near the trees. A huge statue of King Edward VII on horseback towers over the centre of the park. A plaque by the Toronto Historical Board tells me that the park was opened in 1860 by the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and “named in honour of his mother Queen Victoria.” I read another plaque about the same statue:

Originally standing in Edward Park, Delhi, India, this statue was erected on the present site through the generous subscriptions of the citizens of this area.

William Dennison, Mayor

May 24, 1969

Colonialism is everywhere, but these vestiges are particularly blatant. It seems that India, no longer a colony, did not want this statue of a British king and that Canada, still a colony, did want it.

Gathering Threads of Inquiry

How can poetic inquiry bring the body’s knowing to discussions of pedagogy and decolonization? Can it help us stretch beyond our socially constructed identities, habits of thinking, and ways of approaching teaching and learning? Perhaps poetic attention can help us work with the discomfort and shame entwined with being objectified by others and noticing when we have participated in objectification. It may help us use language in ways that are less grasping, that unsettle some of our dichotomies and desire for certainty.

In this chapter, I have explored how the fragmentary, imagistic nature of poetry allows us to work with material beyond the rational—with the unconscious, the partiality of memory, and the untellable. Poetry attempts to take language to and beyond its usual limitations. In this way, the process of writing poetry can work with more fluid thinking-feeling states and embrace embodied forms of learning and being.

I began this chapter with the poem “November 11th,” which points to state-prescribed commemorative practices. In that poem, public space such as a city park is pedagogical space, attempting to teach us that “courage is a man on horseback.” The friend in that poem who reflects on her teaching is Julie Berry, whose poem “quiet as walls” helps me speak about the way in which poetry can approach trauma and dis/embodiment. In the poem, she is a teacher who reveals her vulnerability in an embodied way in the classroom.

This chapter begins to inquire into what poetry has to do with decolonization. It grapples with the metaphorical and pedagogical nature of language in the face of the call not to use decolonization as a metaphor. Philip’s Zong! commemorates what cannot be told of people being forcibly taken from their homelands into slavery and thrown overboard in the effort to redeem money for so-called lost cargo. The spaces between her words and fragments of words speak to what cannot be uttered but is embodied. Her writing is at once about the mechanisms of colonization and about reckoning with how language, loss, and land are entwined. I begin to ask about the relationship of language to embodied and disembodied experiences of land, particularly the land we live on and our relationship to it—in my case, as settler.

Holding this broad sense of decolonization, I ask what the word means in terms of embodied learning and the knowledge of body, mind, emotions, and spirit. How do we teach in a way that opens space for students to understand their dis/embodied experience of land? Digging into our own reflexivity, discomfort, shame, positionality, and multiple kinds of knowing is a place to start. Using words in different ways can help us gather more aspects of our embodied selves. We confront words on plaques and monuments and wrestle with how words are used in poems and classrooms. What have we been taught to remember and to know? How does this relate to land, as we, individually and collectively, seek an embodied sense of self?

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1   Thank you to Sheila Batacharya for her observation that “decolonization is not just a metaphor,” made in a small discussion group about the Tuck and Yang article at an event at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Held in the spring of 2013, this event gave participants the opportunity to remember Roxanna Ng and her work.

2  A number of literacy practitioners write about holistic literacy practices, including Katrina Grieve, Cheryl Reid, and Judy Murphy. Judy Murphy and Cheryl Reid are also yoga teachers who use yoga in their literacy practice and write about this process.

3  These are a few of the many Canadian and American poets whose work addresses issues of multiple forms of oppression. Traditions of dub poetry and spoken word take up oppression directly; see, for example, the work of Toronto dub poet Lillian Allen (2012).

4  See Scott and Friday-Cockburn, eds. (1992) for an analysis of the history, complexities, and ethical issues surrounding literacy student writing and publishing in Toronto.

5  NourbeSe Philip’s reading from Zong! at The Limbo-o: A Night of Poetry at Trane Studio, 16 July 2012, had a ceremonial tone to it. She invited the audience to read with her, not in unison, but voices starting and stopping at various times, creating a cacophony of sounds.