UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies (E-Journal - York University)

Abel, Karen

(untitled images)

The sun grows garish, then gaunt. A fading orange organ in the bedroo

Wolff, Elana

17UnderCurrents  vol. 14
Nest and Leaves, Karen Abel
EMBOUCHURE
by Elana Wolff
The sun grows garish, then gaunt.
A fading orange organ in the bedroom,
embouchure.
This is the way you’ve come to me this evening— 
in a box, on the wall,
reflected.
Lodged in the slatted shadows of the shutters,
then not even there.
Before the orange ebbs completely,
into the autumn night 
and you abscond,
I strain myself to listen for a tune 
of your affections.
And one comes up from the loin of my tongue,
like muddy 
waters onto my lips.


English

Embouchure

Turner, Chris

(untitled work)

In the small room inside my mother’s Chest, a weeping sound that whispers across The tall grass of late summer, carries my mothe

Dougherty, Sean

15UnderCurrents  vol. 14
In the small room inside my mother’s
Chest, a weeping sound that whispers across
The tall grass of late summer, carries my mother
Toward her childhood, my running mother
Running through the sand in summer rain
Toward her father’s lifting hands. My mother
Is a laughing sound at five, —mother
She calls to my grandmother, a hunger
Made of kisses. When the cancer ate his hunger
My Poppa, leaning on his bed, told my mother
I can no longer taste the bread. Social worker,
Scholar, he pamphleted for Socialism
Until it swallowed its own people with precision—
The ideology of the century just ended, my mother
Frightened by the frailness of her father’s hand— 
Social
We are birthed into the sterile light, the social
Weight we enter with the cutting of the chord.
Across
Our bellies, the tied knot our true tribe. Socialism’s 
Grandeur: the sound of any child sharing bread.
Yiddish
Was a second language for Hungarian Jews.
The rain
Against my grandfather’s windows. Summer rain:
The sound of memory’s shoes. At the Social    
Welfare office
Paperwork piled on Poppa’s desk, the names 
of the hungry
My grandfather worked to help. The hungry
Men, women, children at the shelter called him Joe.
Hungry
My mother left my grandfather in that room,
a socialism
Of rain falling, four walls of waiting. She sat 
with the hunger
Of grief, picked at a plate of sardines, onion, bread.
Hungary
Was a cracked jewel when my great grand-mother    
Boarded the boat at twenty—in 1912, arrived 
hungry
At Ellis Island: The copper torch burned the night,
Hungary
Became a left place, a last leaving. Alone across
The cold Atlantic, she carted a trunk of books.
Across
Means to depart, or to arrive?  My mother reaches 
for her father’s hand, Hungry?
She asks him, bones, barely breathing, Water
He asks, closes his eyes. My mother feels 
the water
Closing above her head. My great-grandmother’s 
water
Broke in 1919. Five years later, thin and hungry
From fever, she died. My grandfather sips 
his water
Slowly, I haven’t thought about her in a long time.
Water
In his eyes, my mother puts a cloth upon his chest.
The social
Agency sent nurses that night. On the George 
Washington, water
Was passed in a bucket. Waterfalls
Of voices that rode into the harbor. Mother,
Do you ever wonder about this woman,
the grandmother
You never kissed?   Long after her death,
the husband who disowned his son, water
Of my grandmother’s Christian birth?   Across
The aisle my grandfather’s side was empty. Across
The Atlantic his rebel mother knitted, not prayed.
Across 
Is to arrive, or to depart?   Someone has entered 
the room. Water
My grandfather whispers, his black eyebrows 
knitted. Across
The deck my great-grandmother hummed, spray 
washing across
The boots of Czechs, Slavs, the moon spoke 
Hungarian,
Bathed her black hair with silver light. Across
Her chest an old Magyar touched the sign 
of the cross.
My great grandmother reached for a chair— 
parochialism
Of the rural poor, the Pogroms, Socialism promised
A world of workers sharing bread. Regina 
Moskowitz  crossed
With a thousand other seamstress revolutionaries.
Mother  
Who died when my grandfather was five. O Mother
What is this ghost womb calling from the sky?
Mother,
I hear you in the kitchen sobbing. My grandfather 
is dead: Across
The ocean, is he traveling?  He is just a child.
The summer rain,
Is it carrying him towards his mother?  Is she 
calling him to Hungary?
Is she singing lullabies in Yiddish?   Can you hear?  
Her eyes are weeping prisms.
The Long Waiting  (for Joseph Kriesler 1919-2002)
by Sean Thomas Dougherty
“Water, be my memory, let me see what I have lost.”
—Mahmoud Darwish (trans Agha Shahid Ali)


The Long Waiting (for Joseph Kriesler 1919-2002)

Hernandez, Rodrigo

16 UnderCurrents  vol. 14
Connection, Rodrigo Hernandez
Baggage
by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Great brown trunks with metal buckles, belts, train trunks, black leather and steel rivets,
large round stamps: Austria, Munich, Bremen, Budapest. Piles of trunks and suitcases to
the ceiling. Rooms of suitcases, bird-cages, baskets. Rooms of shoes. Ellis Island, JFK,
Dachau. Rooms of trinkets, gold foiled flowers, laces, gloves, hats, crumpled shifts, teeth.
Bones. Buckled shoes. “It was the buckled shoes that haunted me most,” my friend says of
the camps. A shoe on the side of the road. Shoes. We walk in shoes. When we die, it is
our feet who wear our soles. “Let no angel carry me the last few feet to heaven, bury me in
brand new soles,” go the old blues, the deep blues. I’m humming this waiting by baggage
claim, touch down in Budapest, carrying in my head the image of those great halls of Ellis
Island and the wall of suitcases stacked upon each ship’s arrival. The loudspeaker in three
languages. The German tourists gathering up their ski poles. Heather has her eyes half
closed by a phone booth. She is sleepy in blue jeans and sweatshirt. I wonder what Regina
wore as she stepped off of the George Washington?  What was the weather like that
September day in 1912?  I read somewhere that weather is the carrier of memory, the
bringer of scent, smell, the deep body memories that Proust wrote of—bite the Madeleine
and your childhood returns, your aunt brewing tea in the kitchen. The smell of cornbread
and your grandmother with a babushka or bandanna around her braided hair. I had a stu-
dent with a chivalrous name—Dustin Chevalier—a sweet quiet kid who wrote me an essay
once about “the first smell of autumn along the lake.” The changing leaves, the rain. “It is
when I return to the before,” he wrote, never having read Elie Wiesel. When questioned
about the time before the camps Wiesel answered, “Of course there is a before.” And when
asked “Why does one return to the before?” he answered, “To eat.”


Connection

the quiet explosions of fireworks from town pop hollow and high in sugared colour above the empty pasture where we stand togethe

Pinder, Sarah

7UnderCurrents  vol. 14
rural route millennium
by sarah pinder
the quiet explosions of fireworks from town
pop hollow and high 
in sugared colour above the empty pasture 
where we stand together
the dog is whining behind us
running half moons into hard packed snow 
through frozen shit and hay
and just as I’m about to turn around to calm him
I realize that my grandmother can’t hear
the rusted rattle, the keening
maybe not even the dynamite blasts
in our sky
she stands pigeon-toed in purple duck boots and
the brown barn coat
her hands, limp out of the pockets
she gazes up patiently
woken from her blue-lit lay-zee-boy
and waiting for the sign to turn away
the hand at her shoulder to give direction
back up the plywood steps
through the undershirt ghosts
frozen on the clothesline
her slack-jaw static eclipses
the smeared, streaking lights
my grandmother
between channels
tilts like the satellite saucer on the lawn
tentatively, towards heaven


rural route millennium

Johnson, Jennifer

"Mapping Women, Making Politics: Feminist Perspectives on Political Geography" by Lynn A. Staeheli, Eleonore Kofman and Linda J. Peake (Eds.)

Chahal, Taina

28 UnderCurrents  vol. 14
Playing  Dead : A
Contemplation Concerning
the Arctic, by Rudy
Wiebe. Landmark
Edition. NeWest
Press: Edmonton,
2003. 149 pages. ISBN
1-896300-67-7. soft
cover CAN $18.95.
Reviewed by Taina
Maki Chahal.
The third reincarnation of a series of lectures Rudy Wiebedelivered at Trinity College in 1987, the aptly named Playing
Dead: A Contemplation Concerning the Arctic, is the first title in
NeWest’s Landmark Edition Series. The NeWest series aspires,
as Robert Kroetsch notes in the Afterword, “to bring back into
print, keep in print, important books by western Canadian writ-
ers, books that have become a part of the Canadian canon.”
Canons, however, can be inherently problematic for their exclu-
sions and role in constructing histories and myths of nation-
hood, and Playing Dead appears inescapably part of the white
masculinist colonial mapping of “the Arctic” (despite Wiebe’s
self-reflexivity and sincere respect for the land and its people).
It is nonetheless an important addition for anyone interested in
developing a nuanced understanding of the multiple stories that
construct the North. Wiebe is an outstanding storyteller, com-
bining myth, memories, and excerpts from early explorers’ log-
books, photographs, poetry and prose, but the question of
whose stories get told and by whom, and how they are taken up
(or not!), is a critical consideration. The story of “Green
Stockings,” the daughter of Keskarrah, is one such example.
This renamed Yellowknife woman is as mute in Wiebe’s telling
of her story as in the logbooks of the early Arctic adventurers
whom he cites.
To this new expanded collection of writings that he originally,
and more romantically, called “The Arctic: Landscape of the
Spirit,” Wiebe adds: a Prelude; a Coda; an Afterword; illustra-
tions; the altered map; and, new bibliographic references that
reflect, in his words, “various Arctic changes in the
past…years.” Whether it is “the Arctic” that changes or it is
our/non-Inuit ideas of what we imagine as the Arctic change is
something Wiebe himself takes up in the book. Playing Dead is
a re-telling of the stories of the white male interlopers of the
Arctic (such as Samuel Hearne, John Richardson, Vilhjalmar
Stefansson and Robert Hood, to name just a few ) through the
inclusion of fragments of Inuit stories and songs such as those
of Felix Nuyviak, Anthony Apakark Thrasher, Peter Pitseolak
and Higilak, and through Wiebe’s experiences and travels in the
Arctic. A reflexive re-writing, however, does not automatical-
ly translate into an unproblematic rendering. Wiebe’s Arctic,
both past and present, is primarily narrated through the words
of men - white and Inuit - focusing on re-imagining colonial
accounts. Despite his attempts to bring in the shaman
Uvavnuk and Fanny Pannigabluk, Wiebe’s marginal inclusion
of Inuit women results in a particular racialized and gendered
fiction of the Arctic.
The choice of Kroetsch, a canonical writer, to comment on
Wiebe’s book, is short-sighted, as the Arctic that Playing Dead
narrates remains firmly in familiar and untroubled hands. A
much better choice would have been the insights of an Inuit
writer such as Rachel Attituq Qitsualik, who speaks of the
“breathing archives” found in the stories of contemporary
Inuit people. Well versed in the stories of her father, grandfa-
ther and grandmother who worked with the likes of Knud
Rasmussen and Joseph Bernier, Attituq Qitsualik could have
taken Wiebe’s book a step further, beyond the map, beyond the
Anglo place names littered across “the Arctic” and towards
Nuna and Sila – Inuit concepts of the land and the air/envi-
ronment which do not translate across language. Unlike the
landscape that the English descriptor evokes, Nuna and Sila are
philosophical ideas of material/cosmological place that are not
separate from each other nor outside of the people/the inhab-
itants. (please see “Shadow of Death: Part Two” and “Sila” at
http://www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut000331/nunani.
html and http://www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavut000
731/nunani.html).
As the upside-down map (to those of us schooled in the
Western idea of the world) in Weibe’s book infers, when we
pivot from the center and shift our perspective, we see from
a different standpoint, from behind the ‘eyes’ of the waters,
the land, and the indigenous peoples of the
Arctic/Nuna/Sila. Our sense of the world as defined
through taken-for-granted notions can change dramatically.
Despite continuing problems of voice and representation,
Playing Dead still has much to offer. Ultimately, Wiebe’s intro-
duction to ideas of the linear and areal concepts embedded
linguistically in Inuit geography/philosophy hints to the non-
Inuit reader of the possibilities of contemplating a truer pic-
ture of that unimaginable, awesome “Arctic.”
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