'I AM A SETTLER/I AM UNEASY': RETHINKING CITIZENSHIP, THE NATION, AND THE 'GOOD' OF CONTEMPORARY CANADIAN POETRY

by

Janet McGill

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Appendices Copyright Releases (if applicable) To my loving family and dear friends — for so many years of guidance and encouragement, and for the wonderful way you remind me of where I'm going and where I've been.

IV TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 2: "THAT RAVAGED WORLD IS HERE:" RESITUATING GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP IN DIONNE BRAND'S INVENTORY. 14

CHAPTER 3: "SUCH TINY ELEGANT SPEECHES:" SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA'S SMALL ARGUMENTS AND FOUND 59

CHAPTER 4: "IN THE BELLY OF A RUSTING IMAGINATION:" A NATION UNSETTLED IN WAYDE COMPTON'S PERFORMANCE BOND 102

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION 146

REFERENCES 151

v ABSTRACT

The growing interdisciplinary field of citizenship studies seeks to dismember the coherence of the imagined nation and its naturalized citizens, to undo the act of erasure that characterizes official narratives, and to map the "contours and substance of new forms of citizenship, such as post-national, global, cosmopolitan or urban that might replace the old" (Stasiulis 365). The following thesis explores this evolving field as it relates to Canadian literary criticism and sketches some of the as yet undefined

"contours" of new kinds of citizenship in the works of three contemporary Canadian poets -- Dionne Brand, Souvankham Thammavongsa, and Wayde Compton. Through my readings of these works, I argue that poetry has a unique capacity to affect and provoke the reader, fostering a sense of "literary citizenship," and building the "critical citizenry" necessary to counter increasingly ambiguous and even vexed conceptualizations of the responsibilities and limitations attendant on national citizenship.

VI ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to extend my heartfelt appreciation to Carrie Dawson, my thesis supervisor, whose guidance kept me inspired and on track throughout this challenging process. I am so grateful for your insightful criticisms and helpful suggestions for further reading, for your enthusiasm and your patience, which always put me at ease. My sincere thanks also to Marjorie Stone and Teresa Heffernan, the hardworking members of my examining committee, who both made valuable contributions to this project, offering not only their time and careful readings of my work, but also much encouragement for the future. And to Mary Beth Maclsaac, for the warm welcome you gave me and for all your excellent advice — thank you. Congratulations and gratitude go to Alex — for her own impressive research and for managing to keep her cool, her wit, and her sense of style (and of outrage!) throughout the year. Thanks to those residents of 1406 Edward Street whose company and care played no small part in seeing this project through to its completion.

To Cesar, thank you for showing up — not a moment too soon -- and for bringing all your excitement and kindness into the mix, while making sure that I remembered to sleep, that

I lived on more than coffee and crepes, and that I found time for fun, at least now and then. To those at home, thank you for your interest and your understanding, for keeping in touch (often against all odds!), and for leaving messages about the world outside the library; those reminders made all the difference. Finally, to my trusty little computer, my sunny attic room and that shape-shifting pile of books by the bed — I suspect I'll look back on you fondly, now that all is said and done.

vn 1

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

Sketching the Contours and Substance of Canadian Citizenship and Literature

On April 17, 2009 the government of Canada passed a new law that dramatically redefines citizenship in the interest of "protecting the value of Canadian citizenship for the future" (CIC "Minister Kenney Announces"). In essence, the new law severely reduces the extension of citizenship and appears to have the most profound effect on individuals and families with strong ties elsewhere or who are engaged in transnational activity. Some have raised concerns that the law will increase the likelihood of children being born without citizenship and therefore being "stateless." Thus far, the federal government's response has been to invoke "this era of heightened security" as a primary justification for the new legislation (CIC "True or False?"). Given the growing tendency to see immigration as a security threat, and because the value of Canadian citizenship is under official review, the meaning and limits of citizenship merit close examination.

In a 2007 "Fact Sheet," Citizenship and Immigration Canada reports "Canadians are proud to hold one of the most prized citizenships in the world." The "Fact Sheet" also responds to the question, "What does it mean to be a Canadian citizen?" by defining

Canada as: "free and democratic;" "multicultural;" "having two official languages;" and granting "equal treatment to all its citizens" (qtd. Stasiulis 365). The difficulty with the official doctrine of equality for all Canadians is that it does not account for those trapped in legal limbo, awaiting the right to claim full citizenship, and also does not speak to those who hold that official citizenship but still do not enjoy the benefits of full equality, those who reside within the physical, but not the imaginary, boundaries of the nation.

Furthermore, the density of traffic across state borders challenges traditional notions of 2 citizenship grounded in one geo-political territory. There is an undeniable "multiplicity of citizenships that currently exist in the geo-political territory of Canada" (Stasiulis 367), a multiplicity that the state has arranged hierarchically into degrees of belonging. Official categories of illegal migrants, refugee claimants, refugees, migrant workers, permanent residents and so forth build towards a problematically 'valued' and increasingly guarded definition of 'full' citizenship. A 2007 report by the Metropolitan Immigrant Settlement

Association (MIS A) found that "different tiers of citizenship are being created for various ethno-cultural and ethno-religious groups as they are assessed in terms of their potential as security risks. 'National security' is being socially constructed as a legitimization of various kinds of exclusions, ranging from persecution to more subtle forms of discrimination" (Crocker et al.5). These findings confirm there is a pressing need to extend our conceptualization of national citizenship in the context of a globalizing world.

In January 2006, Essays on Canadian Writing sent out a call for papers encouraging contributors to respond to the fact that "the term 'citizenship' has migrated from its traditional home in political and legal discourses, and emerged as a highly conspicuous and powerful concept-metaphor in global debates on cultural belonging."

The editors ask: "What is at stake in this turn to citizenship, particularly in light of shifting political and institutional structures informing the study of Canadian literature?"

(Chariandry and McCall n.p.). This is one of the questions at the heart of my project.

When the Government of Canada passed rights legislation in the 1980s with the

Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982) and the Multiculturalism Act (1988), the turn towards state multiculturalism came to dominate popular and scholarly discussions of

Canadian identity politics. These developments were problematically rooted in the Royal .3

Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, however, whose 1963 mandate was to

"make recommendations designed to ensure the bilingual and basically bicultural character of the federal administration," and to establish means of "promoting bilingualism, better cultural relations and a more wide-spread appreciation of the basically bicultural character of our country and of the subsequent contribution made by the other cultures" (qtd. Kamboureli "Introduction to the First" xxvii). As Smaro

Kamboureli rightly points out, the language of this report reinforces the primacy of

French and British cultures as the "two founding nations" and reveals the desire to contain the presence of "other cultures" by marking their "contributions" as secondary.

In 1971, Trudeau's White Paper turned the recommendations of the report into official government policy and provided financial backing to projects that might fulfill its aims.

Many "ethnic anthologies" were published between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, the first "concentrated unfolding of ethnic writing in Canada," but these texts "remained virtually ignored ... they made no dent in the canon either at that time or later"

(Kamboureli, Scandalous 131, 133). These anthologies nonetheless performed significant work by making the boundaries of the canon visible. In the 1990s, there was a "major shift" in the representation of these writers as they were brought together in comprehensive volumes rather than divided into distinct groups. While anthologies like

Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions (1990), edited by Linda Hutcheon and

Marion Richmond, and Making a Difference: Canadian Multicultural Literature (1996), edited by Smaro Kamboureli, appeared on reading lists across the country, these anthologies had very different aims. Kamboureli was highly critical of the editorial practices she found in Other Solitudes: 4

This is the only anthology among those I have examined that rejects the recurring argument made by editors that it is time to do away with the limits of the Canadian literary tradition, give serious consideration to ethnic literature, and address the systemic problems that led to its marginalization. ... The overall editorial intent is to present a single model of Canadian history, a model affirming the magnanimity of the majority culture whose celebration of diversity becomes yet another way of containing it. {Scandalous 162-4)

In contrast, Making a Difference provided contributors an opportunity for dialogue,

"without suspending their differences," thus undermining other "persistent attempts to compose a unified vision of Canadian culture against the reality and cultural understanding of many Canadians, a history that bursts at its seams" ("Introduction to the

First" xviii). For many cultural and literary critics, the idealism that typified early responses to the discourse of official multiculturalism quickly became worn and threadbare. Kamboureli has expressed concern that official multiculturalism enacts a

"sedative politics" {Scandalous 162) that "allows the state to become self-congratulatory, if not complacent, about its handling of ethnicity" (qtd. Butling 230). Martin Genetsch suggests that multiculturalism has become a form of tokenism, "a commodity that is made to sell" (26). Although state multiculturalism may recognize and even celebrate difference, it holds onto the myth of a mainstream. Dionne Brand contends that Canada is

"in the main a country of immigrants" and argues that national identity is achieved by

"always redefining origins, jockeying and swarming for degrees of belonging [sic].

Erasing aspects of complicated origins" {Map 64).

Postcolonial studies, once an influential theoretical frame within which to approach the "complicated origins" of so-called "minority" texts, has also been criticized for its complicity with global market forces and described as a form of "commodity fetishism" (Hall 1996, Ahmad 1992). Some critics, such as Arif Dirlik and Masao 5

Miyoshi "radically claim that the interest of Western academics in themes such as multiculturalism and post-coloniality really represents a cultural and intellectual withdrawal from the new realities of global power, and plead for rigorous political action instead" (Maver 18). Colonialism continues, they say, orchestrated in new ways by transnational corporations: "Ours is not an age of/?osfcolonialism but of intensified colonialism, even though it is under an unfamiliar guise" (Miyoshi 728). Dirlik argues along similar lines, suggesting that the concept of postcolonialism "mystifies both politically and methodologically a situation that represents not the abolition but the reconfiguration of earlier forms of domination" (331). Questions of whether or not

Canada is "postcolonial" therefore arguably detract attention from the contemporary state of a capitalist world-system; critics must rethink their objectives and establish the new approaches demanded by the transnational character of global politics.

Lily Cho has argued that a widespread "disenchantment" among theorists now characterizes both the fields of Canadian literature and postcolonial studies, which are burdened by "longings" for particular futures that have yet to materialize ("Dreaming"

178). Despite the radical politics shaping the foundations of these fields and their successful institutionalization into the academy against all odds, the social change theorists once imagined possible has yet to come to pass. Part of the problem stems from the uneasy marriage between the two fields. As Cho explains, "postcolonial" does not accurately describe the "minority" populations in Canada and "the use of 'postcolonial' as a descriptive term for racial exclusion carries within it the potential for masking ... the role of the [nation] as a neo-colonial force" ("Dreaming" 189). As such, there is an urgent need to locate a different theoretical frame within which to address many contemporary 6

Canadian texts, one that is met by the growing interdisciplinary field of citizenship

studies, which seeks to dismember the coherence of the imagined nation and its naturalized citizens, to undo the act of erasure that characterizes official narratives of multiculturalism, and to sketch what Daiva Stasiulis calls the "contours and substance of new forms of citizenship, such as post-national, global, cosmopolitan or urban that might replace the old" (365).

'Citizenship' focuses our attention upon the "increasingly unequal distribution of resources and opportunities within nation-states and across the globe, and upon the enduring institutional structures that impose vastly unequal access to them" (Lukes x).

Though it is associated with a rhetoric of universality, citizenship in Canada has come into being through the exclusion of specific social groups. Katja Sarkowsky suggests that

"the history of citizenship rights in Canada (as that of other countries) is marked by a continuous struggle... of constructing necessary Others against which to define 'the citizen."' (qtd. Chariandry "Introduction" 6). This problematic construction positions literary study as an important means of revisioning citizenship, since much Canadian literary criticism is concerned with the relationship between readers and texts, positioning the text as the "other" and therefore the act of reading as an ethical encounter with the other (Goldman 810).

In Northrop Frye's Massey Lecture of 1963, The Educated Imagination, Frye asks, "What good is the study of literature?" (qtd. Brydon "Global Intimacies" 990). In the Summer 2007 issue of the University of Toronto Quarterly, contemporary CanLit scholars return to this provocative question. The "good" of literature, as Marlene

Goldman understands it, is its potential "to promote bonds of empathy between self and 7

other - in essence, literature's ability to instigate an affective, passionate engagement

with readers" (818). Frye argues that literature has a certain ethical weight "not only

because it promotes tolerance and generates creative conflict, but also because it invites

us to feel" (Goldman 811). Dionne Brand makes a similar argument about the value of all

aesthetic experience in A Map to the Door of No Return, where she describes growing

weary of the onslaught of meaningless messages characterizing modern existence:

We live in a world filled with commodified images of desire.... We become the repetition despite our best efforts. We become numb. And though against the impressive strength of this I can't hope to say all that desire might be, I wanted to talk about it not as it is sold to us but as one collects it, piece by piece, proceeding through a life. I wanted to say that life, if we are lucky, is as much a collection of aesthetic experiences as it is a collection of practical experiences, which may be one and the same sometimes, and which if we are lucky we make sense of. Making sense may be what desire is. Or, putting the senses back together. (195)

In her work Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart explores the "common

human experiences of the senses... across various historical and cultural contexts" (ix)

and concludes that poetry functions primarily as a means of survival and connection:

"poetry is a force against effacement — not merely for individuals but for communities

through time as well.... As metered language, language that retains and projects the force

of individual sense experience and yet reaches toward intersubjective meaning, poetry

sustains and transforms the threshold between individual and social existence" (1-2).

Indeed, reading poetry as an encounter with the other is founded on poetry's reliance on

"the senses of touching, seeing, and hearing that are central to the encounter with the presence of others, the encounter of recognition between persons" (Stewart 3). The experience of reading poetry is one that also notably restores a connection to the body, one that "puts the senses back together," and thus leads to other forms of knowledge. 8

Canadian writer Karen Connelly describes the work of poets as "so large and relevant that rogue governments imprison poets, or exile them, or kill them. Then ban, burn, and destroy their books. Poems are witnesses" (n.p.). Derek Attridge says

something similar. While he cautions that literature "solves no problems and saves no

souls," he also insists on its often unpredictable but powerful effectiveness as an

"invaluable instrument of individual and social advancement" (4, 8). Wary of the need to

avoid overestimating this power, I would however argue that certain poets can and do wield an "articulatory poetics," locating and exposing the fault lines that exist within the hegemonic order. Thus, while there are a number of contemporary Canadian authors whose work foregrounds citizenship ~ Shani Mootoo, Rita Wong, Amitav Ghosh, Rawi

Hage, Anita Rau Badami, and Roy Miki to name a few — I am particularly interested in the work of three poets — Dionne Brand, Wayde Compton, and Souvankham

Thammavongsa. As "minority" writers, these three poets present to the "majority" an other view of the world, unmooring the centre from its fixed and privileged place.

According to Jeff Derksen, it is the work of poets to "make the ideology of globalism visible... to engage with the world system" and imagine for us a different world in their

"rearticulations" (94). I argue that Brand's Inventory, Thammavongsa's Small Arguments and Found, and Compton's Performance Bond engage with and challenge official state narratives of citizenship in their own ways, but that the formal aesthetic of each text demands new ways of reading that translate into new ways of thinking through citizenship and answering the same question posed in Citizenship and Immigration

Canada's "Fact Sheet:" "What does it mean to be a Canadian citizen?" Their answers are embedded in their aesthetic, the way each collection "asks to be read" (Attridge 71). 9

Brand, Thammavongsa and Compton all harness the affective potential of their craft to encourage the development of what Gayatri Spivak calls a "one-on-one responsible contract," that is, an ethical engagement with the text as other (Critique 383).

As such, their poetry reveals the potential to teach literary citizenship, a growing subset of national literary studies that, according to Donna Palmateer Pennee "create [s] a space to ask civic questions of state policies and inherited notions of nationalism" (81). In response to this conceptualization of literary citizenship, Diana Brydon posits that while

"globalization does not eliminate the need for such a space... it may reorient some of the questions that need to be asked... [of] the ways in which the nation is embedded in the global" ("Metamorphoses" 10). Brydon argues that literary citizenship requires a responsibility to both one's "national and global situatedness" (11). Setting aside theoretical approaches that privilege the nation exclusively and those that describe the arrival of a "post-national" era, Brydon recognizes the need "to rethink Canadian literature beyond older forms of nationalism and inter-nationalism, and toward multiscaled visions of place — local, regional, national, and global — each imbricated within the other. Writers and critics are rethinking relations of place, space, and non- place in ways that complicate understandings of where and how the nation fits. They are not transcending nation but resituating it" ("Metamorphoses" 14-15).

A certain "cosmopolitan" ethic is therefore finding its way into the works of many

CanLit writers and critics attempting to reconcile increasingly complex terms of belonging. As Cheryl Lousley explains, "Cosmopolitanism is undergoing a revival as an ethical concept necessary to supplement the economic, political, and cultural shifts and environmental degradation evident with late capitalist globalization" (38). In his 10 introductory chapter to Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Bruce

Robbins argues for what Pablo Neruda would call a particular style of "residence on earth" that is "complex and multiple... shot through with unavoidable distances and indifferences, with comparison and critique... [that] does not thereby cease to be a mode of belonging" (3). Contemporary conceptions of cosmopolitics acknowledge the absence of any universal worldwide community of human beings or any easy definitions of universal human rights, and recognize the problematic legacy of humanism more generally. While strong ties continue to bind and/or constrain the majority of people to

"nation-bound lives" (Robbins 1), there are also a number of ways in which the legacies of colonialism and global capitalism shape those lives by unacknowledged or even invisible transnational experiences and affiliations. A sense of cosmopolitan or global citizenship therefore realigns our allegiances to reflect the "plural and particular... socially and geographically situated" nature of our lives (Robbins 2). This ethic is significant in that it encourages connections both within and across borders. The belief that certain reading practices can be fosteredto dismantle conceptual borders if not concrete ones, is to imagine the potential for global citizenship, not as "a 'status' granted by some supranational body or a position of cosmopolitan entitlement taken up by those who consider themselves at home anywhere in the world... [but] a practice of resistance, a collective struggle toward human rights and social justice" (Moyes 117). Brand,

Thammavongsa, and Compton all call out to their readers to commit to such practices.

I begin with a reading of Dionne Brand's Inventory that explores the terms of belonging and the particular responsibilities that accompany an ethics of global citizenship. The poem exposes the trend of inward-looking, apathetic citizenship and 11

implies that the responsibilities of citizenship now transcend national and continental borders. Like Land to Light On, which describes "the terrifying poetry of newspapers"

(13), Inventory presents a woman haunted by the "terrifying poetry" of the media. In an

effort to keep a "vigil for broken things," she spends years sitting "at the television weeping" (42, 21). While the act of witnessing is problematized, reading is figured not

simply as aesthetic exercise, but as "political and moral practice" (Giroux 11). The far- reaching scope of the inventory requires readers to confront their own patterns of consumption, to ask who the beneficiaries of global capitalism are, and to wonder at

current trends in immigration policy, as well as the implications of terrorism discourse and the normalization of a state of "terror as usual." The poet's unflinching gaze makes visible the marginalization of humanitarian concerns in both domestic and international affairs in the wake of an all-consuming interest in state security. Capitalizing on the methods of capitalism itself to draw attention to the casualties of the market-oriented global system, Brand challenges readers of Inventory to admit the ways in which they are implicated in the inequality and violence they passively witness through the filtered

screens of their televisions.

My next chapter offers a reading of Souvankham Thammavongsa's Found and

Small Arguments. Thammavongsa documents lives lived on the fringes of the imagined community and addresses the gap between policy and practice in a nation that proudly represents itself as multicultural. Thammavongsa interrogates those forces that devalue certain bodies and their labour, marking them as both invisible and silent, and thus furthering the racialization of poverty and creation of an immigrant underclass in Canada.

These complicated issues of belonging and the "unhomeliness" of the Canadian nation 12

are the subject of Thammavongsa's work. Small Arguments critiques the hierarchical

nature of citizenship and the complacency of affluent Canadians, while Found focuses on

the particular category of the refugee to explore the limits of citizenship, definitions of

humanity, and practices of historiography. Her work troubles the state's desire to read

migrant bodies by positioning all acts of reading as acts of translation and authorship of new text, all historical accounts or official records are shown to be interpretations.

In a self-interview conducted for Side/lines: A New Canadian Poetics, Wayde

Compton explains that "the only way to change our conditions, which is what should

motivate any cultural producer under a system like this, is to find the fissures... bust them

wide open, expose them and their assumptions" (84). In my last chapter I consider how

Compton's Performance Bond achieves this explosive poetic by exploring the potential to re-mix, cut and sample from dominant narratives of multiculturalism and to write the marginalized history of blackness into the record. Because multiculturalism rings false

when measured against the unequal distribution of citizenship rights, using multiculturalism as a conceptual starting point "opens up vast opportunities for rethinking the nation and for state struggles, and thus for rethinking liberal versions of citizenship and national belonging" (Walcott "Against Institution" 19). A critique of policy at its

core, of the system which turns out countless forms and methods for "dealing" with the people within its borders, Performance Bond sets out to undermine the seamless

construct that is Canada, and dislodge the assumption of whiteness as a common

denominator of full membership. Like Rinaldo Walcott, who addresses the "multiplicities of blackness" that "collide" in Canada (40), Compton destabilizes conventional definitions of citizenship by insisting, "everybody's a migrant" (42) and by admitting, "I 13 am a settler/I am uneasy" (21). The reader is asked to consider her own settled notions of national belonging and the ease with which she dismisses the injustices that Compton records, comforted by the national rhetoric of multiculturalism in a country that polices its borders, defining itself by "the sum of its exclusions" (32).

A sketch of the "contours and substance of new forms of citizenship" (Stasiulis

365) will not lead to "a new, shiny, improved version of citizenship... Nor can it address the failures of the nation-state to safeguard against the violation of the right to be human... it is something much smaller" (Cho "Diasporic" 108), something closer, perhaps, to the arguments for recognition made by Thammavongsa's small subjects. Poet

Muriel Rukeyser writes of the indifference the world shows to poetry: "They say there is no penalty for poets, /There is no penalty for writing poems. / They say this. This is the penalty" (qtd. Brand Map 109). And yet, a poem can be effective in altering a reader's perception of her own world; it can be experienced, as an event that leaves a reader changed. Brydon argues that the long-preserved divide between literary studies and other disciplines is "increasingly problematic in a world characterized by globalization's

'complex connectivity'" ("Metamorphoses" 15). With this in mind, I have sought out relevant research on citizenship from a range of disciplines and brought it to bear on my readings. This thesis explores the promise and potential of citizenship studies for literary criticism and the turn towards questions of ethics, to conclude with conviction that there is still much good that literature can do. 14

CHAPTER 2: "THAT RAVAGED WORLD IS HERE" RESITUATING GLOBAL CITIZENSHIP IN DIONNE BRAND'S INVENTORY

In "Inventory: Notes on a Poem" (2009) — a lecture given at Saint Mary's University in

Halifax, Nova Scotia ~ Dionne Brand described Inventory (2006) as an "account of the politics of the time" that she began 20 March 2003, while watching a news report showing bombs over Baghdad. After acknowledging arguments that poetry belongs in the realm of "the obscure, the mysterious, the cryptic," Brand argued for the unique power of poetry to combat the apathy of the majority of citizens in affluent nations today.

"Metaphor," she explained, "is an aggressive attempt at clarity. ... Poetry turns on the reader, interrogates the reader." Brand's belief that poetry can and must enter political dialogues leads her to stage an intimate act of witness in Inventory, one expressed in highly sensory language that calls out to readers' sensibilities, moving them to reevaluate the ways in which they are implicated in the inequalities that exist within, beyond, and at national borders. Yet, Brand also demands more than witness, more than sorrow, anger,

- or faith: "don't pray it only makes things worse, I know, think instead of what we might do" (emphasis added) (34). An attentive reading of Inventory, contextualized by current migration policy and security reforms, reveals tangible political measures that might be taken to rectify the injustices recorded in the poet's "bristling list" (100). Inventory, after all, seeks "history's pulse/ measured with another hand" (11).

The volume confronts what Brand has called "the sickly, almost boring choices one is offered daily" in the affluent world, not the least of which is the choice to maintain the comfortable position, the remove, of being a spectator ("Notes on a Poem"). Brand notes that reporters "assured us that what we saw was Baghdad ~ the map, however, all the particularities of it, the roads and cities, had been removed" ("Notes on a Poem"). 15

Inventory seeks to restore particularities to the map of contemporary international relations, to unearth the "real" that is buried in a narrative of spectacle and dangerous simplicity. Thus, we view these events through a witness who has come to recognize the ways in which her complacency makes her culpable and whose close attention to the horrors enacted upon other bodies elsewhere raises questions as to what it might mean to exercise "citizenship across borders" or to "think and feel beyond the nation" (Smith and

Bakker 2008; Pheng and Robbins 1998). In an era when "discourses on the rights, entitlements, and obligations of citizenship have changed dramatically ... as a result of the increasingly transnational character of global migration flows, cultural networks, and sociopolitical practices," there is a pressing need to develop an ethics of global citizenship (Smith and Bakker 3). That is, the recognition that the uneven and unjust spread of global capitalism has made matters of ecological justice and human rights the responsibility of all citizens of all nations. Global citizenship is imagined as "a practice of resistance, a collective struggle toward human rights and social justice" (Moyes 117).

Henry Giroux argues for a form of public pedagogy that could encourage such practices, for "new global models of democracy ... grounded in an ethics and morality in which the relationship between the self and others extends beyond the chauvinism of national boundaries and embraces a new and critical understanding of the interdependencies of the world and its implications for citizenship in global democracy" (19).

I would like to suggest that Inventory is, informed by a similar desire, organized around a central question posed within the first few pages: "how would it truly be to have danced/ with Celia Cruz unsmiling // to have studied instead I the street names of

Montevideo or Havana, / Kingston and Caracas as if planning to live there / in the elegant 16

future, as if no other life would do" (emphasis added) (10). Readers are also asked to

consider what it would be like "to have loved instead" (10), to have witnessed peaceful

revolution, "to have seen Che / Guevara as an old man on television" (11), and to have

had no cause for suffering, "to have never heard 'Redemption Song,' so hoarse, at all"

(11). The poem presents other realities founded on an other education and on the

celebration of human creativity and emotion. In Inventory, the potential to connect to what one sees on the news and in documentaries is the potential for a critical reading of the world, making the act of witness into more than detached observation. These reading practices become crucial in the development of a "critical citizenry," a "culture of

questioning and engaged civic action" that is well equipped to "transform moral outrage

into concrete attempts to prevent... human violations from taking place in the first place"

(Giroux 12).

In her work Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (1993)

Carolyn Forche describes how her own poetry — inspired by her work as a human rights activist in El Salvador, the West Bank, Lebanon, and South Africa ~ was received as

"controversial" by her American contemporaries, "who argued against its 'subject matter'

... or against any mixing of what they saw as the mutually exclusive realms of the personal and the political" (30). The anthology gathers together the works of artists who offer "poetry of witness... poems that call on us from the other side of situations of extremity" (31). In a world where there is so much atrocity, "it becomes easier to forget than to remember, and this forgetfulness becomes our defense against remembering — a rejection of unnecessary sentimentality, a hardheaded acceptance of 'reality;'" yet, poems of witness "will not permit us diseased complacency" (Forche 32). Forche's anthology 17 includes Pablo Neruda, a poet who is similarly summoned by Dionne Brand. In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand reads Neruda's "Letter to Miguel Otero Silva, In Caracas:"

"I clasp it when I lose my way because it is as if he has written it to me; it is my faith that

Neruda can write a poem fifty years ago and I can feel its company now" (99). The letter reads:

/ took life And I faced her and kissed her, And then I went through the tunnels of the mines To see how other men live. And when I came out, my hands stained with garbage and sadness I held my hands up and showed them to the generals, And said: 'I am not apart of this crime.' ....I had brought joy over to my side.

Though not included in Brand's work, Neruda's poem continues: "They started to cough, showed disgust, left off saying hello, /gave up calling me Theocritus, and ended by insulting me/ and assigning the entire police force to arrest me/ because I didn't continue to be occupied exclusively with metaphysical subjects" (qtd. Forche 576). These lines echo Brand's lecture at Saint Mary's where she references the hostility shown to poets who dare to speak out on the politics of the time. Equally, they suggest how the work of poets is to be affected, in a way that others are not, to focus their sight on those injustices which have become invisible: "I could, I suppose, see about myself only. I could be unaffected... I could say in that way that many do: oh, it's not so bad, your writing need not show your skin, it need not speak of trouble, history is a burden after all. But Neruda summons me, is waiting for me at the end of every sentence. I cannot ignore my hands

'stained with garbage and sadness'" {Map 100). Because of the conviction with which it 18 posits a writer "summoned" to address the injustices otherwise unseen and unspoken, A

Map to the Door of No Return serves as a crucial intertext for a reading ofInventory.

In A Map to the Door of No Return, Brand explains how Allen Ginsberg's poem

"Howl" (1956) dramatically changed her understanding of herself as a poet. Brand recalls sitting in a dark smoky New York City bar, listening "intently (yet languidly) to poets like us who stood in a small spotlight declaiming on the ache in human beings", snapping her fingers, murmuring "cool" and dressed the part all in black (112). Brand herself rose, under a "soft halo in the spotlight" and offered her "glimmer of wisdom into the urban void" to a bar full of patrons who snapped their approval when she finished (112). This scene, of a community of poets removed from the world ~ sitting in the dark and smoke, performing, listening intently, but without a sense of urgency ~ is abruptly brought to a close: "Then Ginsberg walked in and read 'Howl' for the first time. Journeys are always imaginary" (112). "Howl" begins:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angel headed hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night...

"Howl" arrives as an onslaught of vision and takes an inventory of the "bright young minds" Ginsberg sees before him, disconnected from the world. He imagines that they return to flats "floating across the tops of cities" to make only futile private protests -

"burning their money in wastebaskets" — while remaining silent on "the Terror" of the outside world, which they listen to "through the wall." Ginsberg's is an inventory of the

"lost battalion of platonic conversationalists" who, when they try to get political, are

"sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets." 19

If exposure to Ginsberg's "Howl" made Brand take stock of her poetics and her politics, it also seems to have inspired her Inventory. In "Howl," Ginsberg writes of "a sudden flash" of insight into "the alchemy of... the ellipse the catalog" (18). Brand employs this alchemy in Inventory to challenge readers to accept the ways in which they are implicated in the terror they may only listen to "through the wall," through the filtered screens of their televisions. While the speaker laments that "where she lives they go about their business, /... the tattoo parlors are full as if making/ warriors, but nothing happens" (40), her inventory nonetheless achieves far more than the "incomprehensible leaflets" distributed in Ginsberg's poem. It capitalizes on the methods of capitalism itself, of taking stock, to draw attention to the casualties of the market-oriented global system.

Like Land to Light On, which describes "the terrifying poetry of newspapers" (13),

Inventory presents a woman haunted by the terrifying poetry of the media. In an effort to keep a "vigil for broken things," she spends years sitting "at the television weeping" (42,

21). The poem makes a persuasive case for a reinvestment in and refashioning of citizenship informed by both the global and the local, demanding that readers join in the vigil and forego the emotional and literal distances that are, Brand suggests, regrettable illusions created by privilege and geography.

The formal aesthetic of Inventory plays a crucial role in collapsing the illusory distance separating the reader from the realities Brand documents. Alessandra

Capperdoni describes the aesthetic of the long poem, in particular its deferred closure, as one capable of "transgress[ing] closures and boundaries, which are both formal and political, breaking] open the script of the nation ~ calling attention to the liminal territories of the 'imagined communities' and to the porosity of borders. As a creative 20 discourse it extends the textual possibilities of language and opens up a space of critical intervention that helps us rethink the meaning of nation and citizenship, as these become again highly contested notions for our 'post-national' times of global capitalism" (n.p).

Brand harnesses these possibilities in Inventoiy and also employs the present tense to construct a sense of immediacy, to make the reader present in the moment of witness. As

Smaro Kamboureli writes in her study of the long poem, "the present tense of the [form] alters the reader's relation to history as the history of the past becomes synchronous with the moment of the poet's writing... .We cannot afford to ignore the poet's reading and scripting activities — which converge in turn with our own reading act" {On the Edge 55-

56). Derek Attridge concurs that "we may isolate one important factor in poetry or the poetic: the verbal singularity that is performed by the reader includes a sense of its real­ time unfolding" (Attridge 71). The potential for the reader to be moved is heightened further by the quality of anonymity informing the poem; as Cheryl Lousely points out, the unnamed speaker, her unknown location and her unspecified nationality opens the possibility that anyone could be the war's "last and late night witness." As the audience of the poem, "we are thus interpellated into an ethical community as we read. The burden of witnessing is passed on to us, each of us, singularly" (Lousley 45). At times, the weight of this burden seems impossible to bear, given the devastating scope of Brand's inventory. Indeed, Brand anticipates a hostile reading of her work, concluding with a section that predicts, "On reading this someone will say/ God, is there no happiness then?" (89). Nonetheless, the poem concludes by defending the necessity of revising this

"bristling list, hourly" (emphasis added) (100). This final word signals the urgency of this duty that is the poet's "job" (100). For members of the "ethical community" 21 established in the act of reading Inventory, the obvious question raised by this reference to duty is what their response should be, where their responsibilities lie.

The use of an inventory is not a new strategy for Brand, who has structured her works in this manner before, namely in Land to Light On. Sophia Forster reads Brand's inventories as "sometimes dizzying lists of contemporary and historical exploitations, items implicitly equated such that they become interchangeable signifiers, to describe a transnational network of oppressive power" (164). An inventory is therefore a useful means of exposing "the root connectedness of a series of oppressions geographically and historically dispersed" and reducing the "players in contemporary global power dynamics" to a "simplified set of economic relationships" (Forster 165):

in Chechnya, a Russian plane has dropped a bomb on a village the radio says, I just heard, ten billion to Yeltsin from the IMF, just today, just like any South American darling devoted sonofabitch, I know this is no news, nor walls of photographs of children in Bukavu, tents of refugees in Goma. (32)

This inventory from Land to Light On identifies both the transnational scope of oppression — its locations and the forces behind it ~ as well as the indistinguishable

"enabling middlemen of capitalism" (Forster 165-166). Giroux's analysis of photographic images can be applied to Brand's use of inventory, where her poetic eye captures and catalogues images in a manner remarkably similar to that of a photographic lens. Giroux understands photos as "social and historical constructs;" the act of deciphering a photo, of translating its visual cues into discourse, "mobilize[s] compassion instead of indifference, witnessing rather than consuming, and critical engagement rather than aesthetic appreciation or crude repudiation. ... [Photographs] make moral demands and claims upon their viewers" (10). This act of translation "offers the possibility for engaging modes of literacy that are not just about competency but also about the possibility of interpretation as an intervention in the world" (emphasis added) (Giroux 11). While the speaker of Land to Light On longs to participate in "the blood / red flame of a revolution'

(6), the conditions that have kept this impulse at bay — a nihilistic individualism and consumerism, "sessions of paranoia," and the "militant consumption of everything" — feature prominently in Inventory.

Although the speaker of inventory asserts that her job is not to "tell" the reader anything, but simply to maintain her "bristling list," Diana Brydon argues that the poem actually directs the reader very carefully, "lay[ing] its hand on [her] shoulder" ("Global

Intimacies" 993), insisting upon certain reading practices that value intimacies between reader and text-as-other but that appear to have been lost or forgotten by viewers sitting in front of "screens [that] lacerate our intimacies" {Inventory 5). Following Brydon, I want to argue that Inventory is a clear demonstration of literature's capacity to generate the horror called for by the inequalities and injustices shaping the "ravaged world" but that is in general not felt by those who have grown "perversely accustomed" to atrocity

(29) and piled their "nerve endings ... on the streets" (30). While the first line of

Inventory positions a hopeless reader who "believed in nothing" (3), an intensity of feeling informs the work as a whole: it is a woman who is, after all, "weeping... the whole time" that maintains this inventory (21). Brydon argues that the poem's "last and late night witness" enacts a model of reading and develops what Gayatri Spivak refers to as a competency in "transnational literacy" through reading practices that establish

"critical intimacy" with a text: "Critical intimacy suggests the need to employ both passion and reason while seeking understanding" ("Global Intimacies" 995). Inventory 23 argues for a worldview predicated not on any existing discourse of exclusion — religion, nationalism, or the cult of rationalism for example ~ but informed by a courageous reclaiming of passion and emotion as viable informants for politically conscious action.

The first casualties recorded in this inventory are thus the emotional capacities of citizens ~ "the suicides inside us" (3), "the light turnings to stone" (3). References throughout the work to ganglia — the tissue masses in the body that provide relay points between different neurological structures, such as the central nervous system ~ and to meninges — systems of membranes that envelop and protect the central nervous system ~ emphasize the body's natural inclination to feel, and remind us that we are built to respond to sensory stimulation, to understand and communicate via its messages. When the poetic witness records the death of "one reading/on bus 'the heart is enclosed in a pericardial sac/ that is lined with the parietal layers of serous membrane'" (24), the fragility of these bodily boundaries is exposed. The body's ability to transmit and receive messages has indeed been overwhelmed by an onslaught of media images and meta- narratives that discourage the viewer from taking up the position of witness.

If the poem argues for new reading strategies it does so on the premise that we have been caught up in certain destructive and limiting narratives — "The black-and- white American movies" which have "buried themselves in our chests" (3). There is no sense here of an interaction between the viewer and the films; the viewer becomes merely a 'host' for these narratives. Notably, they invade and inhabit the chest, thereby evicting both memory and emotion from their figurative home. As such, these narratives and their implicit ideologies — housed within our very bodies — influence our instinctive responses to the world on an emotional level. We know "the way to Wyoming, the sunset in 24

Cheyenne" (3), as if each were part of our own lived experiences, our own memories and developed sense of direction. Significantly, when the speaker takes stock of all the necessary tropes of the Western genre her list slides seamlessly into "the homicides of

Indians," which become just another part of the show that is "lit, dimmed, lit dimmed"

(3) in a repetition that naturalizes this violence. These films are informed by an American

"manifesto" — that of American exceptionalism. Giroux argues that the entrenched discourse of the 'divine right' of the American people and presidency leaves it unaccountable to the public and to the outside world, placing its decisions "beyond public engagement" and enabling citizens to "overlook their own complicity in furthering those existing relations of power" that make the violence of colonialism and neo-colonialism possible (9). While this doctrine of exceptionalism is expressed in films, it has been routinely misread and mistaken for "fun" in the theatres — consumed without much thought along with the "burnt kernels," "the chemical sugars" {Inventory A). The circulation of these narratives however "cannot contain" our actual capacity for love and feeling, and war epics leave the audience "bloody" as participants in both the spectacle of violence and the pleasure of colonial and neocolonial heroics (5).

This legacy of violence circulates in news reports on television screens, becoming

"ordinary far from where it happened" {Inventory 22). This passivity is bound up with forms of comparably ordinary, "common sorts" of racism (Chariandry "Spirits" 815).

Violence evokes little response from viewers who might make sense of what they see by concluding, "the Arab faces were Arab faces after all" {Inventory 22). The acceptance of violence as symptomatic of "uncivilized" nations and the representation of certain casualties as "collateral damage" rather than "victims" links the apathy Brand documents 25 to Eurocentricism and racism. This apathy is also entangled with capitalism, however, and the production of news for profit. It is this perversion of news, its reduction to

spectacle — "the news was advertisement for movies, / the movies were the real killings"

~ that prompts the poetic witness of Inventory (22). Brand asks that we question the cultural capital assigned to celebrity news and reality TV ~ the "unrealities of faraway islands" — since "half the mind is atrophied in this" (9). The fantasies of wealth and status to which these programs cater threaten to devalue human life itself, encouraging citizens to become mere consumers; "plasma, / they collapse into video games, Palm

Pilots, / remedies against dreams// they declare themselves innocent of all events" (73).

The rise of market fundamentalism — what Brand calls "the sermons of politicians, / their corporate benedictions" (69) — is at work here, supporting what Giroux calls the

"debased belief that profit making is the essence of democracy and that citizenship is defined as an energized plunge into consumerism" (17). Brand's project, then, is to restore active reading practices and to decolonize that valuable space in the chest so that -

- like the speaker of the poem who states "there are atomic openings in my chest/ to hold the wounded" (100) - we can read more ethically, be affected by what we learn, and stop seeking "remedies against dreams" (73).

Gayatri Spivak imagines ethics as the "slow, attentive" development of "one-on- one responsible contract" and describes ethical engagement in terms of dialogue, of responding to another and being responsible to them (Critique 383). In these engagements, however, "there is always the sense that something has not got across"

(Critique 384). As Lousley points out in her reading of Inventory, a fully coherent ethical relationship is therefore both "an impossibility" and a "necessity;" this "effort of love" is 26 a crucial supplement to "the political work of changing laws and social systems by changing minds" (41). In Inventory, this "one-on-one responsible contract" is unlikely to develop for the television viewer whose experiences are filtered through a screen that translates the suffering of others into spectacle, positioning the act of witness not as activism but rather as voyeurism (Lousley 43). The news media does not encourage a viewer to interrogate her role in the atrocities she witnesses; it does not ask the viewer to locate the beneficiaries who are always absent on the screen.

Theodor Adorno recognized the manner in which mass media and new telecommunications technologies reduced distances between viewers but "eroded face-to face contact," thus allowing for an increased disregard as to the consequences of one's actions. These new conditions lent themselves to "a climate in which rituals of violence had become so entrenched in the culture that 'aggression, brutality, and sadism' had become a normalized and unquestioned part of everyday life" (Giroux 15). Lousley argues that Brand troubles the act of witnessing by "interrogating the power relations structuring distance" between witnesses, victims, perpetrators and the often unseen beneficiaries (40). Brand's assertion — "then the prison couture of orange-clad criminals / we became, / the kinkiness of blindfolds we admitted" (7) — acts to complicate the gaze:

"the 'we' is ambiguous in its identification, suggesting the spectators sympathize with

(and risk being labeled alongside) those in the victim position ... and share the privileged position of the perpetrators, permitting and vicariously enjoying the 'kinky' imprisonments and torture at American military posts such as Guantanamo Bay and Abu

Ghraib" (Lousley 43). By refusing to distinguish between acts committed by "legitimate" and "illegitimate" agents or to provide the names of perpetrators, Brand demands that we 27, recognize our responsibilities as witnesses. The elusion of distance begins to collapse, and Spivak's one-on-one contract becomes less of an impossibility.

In Inventory, Brand documents the lack of genuine "contact" provided to viewers by existing news media, documentaries, and entertainment; she remedies this situation through the medium of poetry where "the distance between the reader and the text is much shorter" (Brand, "Notes on a Poem"). Brand is able to reach out across that distance and guide readers; in this effort to establish contact she makes an appeal to their emotions. Sara Ahmed compares the work of emotions to that of maps or directives; they orient our responses towards objects and others. As such, "it is through emotions that

surfaces or boundaries are made: the T and the 'we' are shaped by, and even take the shape of, contact with others" (Ahmed 10). Affective response to the other therefore requires first an opportunity for contact and intimate interaction. In her reading of A Map to the Door of No Return, Maia Joseph focuses on "particular instances where an attentiveness to emotional experience allows Brand to discover the possibility of tentative alignment across socially constructed boundaries, opening up the terms of national belonging" (n.p). Inventory goes further, deterritorializing the international order and the illusions of distance that isolate individuals from events outside national borders. The relationship formed between a reader and a text, the possibility of an impression being made, and the sense of solidarity fostered between readers more generally supports the possibility that literary citizenship might foster an imagined territory "which doesn't yet exist on a map," where international relations are personal as well as political, and of significance to individuals, not just heads of state. 28

The potential to establish this "affective citizenship," as Brydon terms it, is implied in Inventory by the suggestion that its loss is but a recent casualty. The speaker remembers days when there was hope for change: "foolish in the heady days / when we thought we might, somehow / within a few seasons" (4). Now, although that optimism is looked back on as "foolish," people are still "gathered at the windows // on the corners, thinking one day / we'll make it, delicately, / without a war, without the tragedy / of it all/ and maybe with our bodies / though now II it's too late for that" (5). Indeed, Brand suggests that it is the devaluation of the human body as capital that has undermined human rights movements and exacerbated the economic stratification between states. As buildings are "mechanized with flesh," "acreages/ of tender automobiles" (9) are cultivated and people go hungry. The human cost of development — in terms of dehumanizing labor and the figuration of the earth as a source of material wealth rather than essential foodstuffs (the dehumanizing of industry itself) — is linked directly to the evacuation of our emotional registers — the abandonment of our "nerve endings" that are

"piled" like garbage on the streets. The speaker collects these remnants and counts them

"like rice grains;" both will be desperately needed in the future when their shortage is guaranteed by an economy that values neither humanity nor the earth.

In Inventory, our food and our wealth have been stripped of any signs of their natural origins in the earth, of the intimacy between the earth and our mortality ~ "we stripped, so fastidious, / the seams of dirt excised from apples and gold" (6). The continued destruction of the earth is in fact figured as perhaps the most obvious indicator of our misplaced ethics — "the forests we destroyed, / as far as/ the Amazonas' forehead, the Congo's gut, / the trees we peeled of rough butter, / full knowing, there's something wrong / with this" (7). The unethical destruction and consumption of natural resources required by global capitalism has consequences that put into sharp relief the ways in which individuals across the world are connected. Whether they choose to embrace an ethics of global citizenship or not, citizens share a common tenancy on the earth with those whom they turn away at their borders. The profoundly uneven and unjust nature of globalization can be seen in the case of new lightweight electronics popular among mass consumers the world over. These devices require Coltan, a mineral discovered in Kahuzi-

Biega ~ a national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, once a reserve for the protection of gorillas, now the site of extensive deforestation and illegal mineral extraction. The lucrative market for this prized resource led to an increase in child labor, generated tragic land slides and contributed to the continuation of civil war in the DRC.

This suffering was caused to produce communication devices on which citizens of affluent nations say nothing of political importance: "the image of the cell phone 'calling no one' and 'carrying] nothing' is a bitter indictment of the willful ignorance by commodity fetishism" (Lousley 48). It is via these specific references to injustice that

Brand begins to lay out the responsibilities of global citizenship, that is, of "thinking and feeling beyond the nation." These responsibilities require mindfulness of our roles as consumers and of the human and environmental costs of the goods and services we demand, but also of the potential which the 'advances' of a globalized world can hold; the availability of improved telecommunications systems allows for an investment in sustained meaningful dialogue across borders, should we choose to use them in this way.

Although the first few years of the twenty-first century might be "small years, small for the distancing planet" (10), they have been monumental and transformative for 30 human history. In this postmodern era, both time and space seem to have collapsed as individuals are at once more connected than ever and yet live their lives "so suspended, defenseless" (10) in the face of ever-shifting and increasingly violent conflicts. And so, an inventory can present an assault on the myth of the utopic cosmopolitan cityscape.

Brand records the spread of peoples "out across the cosmos" (48) and, far from suggesting a move towards equality and global harmony, this pushes the atheist speaker of the poem to make her one and only "imprecation to a deity" in the entire volume:

"God forbid, stop them" (48). Her fear comes from the observation that these spaces are not governed by an ethics of global citizenship; it is "like chaos" (4). There is a desperate need for the establishment of cosmopolites — "the need to introduce intellectual order and accountability into this newly dynamic space" (Robbins 9). Blind to the suffering of its inhabitants, the cities of this cosmos are figured "wear[ing] bandages over the eyes"

(43). Situated looking down at a world "already corroding with cities," the view is bleak.

Miami ~ a city home to multiple diasporas — is figured as an infection, an "orange slick blister;" its inhabitants greedily feed on natural resources and are thus "engorged with oil and wheat, / rubber and metals" (15). In this sickly state, the health and vitality of youth is described as "immodest." They feast upon "troughlike cartons of cola" and enjoy "a gorgon luxury of electronics," but are unburdened by any sense of social responsibility.

Outsiders are shown seeking access to the city, leaving behind — one would assume — a more dismal scenario: "lines of visitors are fingerprinted, / eye-scanned, grow murderous" (16), "burning their beautiful eyes in the patient queue," maintaining a passivity required by a deeply flawed and inefficient — one could say inhumane ~ bureaucratic process that breeds "inchoate self-loathing" (17). While Canada has long 31

been thought of as a country of immigrants, "virtually all reforms in immigration and

refugee policies enacted in the 1990s and into the new millennium have been in more

restrictive directions" (Stasiulis and Bakan 32-33). By way of example, under the 2001

Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) (which replaced the Immigration Act of

1976) permanent residents were brought under the new term 'foreign nationals,' setting a

new precedent in Canadian immigration policy tradition by placing residents on par with

those who enjoy no legal status at all in Canada: "the IRPA introduces new measures that

strip permanent residents of several of the rights they previously enjoyed and thus erects

a further boundary between permanent residents and formal citizens" (Stasiulis and

Bakan 33). Many theorists have remarked on the irony that nation states are regulating

their borders with an increasingly iron grip at a time when the sovereignty of the nation-

state is otherwise being seriously undermined by globalizing forces (Lister 11). Although

globalization may make borders more porous to goods and service, however, "freedom of

movement round the world is largely confined to financial capital and highly skilled professionals, whilst frontiers are closed to the poor and unskilled desperate for work --

or they are allowed in as temporary labor, but denied any rights" (Carter 74). While theorists like Arjun Appadurai hypothesize that the nation is losing influential ground to the "global flows" of goods, services, knowledge and culture, he neglects the complex relations that limit the influence of the global over the nation, the most obvious of which is class stratification: "[Appadurai] makes no attempt to identify the processes that increasingly differentiate the power of mobile and nonmobile subjects," writes Aihwa

Ong, "giv[ing] the misleading impression that everyone can take equal advantage of mobility and modern communications and that transnationality has been liberatory, in 32

both a spatial and a political sense, for all peoples" (1 l).While some seek "flexible

citizenship," responding to "cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and

displacement that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing

political-economic conditions" (Qng 6), globalization favors but does not distribute

equally the conditions for this flexibility and mobility, largely because the state has

retained sovereignty over border controls. The Schengen Area — covering the territory of

twenty-five European countries - is a compelling example of the paradoxical ideology

now structuring borders. While the Schengen Area in many ways represents a progressive

move towards a "borderless world" — the area covers well over four million square

kilometers and allows for the movement of over four hundred million people ~ before joining the Schengen Area, countries are required to upgrade their border controls against

non-Schengen states. As such, the area at once represents a movement away from border

controls and towards them — breaking down barriers between nations perceived to share a

common continental history, culture and economic interests, but also facilitating a mass

coordination of resources to improve the efficiency and consistency with which non-

European or otherwise non-desirable Others are barricaded from entry.

Brand takes care to reveal the inflexible and even indentured living conditions for

many — especially for migrant labourers ~ and she stresses that this gruesome reality

continues despite the fact that its terms have been voiced and made known: "everywhere

they say, 'We come to work with our coffins on our backs,' / at the Indian ports where

they break ships, / the poor holes in Poland digging coal/ for the black market" (Inventory

70). Nonetheless, Canada and most other major labor-receiving states are still

withholding their signatures from the 1990 United Nations' International Convention on 33 the Rights of all Migrants and Members of their Families. The Convention required a minimum of 20 ratifications before it could enter into force (UNESCO 10). When El

Salvador and Guatemala ratified it on 14 March 2003, this threshold was reached. As of

March 2007 not one migrant-receiving state of the global North had ratified the

Convention (UNESCO 12), even though the majority of migrants live in Europe and

North America and even though their abuses are well documented. It is therefore significant that the documentation of this particular form of violence makes up some of the rare moments where Brand finds it relevant and necessary to provide specific names.

While Lousely's reading of Inventory focuses on the marked absence of particulars, she does not interrogate those moments in the poem when individuals are named ~ moments that take on a great deal of significance given the anonymity shaping the rest of the poem. The poet witnesses those that die not by "stray" or intended bombs but rather "by asylum/ in Traiskirchen, at Brussels, at Helsinki, / in deportations to

Buenos Aires, Ricardo Barrientos.../in childhood, at Pagani" (39). The momentary gap after "asylum" reveals the vacancy of that phrase, the poverty of the asylum offered by these places, now notorious for their mistreatment of refugees. The move from asylum to deportation in the same stanza reveals as well the slight details that can determine the fate of an asylum seeker, a refugee "claimant" — as soon deported as offered asylum. The case of Barrientos demonstrates the great potential for these asylum seekers to suffer harm and maltreatment given the refusal of most major refugee-receiving states to ratify the UN Convention. Barrientos, an Argentinean national, died while being forcibly deported from France in December 2002: "On an aircraft destined for Buenos Aires, he had reportedly been bent double, his hands cuffed behind his back, and his torso, thighs 34 and ankles bound with Velcro tape, while two police officers and three gendarmes applied continuous pressure to his shoulder blades. He had a mask over his face and was covered with a blanket, which hid him from other passengers and prevented him appealing for help" (Amnesty US n.p.). According to Amnesty US's 2004 report, there were no charges brought for foul play; his official cause of death was recorded as an existing heart condition. Brand contextualizes Barrientos' death and likely maltreatment by documenting other forms of trauma and abuse particular to this post-modern moment, naming Traiskirchen (a town in Austria where multiple human rights violations have been brought against police for brutality and the killing of asylum seekers in the area),

Brussels, Helsinki and Pagani (cities with similar records). The significance of this naming suggests that these are atrocities that are elsewhere given little notice; these are horrors that escape even the sensationalizing of mainstream media coverage. While nearly two hundred children aged thirteen to sixteen ~ the majority arriving unaccompanied, from Iraq and Afghanistan— were part of the seven hundred refugees held in Pagani at the Reception and Temporary Accommodation Centre for illegal immigrants in extremely overcrowded conditions, the lives of these migrants appear to lack the "shock and awe" entertainment value that the coverage of the war on terror can provide. The names of these locations are as unfamiliar to Brand's readers as the experience of forced migration itself. Brand also documents in this section the disappearance of thirteen Palestinian refugees from Iraq believed to have drowned at sea off the coast of Italy {Inventory 38). As such, she counts in her inventory the most heavily traveled route for illegal migrants from Africa. In March of this year (2009), a boat full of migrants heading for Italy capsized 30 miles off the coast of Libya, killing hundreds. 35

Among those missing were people from Somalia, Nigeria, Eritrea, Kurdish areas of Syria,

Algeria, Morocco, the Palestinian territories and Tunisia. U.N. High Commissioner for

Refugees Antonio Guterres described it as "the latest tragic example of a global phenomenon in which desperate people take desperate measures to escape conflict, persecution and poverty in search of a better life" (UNHCR n.p.). Significantly, these crimes arrive to spectators in the global North via "documentaries," a form of entertainment that is, Brand reminds us, observed "in liquid surfaces, in oceanic blue

screens" that are clearly aligned with those waters in which so many migrants have drowned seeking asylum or prosperity (39). Like their bodies, their narratives are quickly removed from sight, lost "in disappearances in /the secret seas of living rooms here" (39).

The disappearance and maltreatment of these human beings occurs here, and as spectators we are thus made culpable, called to witness and testify.

In response to the movements of these "illegal" bodies, wealthy nations have implemented increasingly restrictive immigration and refugee laws which have been described as a "form of 'global apartheid,' designed to protect these countries from opening their doors in the face of mounting pressures to migrate from less affluent societies" (Stasiulis and Bakan 28-29). When migrants arrive at militarized and hostile borders, they are greeted with suspicion and often turned away, although — as Brand observes — "the wealth multiplies in the garbage dumps, and the quiet is the quiet of thieves" {Inventory 40). The situation emerging in Europe reveals the construction of "a white, wealthy, and Christian 'Fortress Europe' pitted against a largely poor, Islamic world" (Moisi qtd. Stasiulis and Bakan 29). In similar fashion, the construction of the

"North American Security Perimeter" has established "Fortress North America." The US 36 has systematically heightened security and militarized its border with Mexico, an ongoing development that is under close observation by many human rights watch groups around the world. This highly politicized border is brought into Inventory by way of reference to the causalities caused "by dogs and vigilantes" (39), as well as by "La Migra" — the U.S. immigration officials — in Brewster County (named for Henry Percy Brewster, a secretary of war for the Republic of Texas), in Hidalgo County (named for Miguel

Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest who raised the call for Mexico's independence from Spain),

Dona Ana County, and Zapata County (named for Colonel Jose Antonio de Zapata, a rancher in the area and a rebel). The very names of these American counties reveal a long inherited history of conflict and land disputes between Mexico and the U.S. In the most recent move to assert its sovereignty, the Bush administration signed the Border Fence

Act in 2006, a project that entails threading 700 miles offence throughout these counties, from California to Texas. The turn towards heightened border security is brought into

Brand's Inventory and therefore connected to the other tragedies she accounts for, but it also defies her attempts to quantify or record it: "concrete barriers" are "ubiquitous"(42) and border guards "endlessly increase" (51). The justification for these measures ~ legitimized by the state via references to the supposed threat and cost of illegal migrants, terrorists, traffickers and other undesirables ~ is undermined by Brand who compares state officials — "furiously/ modernizing their barbed wire every breached hour" ~ to spiders she observes building their webs (51). While they have no legal claim over the territory, these "belligerent spiders" attempt to cut off "the mouth of the river// the path to the lake" (51) and deny access to others. This unnatural hoarding of resources can be seen via state authored narratives of the migrant as a "drain" on resources. The infrastructure, technology and institutions established to control the flow of people and the power dynamic between guards and "visitors" is established in Brand's

Inventory as part of a long history of parallel relations; these are just the newest

"palimpsests of old borders" (16) as the world is constantly redistributed and redefined according to shifts in power relations and as claims on the land are redrawn. Brand takes stock as well of the growing investment in new technologies that reduce human beings to data: the modern methods of identifying and monitoring individuals at borders as well as within those boundaried spaces of a nation. The turn towards biometrics marks a disturbing trend on a number of levels. It is a practice with ideological import, translating into a lack of empathy expressed in lived experiences and encounters. It also confirms the growing fear and paranoia governing relations at borderlands and the heightening hostility to foreign bodies whose written or spoken histories are assumed suspect — neither communicable nor trustworthy — and must instead be discovered and authorized by the systematic break-down of that body into its tell-tale parts:

lines of visitors are fingerprinted, eye-scanned, grow murderous then there's the business of thoughts who can glean with any certainty, [...] soon, soon, the implants to discern lies

from the way a body moves there's that already she felt ill (Inventory 16)

Biometrics measure both physiological traits (charting fingerprints, DNA, hand and palm geometry, and the iris of the eye) as well as behavioral traits — such as one's gait, "the way a body moves." The language of biometrics — references to "geometry" and the possibility of "charting" different spaces of individual bodies — reveals that the migrant/suspect body has been identified as uncharted territory, an unknown and threatening geography which can be probed, mapped and recorded by the gatekeepers of neocolonial states (and their military compounds and government offices rooted elsewhere) who claim the right to this exploration as well as to ownership over the spoils of their conquest: the data they mine and stockpile to use when needed.

Brand warns of the costly consequences "of reasonable suspicion, of self- fulfilling / dread" (emphasis added) (27). In Canada, this reasonable suspicion has led to the "Temporary Resident Biometrics Project" which is scheduled to begin by 2011. It enlists the CIC, Canada's Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Royal Canadian

Mounted Police (RCMP), to "significantly bolster Canada's existing toolbox of measures to reduce identity fraud and enhance the safety and security of Canadians" by introducing biometrics into its temporary resident program (CIC "Biometrics Project"). While the

CIC report on biometrics assures readers that it is "conducting a comprehensive privacy analysis," this program treats all non-citizens as security risks, and — while perhaps protecting their privacy — seriously undermines their security within the nation, positioning them as reasonable targets for suspicion, discrimination and exclusion. While personal information may have been "treated with the utmost care," the concern for privacy rights does not address the extent to which other human rights are protected by the move to biometrics. Is the wellbeing of the bodies ~ the site/source of this data handled with utmost care - of equal concern? Will the health, nourishment, shelter, and education of these bodies be likewise protected? The reality is that the collection of this information is geared towards restricting the flow of bodies across borders, to making 39 borders less porous to "illegal" immigration. The perceived need for such measures is also a reflection of the increasing value that passports, visas, and other travel documents issued by affluent nations hold in global markets — encouraging an increase in the production of fraudulent documents as well human trafficking. The unequal distribution of wealth and privilege which explains both this rising trade in identities and rising hostilities which fuel inchoate terrorism, is not in any way addressed by the move towards biometrics; if anything, this move exacerbates the sense of global apartheid which contributes to the risks the CIC is attempting to control. Strengthening borders rather than international relations (with 'relations' here imagined in the full sense of the word — dialogue, teamwork, and concern) does not make for a safer world.

The language of Canada's Budget 2009 reveals what Brand understands to be the state's desire to fix identities, to reduce individuals to "some exact phrases" (84). Budget

2009 describes the twofold "benefit" of the CIC biometric program — that is,

"enhancing] the integrity and efficiency of the border by preventing criminals from entering Canada, and facilitating the processing of legitimate applicants" — and positions the non-citizen body as either criminal or legitimate but, in either case, as one to be

"processed" and approved as efficiently as possibly. The border, it appears, is meant to function as an efficient, no-nonsense zone of intelligibility where the identity of each individual will be immediately realized and legible with a simple scan. The six-month field trial was deemed a "success," after all, because it "demonstrated the capacity to fix client identity using biometrics and to increase confidence in decisions relating to client identity" (CIC "Biometrics Field Report"). Inventory documents the demands on newcomers to "mince biographies/to some exact phrases, some / exact and toxic genealogy" (17), to essentially reduce themselves to knowable facts. Brand argues against this impulse and the state-centric ideology it supports, explaining: "they want some single story, the story of my life, /1 say this big world is the story, I don't have any other" (84). In doing so, she asks that individuals be contextualized according to their place in "this big world," that that story of global inequalities should be taken into account as well when deciding who is a welcome arrival at the border, and when working on the assumption that certain bodies can be marked as "illegal" -- a deceit actively being challenged by the efforts of transnational groups such as "No One Is Illegal" (NOII).

This organization of immigrants, refugees and allies originates from the 1970s

Sans Papiers movement in France, a response to a cutthroat campaign to deport

"illegals." The movement took off in the mid-1990s in response to a series of legislation introduced by the right-wing government that affected the status of a broad spectrum of society, so that the category of illegality extended to more and more inhabitants. The contemporary Sans-Papiers movement began on 18 March 1996 when three hundred

Africans, mainly from Mali and Senegal, occupied the Saint-Ambroise church in Paris for four days in protest and demanded the government regularize their status (Freedman 71-

72). When the police forcibly removed them, the Sans Papiers moved to Saint Bernard church and resumed their hunger strikes. Riot police soon brought these protests to a violent end. More recently, in 2002, the right-wing government pledged to resolve the issue "once and for all" and the Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy (who would assume the Presidential office on 16 May 2007), announced that the number of deportations would double within a year, and that the use of charter flights would be reintroduced if necessary to facilitate this goal, in cooperation with the Belgian 41 government who was willing to run "joint" charter flights through Brussels (Freedman

75). Brand appears to have this history in mind as she recalls the infamous "Karcher" comment made by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2005, when he promised to "pressure clean" the

"rabble" of Paris suburbs just two days before deadly riots broke out (Inventory 70). The dehumanization of these poor and excluded residents of the city — referred to as "rabble" or "illegals" — facilitates the smooth execution of their deportation or at least the systemic denial of their rights as long as they continue to reside on the outskirts. "This is a distressing evolution of the English language," according to Catherine Dauvergne.

"'Illegal' has become a noun... .It used to be impossible to call people themselves

'illegal'" (Making People 10). The discourse of illegality "creates the notion of a homogenous mass of people who are all 'clandestine' and who all pose a threat to the security of the French state. It reduces a complex situation to one of the 'lowest common denominator,' depicting all those who find themselves for various reasons without the requisite legal residence papers as criminals who have illegally entered the country"

(Freedman 77).

Building on the initiatives of the Sans-Papiers, activists throughout Europe pursued "No One is Illegal" campaigns. In Britain, September 2003, they published a manifesto entitled "No One Is Illegal!" and called for "A world without borders! No

Immigration controls!" (Dauvergne Making People 9). NOII has operated out of major

Canadian cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal since 2002 where activists "fight for the rights of all migrants to live with dignity and respect" (NOII "About"). While an

"end to all deportations and detentions" is first and foremost on NOII's list of demands, the CIC report on biometrics makes explicit the state's determination to "fix" identities in order to pursue more of these very measures. The state labours to erect a security

perimeter rather than committing itself to ameliorate conditions both within and beyond

that perimeter by safe-guarding human rights, alleviating poverty and hunger, extending

the rights and responsibilities of citizenship to a broader cross-section of society, targeting racism and xenophobia, and building literacy. Even in affluent nations, Brand

documents an impoverished life; "bus stations are empty and sobbing, / the unemployment lines runny" and "the electricity [has been] gone since Thursday" (32).

Perhaps most disturbing is that the turn to biometrics reveals just some of the

economic incentives behind the "war on terror," the financial gains that have been made

in the name of "democracy" and "security." Biometrics, after all, is a new and prosperous

industry built out of the ashes of the terror the state now combats with comparable doses

of terror. Brand takes aim at some of these "experts on terror" in her inventory, when her witness attempts to make sense of the carnage she sees by concluding there must be a motive behind it, some organizing principle: "some she concluded are striving on grief

(21). The world has become "saturated with experts on terror" (44), with individuals who

gather their "wicked knowledge" in their "offices," at a comfortable remove from the

information they circulate. These citizens of affluent nations, who benefit from "a new

industry for the stock exchange/ and an expense account" (44), are clearly not the true

"experts on terror." Instead, those individuals living there, living with that terror all around them, are positioned as such. But of course, their voices are never heard. Brand polemically counts the "barrios and slums" of the majority world in her inventory of happiness, for while they are "crazy crazy places/ violent too sometimes [...] there happiness/ is a light post, a scar, stigmata, blazing/ in every hand, and water, a passport" 43

(97). In a world where affluent nations busy themselves by fiercely guarding their borders and seizing suspect passports, for countless people the basic requirement for life — water

-- is the only passport that matters, and in these circumstances a truer happiness is attainable. While "being screams there, the jangling of intense limbs, / the expiration of any breath, its succeeding intake, / the surprised and grateful lungs" (97), those in affluent nations concern themselves with "home improvements, / self-makeovers" (27); this individualism and materialism is "what goes for conscience now" (27). Such an impoverished ethics allows these self-centered consumers to disconnect their wealth from the scarcity defining the lives of others, and — more dangerously ~ to disconnect that divide from the desire to immigrate as well as the violence of protest and even terrorism.

The litanies of American exceptionalism preached by politicians support the host of excuses that Brand gathers together in an attempt to empty them of meaning:

[...] we're doing the best that we can with these people, what undeniable hatred fuels them, what else can we do, nothing but maim them,

we do not deserve it, it's out of the blue [... ] they hate our freedom,

they want the abominable food from our mouths.

{Inventory 27)

The emotions and irrational fears that Brand parrots in her poem are in fact capitalized upon by the state following terrorist attacks to facilitate the expediency with which security and anti-terrorism legislation is passed. Indeed, some incredibly influential recent legislation is marked by hasty and 'urgent' authorship, namely the UN "Security

Council Resolution (SCR) 1373," which was adopted on 28 September 2001, less than 44 three weeks after 9/11. In light of far-reaching securitization measures worldwide, it is difficult to overstate the ideological force and consequence of the speaker's assertion —

"know that I am your spy here, your terrorist" (37). Such a statement is meant to provoke and initiate a reevaluation of terrorism discourse.

SCR 1373 reportedly took only five minutes to be approved unanimously by all fifteen members of the Security Council (Roach "Sources" 230). In these five minutes an influential and dramatic connection between immigration and anti-terrorism law was established, as all states were directed to evaluate and, if necessary, overhaul their refugee review procedure to ensure that terrorists were not taking advantage of asylum claims processes in order to cross borders. SCR 1373 called upon all states to prevent and suppress "the financing of terrorist acts." The drive to compile lists of terrorist groups and "associated individuals and entities" inspired by the fear of "financing" terrorist activities has posed notorious threats to human rights. Brand has her witness write a letter addressed to all the streets of the Islamic world sharing common names, potentially incriminating herself by "dealing" with those whose names likely appear on such a list.

These blacklists circumvent justice by essentially outlawing individuals and institutions via the legislative rather than the judiciary branch of the state! The potential for names to be added to the lists in error is great, "given the absence of adversarial hearings or challenges of evidence before a person is listed" (Roach "Sources" 234). The problem of common names also causes errors that can have devastating effects since "it is unlawful for almost anyone to associate with or have dealings with a listed person" (Roach

"Sources" 234). The continued impact of resolutions such as SCR 1373 reveals the absence of dissent in this era of militarization. While the SCR 1373 heightened 45 suspicions around refugee claimants and concentrated efforts to limit the financing of terrorist groups, these measures were made without adequate information ~ a fact that elicits little surprise given the "efficiency" with which the Council passed the resolution.

The US 9/11 Commission Report, released in 2004, "revealed significant limits on the ability of financing laws to prevent even massive acts of terrorism like 9/11, let alone the smaller and less expensive bombings in Bali, Madrid and London. It also revealed that the 9/11 hijackers entered the United States in a variety of ways, none of which included claims of asylum" (Roach 228).

Canada's own Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA) was enacted within ninety days of SCR

1373. Since 9/11, Canada has relied "almost exclusively on immigration law as anti­ terrorism law," a move which allows the government to handle 'security threats' with less regard for human rights since "Canadian immigration law has not only broader liability rules but a much lower standard of proof than the criminal law" (Roach "Sources" 236).

Under immigration law (as opposed to criminal law) the state also has the ability to deny disclosure to a detainee of information being used against them. The ATA also allows for preventive arrests and contains a "recognizance with condition" provision that allows the state to deny an individual their civil liberties on the basis of predicted future offences:

"Such presumption and prediction can slip too easily into stereotyping, racial profiling and blatant discrimination" (Crocker et al. 19). The combination of these characteristics

"raises the question of whether innocence can survive as a meaningful concept when immigration law is used as anti-terrorism law" (Roach "Sources" 237). Indeed, the 2007 report by Crocker et al., which records the effects of security and immigration legislation on immigrant and ethnic communities in Atlantic Canada, is tellingly subtitled 46

"Presumed Guilty?" As "ever more narrow notions of security are conflated with im/migration concerns," the government creates "a climate of fear in immigrant and ethnic communities that [leads] them to question their equal rights and freedoms, and thus undermine[s] their sense of belonging in this country they have chosen" (Crocker et al. 2). The equation of immigration law and anti-terrorism law post 9/11 has had obvious and irrevocable consequences for immigrants, and refugee claimants in particular. This development reveals the obvious but often forgotten truth that at its borders a democratic nation ceases to be democratic; the ideology informing border controls is, in Brand's words, "self-righteous, let's say it, fascism, / how else to say, border, / and the militant consumption of everything, /... the eagerness/ to be all the same, to mince biographies / to some exact phrases, some / exact and toxic genealogy" (17).

According to Brand, the demands on newcomers to be "just like us" and their

"eagerness" to conform (read: lack of choice in their desperation) leads them to reduce themselves to a set of "exact" facts that can be reproduced for the guards. When Brand's narrator stipulates that "nothing personal is recorded here" (22), she mimics the methods used at the border. Acknowledging the dangers of this trend towards dehumanization is central to Inventory, which acts as a sort of warning for the future — for the "divine fierce years to come // when the planet is ruined, the continent / forlorn in water and smoke"

(31). Deeply disturbed by this vision, the speaker occasionally seeks refuge in notions of the nation as a homeland, the security that comes from a place where citizens can feel a sense of community and belonging: "let's go to the republic of home," she writes, where there is the chance to "forget all this" (17). "Going home" is, however, no longer possible according to Nandita Sharma, who argues that "in this period of increased mobility (of capital, goods, and people) it is the process of differential inclusion ~ not simply exclusion — that works to facilitate how people are seen ~ and see themselves ~ as being at home or not in the spaces in which they find themselves" ("In the Name of Home" 1).

Brand complicates the notion of 'home' in A Map to the Door of No Return where the modern city is described as "a place of transmigrations and transmogrifications. ... a place where the old migrants transmogrify into citizens with disappeared origins who look at new migrants as if at strangers, forgetting their own flights. And the new migrants remain immigrants until they too can disappear their origins" {Map 62-63). The need for migrants to "disappear their origins" in order to feel "at home" in Canadian cities, seriously undermines the hospitality supposedly on offer by a multicultural state. The impossibility of a neat divide between 'here' and 'there' is also made explicit in

Inventory when the reader arrives at "the suburbs, the outskirts" of Canadian cities, places understood as "inevitable" given our lack of empathy — "we don't care beyond pity" (47). In the suburbs that same moral vacancy is reflected in the failure of multiculturalism — the "faithless hyphens" — and the children with "their killing play"

(47). "That ravaged world is here," Brand writes, in the "world class cities" of Paris and

Toronto, in their "outskirts" where outcasts and non-citizens are subject to racial profiling. The reality of life in Aulnay-sous-Bois and Jane-Finch, its affinities with life presumed to exist only "elsewhere" prompts Brydon to state "that there is no outside to the Canadian nation anymore" ("Global Intimacies" 997).

Indeed, Inventory upsets the perceived distances containing and separating national affairs on a global scale; references to Montevideo, the capital and the largest city of Uruguay, and Caracas, the largest and capital city of Venezuela run up against 48 references to various locales throughout Iraq — from major cities to smaller towns to particular neighborhoods, districts and even restaurants within those cities. The reader is thrown from these streets to Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, to Oxford Circus in

London, and to Potsdam Square in Berlin. The world here is shrinking, and disorienting.

Furthermore, the reported casualties in this inventory do not occur in some vague space

"over there" but rather in Hillah, Amariya, Adhaim, Afar, Samarra, Khallis, Kirkuk,

Talafar, Shorgat, Mosul, Dora, Mishada and so forth. The poem then makes an abrupt shift from the normalized site of tragedy to "far from where it [normally] happens," to

"Missouri shopping mall, possible yes, in restaurant in Madison," in Nashville, and in

Buffalo. The aside, "possible yes," registers the surprise in the reader in the moment of recognition of a place name and joint recognition of the assumption that tragedy occurs only in "faraway" locales. Another significant shift in this inventory reveals that

"standard" news reporting has a dehumanizing effect. Her horror triggers her imagination to fill in missing details — those that mark these bodies as people: "three beating dust from slippers, anyone looking / for a newspaper, an idea in their head like figs will soon / be in season, four playing dominoes, drinking Turkish coffee" (24). In contrast, the reporting techniques of the news media reveal much about "what goes for conscience now" (27). The scope of Brand's inventory on the other hand extends far beyond that of the Body Count project to which she gives credit for the casualties she describes. While

Brand employs the figures tallied by this valuable activist initiative, she does so in part to argue against such measures which, though admirable and necessary, must be expanded beyond their mathematical form. The multiple meanings of "figure" after all speaks to the number of casualties and to the actual bodies themselves, their original shape as well as their disfigurement in death; it also speaks to the operation of these bodies and numbers as symbolic figures, as metonymies of the violence and destruction characterizing the invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In keeping with her impulse to humanize these casualties, Brand's poetic witness

stages an imaginary retreat into the embrace of a relationship, in a place where she could

"forget" everything about the real world (35). This imagined retreat is characterized almost entirely by sense experience: by music — "when you come though we'll listen/ to

Coltrane's Stellar Regions " (36) — and tastes — "gira cooking in oil" (36) — and careful observation of nature — "caterpillars gnawing at leaves... / one bee eating fruit" (36). It is a retreat to another life that is founded on the possibility of human connection, of bodies impressing upon one another:

all I can offer you now though is my brooding hand, my sodden eyelashes and the like, these humble and particular things I know, my eyes pinned to your face

understand, I will keep you alive like this

(37).

Here, the description of "eyes pinned to your face" emphasizes the intimacy of the gaze that Brand champions as a crucial means of reassigning value to human life and reigning in the chaotic violence currently shaping global relations. Her letter to this imagined recipient is presented as something to be experienced and processed on a sensual level:

"take this letter, put it on your tongue" (37). Her directive encourages both the tasting of her letter, the figurative consumption of her meaning so that it will be housed within the recipient's body, as well as the literal destruction of the letter — its erasure. The consumption of potentially incriminating documents — of passports torn and swallowed 50

by a migrant in an airplane bathroom, for example — reveals the danger and significance

of words, and in this case, of poetry as a challenge to the state, to carefully patrolled

boundaries of language and the categories it maintains. This retreat is inspired by a desire

"to step into another life.. .//without anything we now know, without/bruises, without

bullet-holed walls," by the desire that she polemically suggests makes her a "terrorist"

(37). This assertion forces a re-evaluation of the definition of terrorism and the conditions that produce it.

Charles Townshend stresses that actions are only labeled "terrorist" within an

ideological context. Actions we recognize as terrorist are actually the same actions

carried out by state military campaigns or by other criminals. So, what distinguishes one

act of violence or coercion from another? In times of war and in response to threats to

national security, the state has the power to commit such action legitimately; a criminal

commits such action without political goals in mind; a terrorist commits such action

without legitimate political backing but in accordance with "a free-standing, sufficient,

and decisive political strategy" (157). Terrorism can only be defined as such because of

socially constructed ideas about what is acceptable; in fact, the effectiveness of a terrorist

strategy rests in its ability to evoke a strong emotional response from the public. An

action committed within the terms of a normative social order will not cause shock or terror. I labor on these distinctions in order to pursue further the significance of Brand's use of the highly charged term "terrorist" in reference to her own persona, especially in a work originally instigated by her witness of mainstream news coverage of the "war on terror." If actions and desires are deemed "terrorist" because they exceed the bounds of what is "acceptable," then in the context of Inventory the desire for such intimate human 51 connection, and the desire to abandon the world in which she lives, makes her a

"terrorist" only insofar as it challenges the narrative of the righteous "war on terror."

In Inventory, even terror at first seems to have lost leverage in affluent nations;

Brand laments that citizens remain immune to images of violence that are accompanied by "half-hourly repetitions/ of the same shameless verses" (44). We can scarcely learn much from the fleeting text -- "U.S. engagement in/Afghanistan" — that "ribbons its way along TV screens" (68). This message on a screen is so detached from the events it reports that the viewer wonders, "Was this the same telecast/so many years ago?" (69).

The media plays a crucial role in fear mongering, establishing "forms of jingoism, patriotic correctness, narrow-minded chauvinism, and a celebration of militarization that renders dissent as treason, and places [human rights abuses] outside of the discourses of ethics, compassion, human rights, and social justice" (Giroux 15). The media also maintains the illusion of distance separating viewers and the events on the screens: "all this became ordinary far from where it happened//... not even the western hostages were hostages, / the lives of movie starts were more lamentable, / and the wreckage of streets was unimportant" (22). When these events occur on the soil of affluent nations, however, such as the bombings of the metro system in London in 2005, then terror becomes more real. Rather than prompting a reevaluation of the dichotomous thinking that encouraged indifference to the terror and violence governing the lives of citizens in other nations, this experience is instead translated immediately into the dichotomous language of "us" and

"them," "savagery" and "civility," "murder" and "peace:"

the underground subways are hysterical with gurneys, and yellow tape and smoked saliva, the cities wear bandages over the eyes 52

the conversation is over except, 'we wont change our way of life for this savagery against civilized nations... murders when we talk peace'

whatever language we might have spoken is so thick with corrupt intentions, it persuades no one

(43).

"Terrorism" has become an elusive and highly manipulated term, one that circulates in the media — that "principle agency of social orchestrated vision" (Mallios 267) — largely in service of a culture of fear and paranoia. Brand explores this culture of fear in

Inventory, where her persona admits, "she's fearful, yes, like anyone" (43). In this state of terror as usual, when transnational dialogue does occur -- via "telephone call[s] to another hemisphere" — it does not inspire critique, but rather questions: "how is it there, only hysteria, /nothing really, okay then" (50). By depicting a state of "terror as usual"

Brand makes an important point that events "elsewhere" have an impact everywhere,

"everything is touched." In A Map to the Door of No Return, she encourages readers to focus their peripheral vision, to stay attuned to that which occurs at the borders of our worlds: These are people on the edges of the city, some would say, not emblematic. I know they might be the edges and easily ignored, but they curl into the middle ... I think it is difficult to see here in this city; no one wants to see, or seeing is a charity they submit to. {Map 101)

This observation has profound implications when extended to the international realm.

The events of distant places, "easily ignored," will "curl into the middle." In particular,

Brand asks that we focus our attention on those peripheral figures most often marked invisible — that is, women. It is crucial to note, as Brand does, that the prevailing inequalities structuring the global system are also organized around patriarchy and have thus translated directly into the feminization of poverty and other human rights abuses. In Bananas, Beaches, and

Bases (1989) Cynthia Enloe argues simply: "If we employ only the conventional, ungendered compass to chart international politics, we are likely to end up mapping a landscape peopled only be men, mostly elite men. The real landscape of international politics is less exclusively male" (201). Brand, cognizant of this argument, wonders

"why, why are only the men in the streets, / all over the world" (34). Similarly, in "Bread out of Stone," Brand describes how, as a black woman, she has felt intimidated to cross the road when confronted with a group who, "white and male, ... own it" (11). In her lecture at Saint Mary's University, Brand spoke of her profound concern for the location of women within the ebbs and flows of globalization. Noting the rise in religious fundamentalism and a corresponding rise in oppressive masculinities and ultra- conservative femininities, she remarked that the "progress and desires of modernity can spread over all with the exception of women's bodies." Not surprisingly, then, in

Inventory we find "the woman is lying in the alleyway // treacherous and naked once more" (9). Notably it is not a particular woman but "the woman:" this is not a story about an individual, but rather an icon of femininity. The female body remains a site/sight on which cultural anxieties and hatreds have been enacted throughout time. The apparent familiarity of this icon of woman as a raped and murdered body, "naked and treacherous," in an alleyway is signaled by the words "once more." The perpetuation of violent misogyny informs the landscape of the nation for female citizens — limiting their 54

security and their mobility in certain public spaces like alleyways, which have been

repeatedly marked as sites of both violence and desire.

In her effort to give voice to these figures often unreported in news stories or

relegated to the human interest column, Brand inventories "the passions of women, / their

iron feet, their bitter hair," and the atrocities that may occur on "their/perpetual nuptial

assignment" or in their "battered kitchens and rooms/ radiant with their blood vessels"

(31). Moreover, she posits a global network of women "waiting at doors/ at night in the

universe, such waiting" (31), positioning the sex-trade as one universal feature of the

otherwise dubious "global village." In Cairo, there were "men, all men" in the streets,

except for one night where she spies "a sexual thing, / covered in the film of a garment //

blind, held, and desired" (63). In this other market of the global market, a woman's body

translates into a currency that is urgently needed, fueling "survival circuits" of her family,

and even her nation: "her urgency too, to become, / wanted.. .she dragged and willing, /

everywhere // modernity for everything but this" (64). The global feminist consciousness that has emerged of late has brought into focus the necessity of bringing feminist analyses

to bear on official policy matters. For example, half of the forty million people living

with HIV/AIDS are women in the Third World (Reilly 188). Transnational feminist

movements and cosmopolitan feminism have developed in response to the trends that

Brand documents, abandoning the notion of "a territorially bounded, Western, liberal

'developed' state as its empirical frame of reference" (Reilly 181). This move towards transnational thinking has important consequences for thinking through the responsibilities of citizenship. 55

As a volume, Inventory circles around the possibility of awakening readers from their dream-like state of acceptance. By encouraging her readers to recognize their misreadings or, rather, irresponsible readings, of the news they receive, Brand prompts

"an opening into dialogue... [a move into a] personally and politically enabling position"

(Joseph n.p.). One means of encouraging this recognition can come from a moment of wonder, which can be understood as an "affective opening up of the world" (Ahmed qtd.

Joseph). This sense of "wonder" is achieved in Inventory in a moment of intimate connection and familiarity between strangers.

The most positive and hopeful moment of Brand's poem comes when the protagonist is called to by a stranger in a marketplace, a marketplace that is not 'here' in

Canada but 'there' in Cairo: "a voice called to me, 'Welcome back, Cousin,' familiar like the sound of water, rain on a roof or the sea outside a door [...] and yes, he could have been my cousin, / and was" (56). The meaning of this unique experience evokes a desire in her to return, to "go back, take // his hand, eat from it, but / that was, would be, another life' (58). So unusual was the experience that she fears he might have "never existed // or never called me 'Cousin'" (59). The encounter is described as a "charm," "its startling purposes, its imperishable beckoning grace so unexpected, so merciful" (60). The potential for genuine communication and a sense of familiarity between strangers in this world - the 'charm' of the word 'Cousin' which is "more than father sister brother/ mother, clasping what is foreign whole" (59) ~ is the potential of global citizenship. "A

'cousin' is familiar and familial, a personal connection in the globalized world, what

Kwame Appiah terms a 'world of strangers.' The encounter is received as a call from another ethical subject, and not assimilated into one's own language: 'all the time 56

nevertheless, /1 left him to himself" (59 qtd. Lousley 51). Brand offers the possibility of

imagining a different reality and in doing so takes stock as well of humanity's capacity

for loveliness and beauty, for peaceful habitation, and communication.

The final inventory of the poem acknowledges "sensuous connection to the more than human world... the bodily joy of being alive in a living world" (Lousley 51). The

inventory moves from "tennis matches and soccer games, / and river song and bird song

and / wine naturally and some Sundays" (89), to "moments when you rise to what you

might be" (90). This inventory is concerned with all variety of sensory experiences; in particular, Brand makes detailed and repetitive references to singers and songwriters

which merit closer examination. Inventory brings together Celia Cruz, Fairuz, Kathleen

Battle, Bade Fateh Ali Khan, Abdullah Ibrahim, Dinah Washington, Cecil Percival

Taylor, Smokey Robinson, Betty Carter, Roaring Lion, Abu Nuwa, Carlos Santana,

Kongar-ool Ondar, Tanya Tagaq Gillis, Jali Nyama Susa, Mariza, Fela, the Fatback

Band, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan, James Brown, The Beatles, Janis Joplin and Marvin

Gaye. By employing American, British, Cuban, Lebanese, African American, Pakistani,

South African, Trinidadian, Mexican, Inuit, Nunavut, and Nigerian musicians who revolutionized their forms and often acted as human and civil rights advocates, Brand

emphasizes that the impulse towards musical creativity and the use of music as an emotive response to social conditions is a global phenomena — a human phenomena ~ a means of articulating a certain spirit of global citizenship. Music is positioned as the lingua franca of humanity — establishing a sensory connection between listeners and musicians who may otherwise have no means to communicate. The significance of music is in part due to the fact that it is "registered not just cognitively but at the level of 57 the physical body, in ways in which visual and linguistic media are not" (Gilbert n.p.). As such, while "music is obviously cultural ... its 'culturally' is not limited to its capacity to signify" (Gilbert n.p.). Music is perhaps the most obvious affective force, as it registers a

"non-conscious experience of intensity" (Shouse 5). If affect is understood as "the body's way of preparing itself for action" then listening to music is one significant means by which individuals are moved to seek social change (Massumi 30 qtd. Shouse 5).

The hope for a different world requires a reconnection to feeling, as well as the privileging of different knowledge and experiences. Brand's fanciful imagining of a

"whimsical contraption moved with sometimish winds" across the world "as continents roll over in their sleep" (11) is articulated in a tone that acknowledges its own naivete, its lack of institutional or even ideological supports. And yet, if the poet sets her sights to awaken a global ethics lying dormant in humankind, then she requires only a contraption made of "inconvenient magnets to allow/ unpredictable openings of incurable light" (11).

I would argue that her inventory achieves exactly this. The onslaught of various emotionally, politically, historically "charged" images and truths positioned next to one another ~ "inconvenient" and challenging as it may be to read and to navigate ~ nonetheless generates enough power to unsettle and move the reader towards recognition and to experience "openings of incurable light." The scope of this affective potential may be "unpredictable" ~ individual readers bringing their own particular experiences into the equation ~ but is in any case certain and "incurable." What is it about the form of

Brand's inventory — the construction of this "whimsical contraption" — that achieves such a radical opening up in her readers? The poem harnesses the power, not of 58

"sometimish winds," but of sense experience — a reconnection to the body, its knowledge, that offers the potential to reconnect with others.

Dionne Brand's Inventory insists on the unrelenting and open-ended potential to witness, and the opportunities to reach out to others ~ to seek communication and foster literary citizenship by asking: "what door are you looking through now, / still what door are you looking through, / what sound does the world make there" {Inventory 34). In the end, there is hope in this Inventory — buried in the potential of "putting our senses together" so that we are better able to "take stock of our world, and [participate] in its social transformation in such a way that non-violent, cooperative, egalitarian international relations remain the guiding ideal" (Stag qtd. Giroux 11). Throughout, the possibility of an alternative curriculum, the radical imagining of what might have been had students

"studied instead" (10), reinforces the potential for a literary education to direct readers towards "the autonomy and dignity of a global citizenry and peace" (Giroux 21). As

Brand has asserted in simple and powerful terms elsewhere, "writers mean to change the world" ("This Body for Itself 26). Inventory makes clear those aspects of the global order that so urgently require rewriting. 59

CHAPTER 3: "SUCH TINY ELEGANT SPEECHES" SOUVANKHAM THAMMAVONGSA'S SMALL ARGUMENTS AND FOUND

In an article about the future of Canadian and postcolonial literary studies, Lily Cho imagines that it "will be marked... by the small intimacies of memory" ("Dreaming"

195). Souvankham Thammavongsa's Small Arguments (2003) and Found (2007) seem to fulfill this prediction. The poems are published in small volumes, recorded in a barely- there typeface that appears fragile, tenuous on the vast whiteness of the page. The vulnerability of the verse, and of the beings and documents it describes, speaks of the conditions of diasporic citizens who are likewise unsettled. Thammavongsa documents her subjects in a manner that suggests a deep concern with Canada's "history of selective immigration policy, and the continuing inequalities of access — to education, economic opportunity, political power and so on ~ for different migrant communities within a supposedly multicultural society" (Huggan 43).

Small Arguments takes stock of tiny, unnoticed objects and creatures to consider the multiple ways of being in the world. Its subjects include a blood orange, a strawberry, a snail, and an earwig. The poet sees in each small being an argument — reading the shape of its body, the density of its skin, and the persistence of its movements as articulate expressions of hope and strength. Small Arguments can be read as an intimate exploration of the lives of those that are excluded from the nation and as a critique of the hierarchical nature of citizenship, which constructs such radically different experiences and modes of belonging. Thammavongsa's engagement with citizenship continues in

Found, where the particular category of the refugee is taken up in some detail. The privileging of this category in a separate volume reflects Thammavongsa's own experiences of citizenship — born in a refugee camp without a birth certificate or any 60 official claim to a state ~ but also appropriately speaks to the fact that the handling of

"issues of asylum for refugees ... are a barometer of the extent of governmental or social

oppression and discrimination in various countries, and of the gap between rich and poor areas" (Carter Political Theory 99). The devastating truth is that states have tended towards an interpretation of the 1951 Refugee Convention "not as an individual right but a political offer on the part of the host country" (Carter Political Theory 101). The increasing restrictions placed on entry and the strict determinations for refugee claimants in part involves the requirement that the claimant be in possession of a variety of official documentation, a near impossibility for many who have fled from oppressive regimes and near-death trauma. These demands have been poignantly critiqued by other Canadian poets, such as Trish Salah, who questions the ethics of state restrictions on refugees in her poem "Water Borders White Money" selected for a recent edition of West Coast Line

addressing the limits of the discourse of citizenship: "To qualify," Salah writes

"discrimination is not sufficient, you must prove/ - more than/ enduring/ poverty/ more than beating/ more than rape -/ and what is, more than - war, /more than death/ threats?

You must prove/ 'persecution'" (164).

Thammavongsa's attention to the complex and often limited terms of belonging is in part a reflection of her own multiply situated position; she occupies an "uncomfortable

space... at once ignored, tokenized, and (involuntarily) responsible for representing an ambiguous demographic" (Lee 41). Significantly, Thammavongsa connects the sense of being an "outsider" explicitly to her sense of place within the CanLit canon: "There are these writers who supposedly define what Canadian literature is, sort of like the planets revolve around the sun. But the firefly holds its own light; it doesn't come from an 61 outside source, it comes from inside. I think I'm like that... I write about creatures that seem unimportant, like a worm, because it's still a life. And I've always looked at my own life like that. I'm small and insignificant as a writer and a person, but I still have something to say" (qtd. Lee 41). Responding directly to one of the figures of the conventional CanLit canon, Small Arguments challenges Gwendolyn MacEwen's assertion that "water will never lie to you." Water "will lie to you," according to

Thammavongsa, it will "make you believe/ this/unmarked end/isn't deep" (16). Clearly,

MacEwen catalogues water's characteristics from a radically different place of privilege.

Whereas MacEwen writes that "Water ventures into everything and becomes everything.

/ It has/ All tastes and moods imaginable; water is history" (207), Thammavongsa asserts that water is a deceiving and destructive force, it "breaks light/ before light knows/ where it is and takes shape, / uncertain of its own" (16-17). Here I read Thammavongsa's

'water' as the lie of a coherent national identity, as well as the institution of CanLit itself, originally enlisted to enforce that lie. Within this field, there is the potential for both young writers and minority writers like Thammavongsa to become lost and invisible in the sea of the majority, the myth of the mainstream - to "go in/ without enough air/ to find your way back" (16). The ability for these doctrines to locate and smooth over fault lines, to 'take the shape' of transgressive narratives and thereby drain them of some of their power is part of what Ajay Heble describes as a longstanding "emphasis on wholeness, on Canada as a kind of homogenous national community" (88). Nonetheless, as Thammavongsa writes, "If you wait long enough, / you can watch it give up/ its grooves, its scars" (17). 62

These transgressive reading practices demand literacy, however — a fundamental measure of equality and privilege that Thammavongsa does not take for granted. Small

Arguments begins with "Materials," which situates literacy in direct relation to citizenship and belonging. Thammavongsa calls this poem "a toolbox for the book. In the building of every poem, [there was the] memory of what it was like to learn to read, this desire to communicate with a world I did not yet have a place in" (qtd. Peerbaye n.p.).

The importance of literacy as a "way in" is its offer of dialogue and learning: "the key is not only to ask questions, but to listen to different voices" (Johnson n.p.). Henri Giroux says something similar when he argues that an encounter with a text has "the potential to call forth from readers modes of witnessing that connect meaning with compassion, a concern for others, and a broader understanding of the historical and contemporary contexts and relations that frame meaning in particular ways" (11).

In an essay entitled "Whose Gaze and Who Speaks for Whom" published in

Bread Out of Stone (1994), Dionne Brand describes her experience as a juror for the

Governor General's Award for poetry. Her role on this jury, as it turns out, would be to offer "another definition of the meaning of poetry in everyday life" (167). This other definition insists: "speech must be relevant, charged, politically conscious, memorable. It must pursue human freedom" (167). Brand wanted to award the prize to those poets who could offer "a vision for a new Canadian poetics." Her eventual championing of

Thammavongsa's poetry therefore comes as no surprise. Her response to Small

Arguments - "Here is a delicate and graceful hand naming the fragile materials of poetry"

- is the only text inscribed on the back cover of the Pedlar Press edition. I find Brand's description intriguing, since Thammavongsa takes great interest in the physical imprint of 63 her father's 'hand' in Found. Brand's wording reinforces the notion that the sense of an author's physical presence in a text is a crucial determiner of the work's affective potential. This presence is achieved in part through the thoughtful construction of the physical work itself, an attentiveness to the many "materials of poetry" available to the poet -- including design and layout of the final work.

The physical quality of Thammavongsa's texts and the spatial layout of her poems on the page are the subject of much of the existing reviews of her work. I would suggest that the appearance of these volumes and their text strategically redirects the eye, asks that it practice a new way of seeing. As Brand asserts in her essay 'Seeing:' "the eye is a curious thing: it is not passive, not merely a piece of physiology... It sees.... The eye has citizenship and possessions" (169). The eye "goes where it wants" (171), and yet

Thammavongsa has taken pains to direct that movement as much as possible. Rita Wong describes, for example, the "attentive spirit [that] moves through Souvankham

Thammavongsa's poems. The spaciousness of her words on the page makes room for the minute, the everyday, the simple lives that are often overlooked in our daily rush" (46).

The layout of the text plays a significant role in "slow[ing] down the word and the world"

(Wong 46). Una Lee remarks that Thammavongsa's "handmade chapbooks are set in nine-point type, and at readings, you strain to hear her speak. Everything about her poetry is small, yet her task is enormous. She is fighting a quiet resistance against loneliness, insignificance and despair" (41).

Thammavongsa's desire to remain involved in the design of her work reflects her history of involvement in zine and chapbook publication. Her decision to work with Beth

Follett of Pedlar Press stemmed from her confidence that "it [would be] a lot like 64 publishing [her] own chapbooks... In the contract it was written that I was allowed to

choose the paper and look at the galleys before they went to the print," Thammavongsa recalls. "And that's very rare ... I was able to become part of the whole experience"

('Test Reading Series'). Thammavongsa explains the importance of remaining a part of the design and publication by calling upon the story of Sadako and the thousand cranes.

She compares the process of completing a chapbook to that of making cranes:

The physicality of the book makes me feel like I am real, or whatever is supposed to happen to make you real, has happened. You see, I was never given a birth certificate when I was born... We need documents to prove that we are alive and real. It isn't enough that I happen to be right here - a piece of paper needs to prove this. Small Arguments makes me feel real in that sense. It feels like I've been granted a place of belonging. And no other thing I've had has given me that sense... For Sadako, it was in the folding of paper, its design and order, that she places her hope and faith. And for me, it was in the making of Small Arguments as a chapbook, before it became a full book. Folding each and every page, gluing each and every spine. Then I found a publisher who saw the work and kept it as I had intended it. (qtd. Peerbaye)

Having grown up without official papers, Thammavongsa has produced poems that have

come to stand in for the state-sanctioned narratives she is missing. The sense of hope and

faith that went into the folding of each page is present in the beings she documents. It is present as well in the sense of wonder her poems elicit when they surface, as if against all

odds, on the otherwise impossibly blank page. Thammavongsa has stated that she uses

graph paper to help her "see the space and break it up" ("Test Reading" n.p.). Her admission that she misses her typewriter, which she traded in for a laptop, reflects her

sense of the work as an extension of herself: "with the typewriter you feel like it was real work. When you hit a button, you can hear it, the keys rise up and hit the page but it is so

silent on a laptop. It feels like I'm not writing" ("Test Reading" n.p.). Her desire to feel and hear the transfer of her words onto the page, to witness their transformation into text, 65 is a reflection of her strong sense of connection to the work. This sense translates in the act of reading the poem, where one feels and is affected by the weight of each word, carefully selected and carefully plotted on the page. Thammavongsa explains her motivation: "I just wanted to draw out your experience of reading the poem, to count the space as part of it, because it's doing something there that's just as important, as a direction - a period, or coma, or semi-colon, or a word - it has as much a role as a word"

("Test Reading" 2006).

Daniel Morley Johnson finds in Thammavongsa's work something similar to that of Jan Zwicky's Songs for Relinquishing The Earth, "a collection that also began as a self-published work that, according to its prefatory note,' [connected] the acts of publication ... with the initial act of composition,... a book whose public gestures were in keeping with the intimacy of the art'" (n.p.). Johnson's connection between these texts provides an important means of thinking through Thammavongsa's presence in her work and the radical potential of that felt presence - it is her achievement of "the intimacy of art" which encourages in her readers the formation of bonds of intimacy elsewhere, in all their encounters, to "feel this pulse/ beating against your own" ("The Butterfly" 48). In a world where some "are born/holding out their limbs/ to a world that will not/hold them"

("The Earwig" 53). Thammavongsa asks "who, / who will hear/ these small questions"

(57). The question is more than rhetorical; it is also deeply personal: "'Small Arguments is a book of poetry, but it's also my life, my body of real and hard work" (qtd. Peerbaye).

"What good is the study of literature?" the University of Toronto Quarterly wants to know. Thammavongsa offers one answer by way of Bertrand Russell, whose words she uses as an epigraph to Small Arguments: "Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying just below the surface even in the commonest things in daily life." Her poetry performs and prompts this philosophical questioning, engaging with ordinary materials rather than the sublime or transcendent. While many may turn from the ground "to honour light," Thammavongsa reminds us that it is the ground - our origins, that which is familiar - where we reach back to for a "compass" (35). Dionne Brand has likewise been drawn to representations of the "commonest things," in particular to the surprising strength of vulnerable beings, as a means to offer hope in a world increasingly full of barriers. "The rufous hummingbird," Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return, "travels five thousand miles from summer home to winter home and back. This hummingbird can fit into the palm of a hand. Its body defies the known physics of energy and flight. It is a bird whose origins and paths are the blood of its small body. It is a bird whose desire to find its way depends on drops of nectar from flowers" (6). Thammavongsa asks that we acknowledge those living in Canada who labour always within "the reach of light" (31), lives lived inside "an anguished moment" (Moritz qtd. 31). These conditions of inequality may leave them "harden[ed]/ into a black shrivel/ where ... language/ unbranches/ into 'a narrow silent throat'" (31) and yet our act of witness can expose the invisibility of these marginalized members of the nation; the silencing of their voices can be lifted.

Approaching Thammavongsa's poetry through the lens of citizenship studies reveals her engagement with those individuals who are suffering in the increasingly unequal distribution of resources and opportunities on both a national and global scale.

Her focus on the arguments of small beings is interesting because it highlights as well the 67 figurative language often used to describe the failures of the current system - both the immigration system, in which "many applicants with good claims fall through the cracks"

(Bohmer and Shuman 13) -- and the security perimeter ~ where "the possibility that determined terrorist groups will at some point be able to find cracks in our armour" is, by some accounts, "very real" (Moens and Collacott "Introduction" x). While this catalogue of small things that might "slip through cracks" is not explicitly rooted in any particular locale, it speaks to abuses and injustices undeniably characteristic of a neo-liberal Canada where the other — "figured as a social drain on the individual and corporate accumulation of wealth — is either feared, exploited, reified, or considered disposable, and only rarely is the relationship between self and the other mediated by compassion and empathy"

(Giroux 17).

Thammavongsa's emotionally charged personification of the fruits and insects in

Small Arguments proposes a new ethics, one that is comparable to that developed by

Jacques Derrida in Of Hospitality. Derrida argues that 'hospitality' is "the whole and the principle of ethics" and advocates 'absolute hospitality:' "Let us say yes to who or what turns up, before any anticipation, before any identification, whether or not it has to do with a foreigner, an immigrant, an invited guest, or an unexpected visitor" (77). Noting the absence of this form of absolute hospitality, Derrida points to the necessity of an institutional framework that would grant certain rights to all newcomers:

How can we distinguish between a guest and a parasite? In principle, the difference is straightforward, but for that you need a law; hospitality, reception, the welcome offered has to be submitted to a basic and limiting jurisdiction. Not all new arrivals are received as guests if they don't have the benefit of the right to hospitality or the right of asylum, etc. Without this right, a new arrival can only be introduced 'in my home,' in the host's 'at home,' as a parasite, a guest who is wrong, illegitimate, clandestine, liable to expulsion or arrest. (60-61) 68

In Rawi Hage's recent novel Cockroach, the unnamed protagonist is an immigrant to

Montreal who admits he no longer feels "fully human" (207). The reader follows him as he moves through the city and witnesses his transformation as he begins to imagine himself as a cockroach, a position where he is at once hated and powerful: "one had an advantage being at a low angle like that, close to the earth and invisible" (125). When he breaks into his therapist's home, the point of view shifts from first to third person. He speaks as if observing himself from outside ~ he is always seen as "the stranger" (81) to those that observe him: "Then I slipped past the building's garage door, went down to the basement, and crawled along the pipes. I sprang from her kitchen's drain, fixed my hair, my clothes, my self, and walked straight to her bedroom.... The stranger stood up and walked to the kitchen... The intruder, feeling at home..." (80-83). Here, the fear of the other — forever "a stranger" — entering the home/land is explicitly connected to metaphors of pests and infestations. Thammavongsa also employs the symbol of the other as parasite in the poem "There is a cockroach," and asks readers to reassess the empathy an 'unwanted' 'intruder' deserves -- the rights to which it is entitled: "It lay there/dying for a week, /kicking one leg at you... Now older, you lift gently/the bits of paper and food/from its body, /offer your open hand/with small apologies" (51-52).

Thammavongsa's argument for 'the Cockroach' - pointing to the violences enacted on its body, the devaluing of its life - demands that we recognize one another as human, entitled to certain rights irrespective of citizenship status. The exclusive scope of our sight and the futility of our delayed regret and 'small apologies' are thus exposed.

Significantly, however, Thammavongsa also suggests that this recognition - the moment 69 of seeing, of being affected - encourages an act of intimacy with the other that dismantles racist ideologies of filth and contamination; we feel drawn to "lift gently" this other, and offer "small apologies/tucked into the folds of [our] skin" (51-52). Like Brand,

Thammavongsa employs poetry as a means of establishing intimate connections with her readers ~ suggesting that social change begins first on the emotional register. She speaks on behalf of those who remain 'strangers,' who have "never held, have never been held" and she measures her words against their heartbeat: "as boundless as the rest; beating/always against everything" ("Poem for the Rain" 38).

The fear of the Other, in contrast, leads only to the desire to document and examine these bodies, not to know them but to understand them, to know the risks they present us. Thammavongsa documents this desire, asserting that "Frogs/do not belong/ in a pickle jar" (46). And yet, because according to the state's binary way of thinking it is only by locating what we are not that we can determine what we are, we "mine their bodies/to know ours" (46). Nandita Sharma writes that "nationalist discourses would fall apart if there were not Others against whom the nation could be defined" (115). John

Holloway says something similar, arguing that "because the state is formed through assertions of national sovereignty that are constructed through the organization of racialized differences between Us and Them, 'the very existence of the state is racist'"

(qtd. Sharma 116). In Small Arguments the worm is likewise "found, sliced/into its body, metal// we do not know/ how so simple/ a creature/ can manage/ a world/ in which we invent so much" to harm it (54). While we put it in a "display case... name and label/what we know" (54) we never know this being, "its face, wherever it, [is always] 70 pinned back from view" (55). Troubling the desire to establish identities is at the heart of these poems.

The politics behind this concern with intelligibility are perhaps those explored by

Amitava Kumar in his book, Passport Photos, which describes the reading of text as other as reflective of power dynamics: "If it can be allowed that the passport is a kind of book, then the immigration officer, holding a passport in his hand, is also a reader... we might see the immigrant as a very different kind of reader than the officer seated at his desk with a gleaming badge on his uniform. The immigrant's reading of that book refers to an outside world that is more real. The officer is paid to make a connection only between the book and the person standing in front of him" (3). As a result of this highly restrictive reading practice at the border, practices protected by the imbalance of power between the "badged" officer and the immigrant, countless migrants lacking proper documents are made "vulnerable to exploitation and abuse" (Kumar 12). In contrast to this scenario, and its attendant possibilities (inevitability?) of misreading - Kumar presents his book as "a forged passport... an act of fabrication against the language of government agencies" (ix). Kumar sets out to "restore a certain weight of experience, a stubborn density, a life to what we encounter in newspaper columns as abstract, often faceless, figures without histories. And, having done that, to then remark on the limits of even that act" (Kumar xi). While in Small Arguments, Thammavongsa records our desire understand the Other, "to discover/what it keeps/from you" (30), she also insists this approach elicits violence - "you do not know/ any other way" (30). Furthermore,

Thammavongsa undermines the assumption that these bodies have something to hide -

"you suppose/ they are like others/ and slice one/ Now, you know/ there is no need" 71

("The Strawberry" 33). In both of her works, the recognition of our limits of understanding and the limits of representation are key to essentially undermining the legitimacy of the state's ability to read a passport, to judge a life based on the fragmented lines provided, and to make crucial life-altering decisions based on these limited and arbitrary readings.

Small Arguments explores the many ways in which individuals experience exclusion in the nation and in particular addresses the violent acts of surveillance and interrogation they undergo in interactions with state officials but also in their daily interactions as a result of racial profiling, gender and class discrimination - these bodies are 'sliced,' 'stricken down,' 'hardened,' 'mined.' Heike Harting argues that these conditions call upon vulnerability as a trope, in order to facilitate "particular narratives of melancholic belonging that hinge on the spectral presence of colonialism in the formation of both contingent diasporic subjectivities and a more equitable understanding of global citizenship" (177). Thammavongsa's poetry implies that "citizenship exists on a spectrum, involving a pool of rights that are variously offered, denied, or challenged, as well as a set of obligations that are unequally demanded" (Stasiulis and Bakan 2).

Stasiulis and Bakan's research into the rights of West Indian and Filipino non-citizen migrant women workers brought into Canadian homes as part of the live-in care giver program begins from the premise that "domestic workers in Canada... re-create the citizen/non-citizen divide that marks the features of the global system in microcosm within the private Canadian household" (Stasiulis and Bakan 5). This same logic and intention seems to inspire Thammavongsa's gaze, which is centered on the microscopic elements of life, working from "the ground" up (as her poem "The ground" makes clear). 72

But this exploration should not be misread as "an Edenic paradise of sorts" (Donaldson

222); the territory she charts is dystopic, competitive and hostile. This collection and the violence it documents lend support to those theorists who argue that "the basis of living together has ultimately to be provided by law and politics," especially since the position of immigrants has been shown to be deteriorating: "Respect for the rights of strangers is under severe attack in the West, not only in response to right-wing populism or nationalism, but even more crucially as a result of the wide ranging disregard for civil liberties arising out of the "War on Terror" (Carter "Migration and Cultural Diversity"

21, 27). Given the unlikely development of laws in the near future to protect the rights of these vulnerable citizens and non-citizens alike, projects like Thammavongsa's are absolutely critical in terms of their ethical incentive to foster a sense of affective connection between the reader and the other, to alter ways of seeing and of reading those who live in obscurity or whose plight has beeffmasked by the terms of the market oriented system.

David Chariandry offers an important reminder to those who may have adopted the lens of citizenship studies uncritically; to do so, is "at least potentially, to reinscribe a

'grammar' of action and thought where belonging to a state is both assumed and paramount, a position that threatens not only those who don't, can't, or choose not to belong, but also those who have discovered that their concerns (perhaps pertaining to gender, ethnic, or sexual difference) have a fraught or even non-existent relationship to state-scaled politics" (5). Indeed, Thammavongsa's descriptions of a being that "does not know/tenderness" (30), of one that "defends itself, / knows/ to draw against others" (21), of one who is "born this way, / stricken down" (23), or one who "recedes/ from its own 73 skin" (28) present vulnerable bodies understandably skeptical of any offer of national belonging. Despite notions of multiculturalism and Canada as a 'nation of immigrants'

Katja Sarkowsky maintains that "the history of citizenship rights in Canada (as that of other countries) is marked by a continuous struggle . . . of constructing necessary Others' against which to define 'the citizen'" (qtd. Chariandry 6). Rather than accepting newcomers into the fold, some individuals learn, as they do in Thammavongsa's poetry,

"what it is like / to be left / or thrown aside; / the path / of every gutter" (41).

In 2002, after winning the Man Booker Prize for Life of Pi, Yann Martel described

Canada as "the greatest hotel on Earth: It welcomes people from everywhere" (qtd. in

Roberts "The Greatest Hotel" 147). While Martel's experience of Canada as a site of hospitality strengthens its discourse of official multiculturalism and universal acceptance

(for those who can afford a room!), the possibility for outsiders to in fact become parasites is present in the "slippage from the hospitality espoused by legislated celebrations of Canada's racial and ethnic composition to the mere restricted, less welcoming concept of accommodation: mere shelter, addressing only the most basic needs, and not attending to more complicated issues of belonging" (Roberts "The

Greatest Hotel" 155). The increasing racialization of poverty and emergence of an immigrant under class in Canada has been documented by a number of scholars, including Galabuzi and Kazemipur who go so far as to suggest that economic segregation and social marginalization of racialized citizens and im/migrants is constructing an

"economic apartheid" in Canada. The barriers that exist for the realization of full and equal participation in the economic, social, cultural and political dimensions of life in

Canada mark what Cynthia Sugars calls the "unhomeliness" of the Canadian nation. In 74

these impoverished circumstances of hospitality as mere accommodation,

Thammavongsa's "Black Ant" enters a city where "there will be no light / to lead its way/

no compass / to direct it" (43). These "more complicated issues of belonging" denied by

the state are the materials out of which Thammavongsa constructs her poetry.

I would like to argue that Thammavongsa's keen eye for the stories of fruit and

insects as the subjects of Small Arguments carries traces of a specific narrative of

oppression both reflecting and contributing to the 'unhomelieness' of the Canadian

nation. The small arguments of these creatures and organisms can be put into dialogue

with the arguments of researchers who are concerned with the plight of migrant workers

in Canada, and in particular, those who work predominantly on fruit farms and in

greenhouses throughout the Okanagan Valley, Ontario and Quebec and who are

frequently depicted in language that positions them as threatening outsiders, vermin or

'pests,' who have infiltrated the 'home' of the nation to which they have no claim, taking jobs that 'belong' to citizens. The growing reliance on migrant labour has lent support to

some theories that we have entered a post-national age; the development of more

optimistic discussions of the potential emergence of postnational citizenship is an idea

fostered by the development of supra-national human rights institutions and documents

such as the United Nations (UN), the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),

the European Court of Justice, the International Labour Organization (ILO), the

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the UN International Convention on the

Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, to name

arguably the most influential. But these postnational theories have been curtailed by the limited commitment nations have shown to the ideals these institutions and documents 75 mandate. In her extensive research into Mexican migrants in Canada, Tonya Basok foregrounds "the difference between rights as a set of principles and laws on the one hand, and their actual practice and implementation on the other" (1). The gap between policy and practice is one that can only be documented through a careful examination of lived experience on the edges of the imagined community: "whereas legal access to economic rights has been extended to non-citizens residing in the national territory of sovereign nation-states, membership in the national community has often been denied to them, thus precluding them from exercising the rights to which they have been granted legal access" (Basok 1). By way of example, although migrant workers in Canada have a right to minimum wage, worker's compensation, access to Medicare, and some provisions of the Employment Standards Act, "several of these rights are not exercised by the Mexican workers" (Basok 9). These workers may be unaware of their entitlements or they live in fear of expulsion from the guest worker program and therefore choose not to speak out. Their sense of exclusion and unbelonging in the communities in which they live fosters and feeds this ignorance and fear. In "A tangerine" Thammavongsa reminds us of the potential for beings to adapt to conditions of poverty and inequality, to keep themselves 'small,' in an effort to be carried along, to be held. The struggle for those who are denied belonging, the demands of what Agamben calls "bare life," actually make them defer what they might be. "A tangerine ... It will stay/ like this, / small, deferred"

(19).

Nandita Sharma argues "a type of home economics is at play in the process of hierarchically organizing various groups of people through differential state categories of belonging. There is a materiality to the 'differences' between 'citizens,' 'immigrants' (i.e. 76 permanent residents), and migrant workers; this materiality is based in the relationship between ideas of nation and those of race, gender, and class" (113). In his reading of media representations of migrant farm labour in Ontario, Harold Bauder argues that the thousands of horticultural migrant workers who travel from Mexico and the Caribbean to

Ontario every year as part of the Commonwealth Caribbean and Mexican Seasonal

Agricultural Workers Program, also known as the "offshore program," have become "a

structural necessity to the industry, ensuring growth and profits" (41). Despite their value to the communities that employ them, these workers live with "exploitative and coercive

labour practices" (41). Bauder argues that the media's construction of these migrant workers as threatening outsiders functions to legitimize working conditions which some researchers and activists have argued make offshore workers an 'unfree' labour force.

This accusation is made on the basis that workers are not free to change employers and are not in a position to refuse to work should their employer demand it (Bauder 43).

Thammavongsa's "This Fly" speaks to the fundamental insecurity of their place in

Canada: "This fly/knows/there is nothing/to keep it here/only/the breaking of a wing/the thick glass/put in its way, /and the closing of/an open door" (44). Similarly, the snow

"will know/the hard pound/of cement/against its cold chest" (39), while blood oranges are "born this way, / stricken down" (23) and must spend their lives "learning to heal"

(24). The idealized notion of Canada offering an 'open door' to immigrants and migrant workers does not acknowledge that within that door, labor conditions have been called

'unfree.' Indeed, as Sharma documents, "it continues to be onto the bodies of im/migrants that a foreign identity can most easily be grafted.... The process of differential inclusion 77

- not simply exclusion ... works to facilitate how people are seen and see themselves - as being at home or not in the spaces in which they find themselves" (116).

According to a report published by the North-South Institute in 2004, 10,777 seasonal workers came to Canada from Mexico and 8, 110 from Jamaica, Barbados,

Trinidad and Tobago and the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (Grenada,

Antigua, Dominica, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the

Grenadines, and Montserrat). The migrants perform manual work on over 1,800 farms in nine provinces, nearly 1,600 of them in Ontario (Brem 3). Between 70 and 80 percent of the migrants are rehired by name from a previous season and receive priority in immigration processing. In fact, "the practice of 'naming' allows workers to expect continuing employment each season so long as they remain satisfactory to employers"

(Brem 4). As such, many workers are inclined to withhold criticism of working conditions so they can be sure to have work in the future. While fewer than half of the

CSAWP workers surveyed said they received adequate training in the handling of machinery or agricultural chemicals, "NSI research found that between one-half and one- third of workers tend to go on working rather than risk losing wages or being considered so unfit they could be sent home" (Brem 10). These workers are subject to the rules regarding payment of Canadian income tax and also pay Canadian Employment

Insurance (Brem EI) premiums and contribute to the Canada Pension Plan (Brem CPP).

Caribbean workers also have 25 per cent of their wages automatically remitted to their governments under the Compulsory Savings Scheme (Brem 8). CSAWP workers in

Ontario paid $3.4 million in EI premiums in 2001, although in practice the migrants cannot claim regular EI benefits: "To collect such benefits, the migrants would have to 78 remain in Canada illegally in violation of both their immigration permits and the

Employment Agreements" (Brem 8). Within these constraints, migrants are unable to improve their conditions. Their potential is wasted, as Thammavongsa shows. The

"dragon fruit" is potential unfulfilled - it does not live up to its name - "inside, there are/ no flames, no burnings / only/ a soft whiteness, freckled/ with dark fragments" (25). The dragon fruit suffers from "a loss/made by light too brief (26). It has not had the privilege to develop its full potential, its fire, its power.. .meanwhile an orange "left uneaten, recedes/from its own skin" (28) and inside the grape, "the seed, /salient inside skin, / is left unaware/ of the body it will not become" ("The Grape" 32).

Bauder's analysis of media representations of migrants reveals that they are

"pushed into the background [of the national imaginary] and represented in a light that devalues their economic contribution and denies them the status of human agents. [They are depicted] as dehumanized and objectified labour power" (44). In contrast to this dominant portrayal, their lives have been captured in images by photographer Vincenzo

Pietropaolo in a series of images titled "Harvest Pilgrims" in which he documents their working conditions in over forty locations across Ontario and in some of the workers' homes in the countries to which they have official citizenship; Pietropaolo's is an attempt to humanize and make the figures he photographs knowable to a larger public that has so far been unwilling to acknowledge their existence. By employing the exact same figures

- of migrants as 'pests,' or 'infestations' or as indistinguishable from their labour, figured as the very fruits they harvest - Thammavongsa actively personifies these beings, working to invert the original logic of these tropes. Rather than having the effect of dehumanization, the sensitive personification of these figures invests them with the 79 power to pose their small unheard arguments, articulated not through language since they have no voice, but rather through the marks on their small forms, the stories their bodies tell, the feelings that their exteriors reveal. Rawi Hage likewise documents in Cockroach, the power of small beings, the resilience of the cockroaches that his narrator cannot keep

from his sink, but also the possibility for small beings to successfully organize and mobilize: "Little creatures that seem insignificant and small are murderous in their sheer vast numbers, their conformity, their repetitiveness, their steady army-like movements, their soundless invasions. They terrify me" (209). Hage asserts that "everything is made

of little particles that gather in groups and invade. All nature gathers and invades..."

(210). These same creatures catch Thammavongsa's poetic eye; she significantly presents them in isolation, however, allows them to stage their own private protests, thereby showing their resilience and power to be intrinsic to their bodies and the force of their arguments rather than suggesting they have strength only in numbers.

Finally it is possible to read Small Arguments, with its emphasis on foodstuffs and the natural elements that make harvests possible, in connection to a dialogue concerned with growing food insecurity and shortages around the world. In 1998 at the World Food

Summit, a pledge was made that hunger and food insecurity would be made things of the past. Now over a decade later, "virtually no progress has been made" (Wright and

Middendorf 5). The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that 854 million people suffer from undernourishment worldwide, 845 million of them in developing and transitional economies and 9 million in the industrialized world (Wright and Middendorf 5). Ironically, migrant labourers from these starving nations often work in agriculture. World hunger and food insecurities are perhaps the starkest indicators of 80 the global stratification of wealth, supported by the "inequitable organization of conventional world markets and ... the exploitative relations embedded therein" (Wright and Middendorf 11). In light of this reality, Thammavongsa's "The Potato Bug" can be read as an argument for a redistribution of food, documenting a life spent fighting for "a

small grain" held "in the close/of its chest" (45).

Larissa Lai describes the necessity of holding onto the promise of a politics of affect as a means to continue imagining "a more hopeful future than the one offered to us by neo-liberalism, high capital or 'empire'" ("Global Spillage" 117). She suggests that

"in the face of these large, orchestrated movements of capital, ideas and bodies, the smaller movements concerning social justice and a politics of representation, inside the bounds of the state remain important, but the vantage point from which we view them at this historical moment is necessarily different from the vantage point from which we saw them in the moment of their enactment" (emphasis added) ("Global Spillage" 117). This vantage point is one identified by Jeff Derksen in his reading of Fred Wah's poetry:

" Wah's space is not globalized from a central Cartesian 'master of all I survey' point of view... but rather is globalized from below in a sense, in his investigation of the local (in early works) as also distinctly part of a global economy" (qtd. Lai "Global Spillage"

118). Thammavongsa's interest in the small narratives visible at ground level positions her work on a scale that usefully problematizes accepted notions of citizenship and responsibility at a local level which can be extended and rethought on a national and global scale. Most importantly, Small Arguments suggests that even those beings marked

'small' and inconsequential can and do fight to make themselves heard: A Firefly "casts its body/ into the night/arguing/against darkness and its taking// it is a small 81 argument/lending itself to silence, / a small argument/ the sun will never come to hear//

Darkness,/ unable to hold against/ such tiny elegant speeches, / opens its palm/ to set free a fire/ its body could not put down" (41). While there may be an increasing number of people waiting at Canada's borders who are taking a "leap/ into heaven, / asking/ for a place" only to be turned away "at every leap" (42), the grasshopper - "worn down and beaten, / clotted and covered/ with so much earth" - is, nonetheless already "poised/ to ask again" (42).

Found (2007) documents one man's comparable determination to move his family from their home in a refugee camp. Thammavongsa's second volume begins as follows:

"In 1978, my parents lived in building #48, Nong Khai, Thailand, a Lao refugee camp.

My father kept a scrapbook filled with doodles, addresses, postage stamps, maps, measurements. He threw it out, and when he did, I took it and found this" (n.p.). In

"Affect, Memory and Materiality: A Review Essay on Archival Mediation," Anupama

Rao turns to Jacques Derrida's notion of the archive as one that "renders all history an autobiography of the state" (560). Despite the strength of these state-sanctioned versions of history, "the archival secret is that history varies with its mode of narration and memorialization: while it consists of facts, the sense of these facts is contingent on how they are arranged" (Rao 560). If we read Found as a historical document of a sort, a description of a historical artifact that is itself a record of historical events, than Rao's interest in "history's transformation into artifact" (560) makes this work remarkably relevant. Rao argues for an expanded conceptualization of the archive that allows for the recognition of "minoritarian subjects" and their "demands" for recognition in the historical record that has traditionally overlooked their presence, as well as their rejection of that historical record altogether as biased and hegemonic. Rao is seeking "those forms

of embodiment and alterity that resist the histories that seek to humanize them" (560). Is

this perhaps the project of Thammavongsa's Found? Should this reading of her father's

scrapbook be understood as the "intense, if thwarted, desire for archival recognition"

experienced by "subaltern selves"? (Rao 561). Is the discovery of her father's discarded

archive of scraps an opportunity for Thammavongsa to write him, and vicariously herself,

into the record? The undervalued nature of her parent's labor and struggle has been

erased from dominant historical accounts; their lives are built out of the rays of sunlight,

"shafts/.. .sent.. ./down to harm you; // but you, // you lifted// from dirt; // took each//one

down; // and built, // to survive" (20-21). In contrast, and in response, Thammavongsa

seizes her father's scrapbook as tangible artifact, describing his handwriting as 'carvings'

which marked his presence "where nothing/stood" before (25).

Rao suggests that "an ethnography of the archive should trace the semiotic processes through which things and people attain significance, and the modes of

emplotment through which their histories 'matter.' ... [locating those] mechanisms through which the amateur historian emerges as witness to the 'small voice of history'"

(561). In particular there is a need to emphasize "the archive's materiality ... in order to

counter the invisibility of certain forms of life and labor in the archive" (562). If, as Rao posits, "the ethical task of the historian is to connect objects with the labouring bodies that produced them," (563) then Thammavongsa succeeds as an ethical historian. She reads the artifacts she uncovers with an eye to the labour that constructed them - noting the quality and characteristics of tools used - the colours of the ink, the pressure applied to the pen. While Kasim Husain understands her poems as "gestures at understanding... rather than making any claims to authoritative interpretation on her part" (3), I find evidence in the volume of a self-conscious demonstration of critical reading and interpretative practices that have significant implications for the radical and pedagogical potential of Thammavongsa's larger project.

Elena Basile argues that the text's situadedness - "poised between testimony and warning" (55) - and its uncertain character calls into question Thammavongsa's role as translator/interpreter/poet even as the initial poem seeks to position the work as a found object, i.e. a genuine 'historical' artifact. While "the discontinuity of that passage haunts

[Basile's reading of] Found in more ways than one" (55), it foregrounds all acts of reading as acts of translation and authorship of a new text, and all historical or official accounts as interpretations. This view of reading becomes crucial when considered in light of the text's fundamental concern with the status of refugees and their place within state narratives, in particular, how their documents or lack thereof are read and re-written by state officials in ways that have powerful implications for human rights. In Small

Arguments, for example, Thammavongsa catalogues a series of readings and consequent constructions of identities drawn out of subjects that cannot speak, that cannot author their own narratives in language. "A pear, sliced" acts as a reminder that in order to listen to the as yet unarticulated narratives of some bodies, we must be willing to move beyond appearances, to "plung[e] past peel" (18). These readings required attentiveness to the codes of their bodies, a re-membering of their fragmented bodies, in order to give name to the violence consistently shaping their existence. These reading practices - the reading of "absent traces of things" (Basile 57) - require an affective response to the text or the 84 text-as-other. As much as Thammavongsa's work is about language and the "materials of poetry" itself, it is also deeply concerned with auto/biography.

"The very process of constructing a narrative for oneself- of telling a story - imposes a certain linearity and coherence that is never entirely there" writes Chandra

Talpade Mohanty. "But that is the lesson, perhaps, especially for us immigrants and migrants: i.e. that home, community and identity all fall somewhere between the histories and experiences we inherit and the political choices we make through alliances, solidarities and friendships" (qtd. Kumar n.p.). While following one year in her father's life as documented by him, Thammavongsa's Found does more than translate an absent text; it offers an opportunity for Thammavongsa to trace her own origins. After all, the scrapbook was kept the year of her birth and maps a territory both spatial and temporal that has shaped her identity in profound ways - denying her access to official documents that could assign her a national identity such as a birth certificate for example. This is a territory that she no longer inhabits and cannot remember or return to.

Found therefore raises questions of the genre distinctions made between fiction/ biography/ and memoir, questions that call to mind Daphne Marlatt's concept of 'ghost writing,' the writing of oneself into being out of a history that is fragmented and spectral, a need which Marlatt calls an 'immigrant's preoccupation.' Marlatt argues that "each work [of ghost writing] struggles with the notion of here, what being here means, what it includes or excludes" (vii) and while "none of [this kind of writing] is fiction... it may be read as such" (vii). The questioning of generic boundaries separating fact from fiction, biography from autobiography, and translation from authorship in the case of

Thammavongsa, "destabilizes a sense of self through a focus on intersubjectivity or 85 relational selves... interrogating, with their diverse strategies of memory work, a linear narrative, these texts help to encourage a re-evaluation of raced ethnic, gendered, and national identifications, and facilitate an illuminating examination of the complex relationship between language, place and self, while also drawing attention to Canadian literary studies as a site of struggle and contestation" (Saul 4). Lily Cho suggests that works like Found reveal how racialized communities are "are bound not by ethnicity but by grief (Cheng qtd. Cho "Affecting" 5). Racial melancholia, defined as "more than a state of psychic injury which embraces the restless ghosts of past injustices" (12), offers one means of addressing the "doubled experience of belonging and unbelonging, of the anguish of living with the contingencies of citizenship even as the demands of diaspora tear away at those contingencies" (Cho "Affecting" 12).

In "The World, A Map Of Thammavongsa makes clear her stance on the nation and its ongoing significance; she writes that the geography of the world itself, "if/it is round...//does/not matter" (42). Instead, what matters is "the country/and//the blue dot inside" (42). The significance of nation-based identity, of a life lived not on a globe, but in a particular country and a particular city within that country, is reinforced by the fact that this is the last entry of the scrapbook proper that references more than black lines.

Her father's sense of his place in the world, "the blue dot/inside," seems to have overcome his desire to plan another life, to imagine his transition from refugee to immigrant. Graham Huggan's affronted reaction to the metaphorization of migrancy among literary critics becomes relevant to this reading. According to Huggan, there is a

"link between the metaphorization of migration and the often Utopian spatial poetics/politics of postcolonial theory" (34). The notion of migrancy as metaphor - as a 86

"mode of being in the world" that challenges the culturally constructed opposition between 'here' and 'there' - the two words evidenced on the U.S. postage stamp - this notion of migrancy as "a mode of being" "is surely not an answer to those who seek to control (meaning mostly to restrict) migrants' actual movements" (Huggan 43). In

Questions of Travel: Postmodern Discourse of Displacement (1996), Caren Kaplan argues that aestheticizing migrancy runs "the risk of leveling out discrepant historical experiences, blurring the boundaries between voluntary and involuntary forms of movement and, at worst, acting as an alibi for the privileges of the worldly cosmopolitan elite" (qtd. Huggan 37). Similarly, Amitava Kumar argues that while the metaphor of the border and migrancy remains a useful means of conceptualizing interdisciplinary measures, for thinking through the possibility for "genuine, transformative shifts [which] will require the creation of new assemblages not only of forms but also of readers and, in a word, of communities," he also argues that "the metaphor of the border" must be returned "to the material reality of barbed-wire fences, entrenched prejudices, and powerful economic interests that regulate the flow of human bodies across national boundaries" (x). Indeed, for the disempowered subject of Found, migrancy is a means to an end, a means to another life, and one that is denied to him by the politics keeping him in a particular refugee camp, in a particular country. The pages that follow this poem document his defeat, and painfully account for his awareness of time passing without change, without news, without anything worth noting or saving.

In her reading of Found, Basile suggests that its grounding in a refugee camp locates the reader at the limits of citizenship, "the juridical threshold of what it means to be a human subject" (56). The binary of citizen and refugee, of life inside and outside the 87

camp, is maintained by state documents, by "the increasingly costly privilege of an

official piece of paper issued by an official Nation State" which marks a body as a subject

(Basile 56). On the 'other' side, in the undocumented lives of refugees in the camp

(undocumented both in the sense of being 'without papers' and also being left outside metanarratives of history), bodies are stripped of any empowering identity, any claim to a place; they live a "naked life" in which they have "lost every quality and every specific

[juridical] relation except for the pure fact of being human" (Agamben qtd. Basile 56). In his essay "Beyond Human Rights" Giorgio Agamben polemically argues that, "given by now the unstoppable decline of the Nation-State and the general corrosion of traditional political-juridical categories, the refugee is perhaps the only thinkable figure for the people of our time and the only category in which one may see today ... the forms and limits of a coming political community" (158-159). Agamben proposes the abandonment

"without reserve" of "the fundamental concepts through which we have so far represented the subjects of the political (Man, the Citizen and its rights, but also the

sovereign people, the worker and so forth)," suggesting that we should "build our political philosophy anew starting from the one and only figure of the refugee" (159).

Agamben points to the fact that "each and every time refugees no longer represent individual cases but rather a mass phenomenon," not one state or international organization developed to 'handle' refugees has been capable of offering any adequate solutions (160). While we may have a wealth of "solemn evocations of the inalienable rights of human beings" the current organization of states and international relations renders these evocations meaningless. Indeed, while the refugee is "precisely the figure that should have embodied human rights more than any other" she is, instead, proof that 88 the concept of human rights is in crisis. The "human being" and the notion of "human rights" inspired by this figure, proves to be "untenable" the moment that we are faced with the refugee, a person who has truly lost "every quality and every specific relation except for the pure fact of being human" (160-161). As such, Agamben makes the connection that the notion of human rights is in fact deeply tied to rights of citizenship:

"In the system of the Nation-State, the so-called sacred and inalienable human rights are revealed to be without any protection precisely when it is no longer possible to conceive of them as rights of the citizens of a State" (161). The refugee is therefore a "limit concept that at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the Nation-State and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed" (162). The discourse of humanitarian ethics actually denies agency to the status of "refugee," defining it as a necessarily temporary identity category until 'proper' citizenship can be realized. As such refugees are seen as humanitarian 'emergencies' in that they pose a serious threat to the myth of the nation - according to Agamben "there is no autonomous space in the political order of the Nation-State for something like the pure human in itself (161).

Basile reads the existence of Thammavongsa's father's scrapbook as a bulwark against the press of this 'naked life,' and I agree but also suggest that Thammavongsa's project is to simultaneously expose the naked terms of that life, to disturb and to unsettle the reader, to put forth a spectacle of violence, the bare bones of a life lived in suspension. The narrative builds an argument against passivity, against apathy, positioning the refugee as one waiting for refuge, as one denied the right to lay down foundations, to build a life, to form connections: "An intense gravitational pull builds throughout the book around the drama of waiting, of that suspension of life (a suspension 89 of place, of past and of future, of language and belonging), which a refugee camp ultimately produces" (Basile 56-57). The violence Thammavongsa's father enacts upon the pigeon - a symbol of mobility, of flight, and of correspondence - carrying for example news of potential change - might disturb some readers more deeply than others, to the extent that this gesture may seem in many ways to be a well-argued response to the silent and unchanging life of Nong Khai.

Nong Khai, the refugee camp in Thailand where Thammavongsa was born, opened in 1975 to accommodate Laotian refugees crossing from the capital city. By 1980

Nong Khai was home to approximately 40,000 people. During an exodus that spanned three decades after World War II, "refugee camps the size of small cities have been built and dismantled" in Southeast Asia (Robinson 3). For lowland Laos, 1978 - the year

Thammavongsa's scrapbook is dated - saw the largest flight to Thailand; UNHCR figures show 48, 781 arrivals, more than the previous three years combined. One major explanation for this surge is the widespread hunger afflicting Laos after the 1977 drought.

Here the context of Found and the subjects of Small Arguments seem remarkably close.

1978 was a significant year for Laos in part because the UNHCR withdrew their support from activities for displaced persons inside Laos, focusing their efforts on "preventing the exodus of persons who might wish to leave Laos because of economic difficulties and chronic food shortages in some areas" (Robinson 106). 1978 was also significant insofar as it marks the year that the Indochinese became one of three designated classes of refugees admissible to Canada. According to Canadian Employment and Immigration

Commission (CEIC) statistics, 11 Lao refugees had arrived in 1975, whereas in 1980 the number was, 6, 264 (Van Esterik 904). Penny Van Esterik reports that as new immigrants 90 in Canada, the Lao have been disproportionately employed in low-paying, unskilled or semi skilled jobs. In a bizarre revelation, Van Esterik also reports that "both men and women have specialized in picking earthworms for sale to bait stores and other outlets"

(905). The resonances here between Found and Small Arguments are striking, connecting immigration, the labouring body of the migrant and the small living bodies of the natural world. Van Esterik, in an arguably patronizing tone, also asserts "the Lao in Canada live quietly without drawing much attention to themselves as they struggle to make ends meet" (904). If Van Esterik's research is sound, then Small Arguments speaks in part for this "quiet" community that arrived as a result of events alluded to in Found, challenging the instinctive desire to remain invisible, to withdraw, and arguing instead for their belonging.

When Thailand's Ministry of Interior (MOI) published its first annual report on

Indochinese refugees it was titled The Arrival of Displaced Persons into Thailand from

Cambodia, Laos and South Vietnam: "In 1977, the MOI report pleaded poignantly, Turn

Not Your Eyes Away. The following year, MOI issued A Call for Humanity. By 1979, it was calling refugees The Unfair Burden: 1980 had become Too Long to Wait. By 1981, an air of grim reality seemed to have set in. That year's report on Indochinese displaced persons, with its cover of gun-metal grey, was called An Instrument of Foreign Policy"

(Robinson 110). The 1978 MOI report A Call for Humanity issued a call for help to neighboring countries that went unanswered. The 1978 scrapbook kept by

Thammavongsa's father presumably had no agenda when he wrote it. And yet it was produced in these conditions, of hostility and fear. The development of the MOI's view 91 of refugees as "instruments of foreign policy" seems to have stemmed from their waiting on change.

In a recent review of Found, Kasim Husain takes an interest in Thammavongsa's portrayal of "physicality, particularly that of the labouring body" (1). Beginning with

Marx's argument that commodities can only acquire value if the labourer is "put out of sight," disconnected from the commodity she produces, Husain suggests that

Thammavongsa's frequently stated investment in the design and publication of her books reflects a "cohesion between form and content" (1). Thammavongsa's interest in objects and her presentation of the artifacts she has found "refocuses our attention on the embodied nature of language over and above the abstraction that takes place in transmitting meaning" (1). Referencing Thammavongsa's choice of titles and their

"strategic inversion of emphasis," Husain concludes that "the objects that make up the scrapbook seem to occupy a privileged position over and above any retrospective interpretation she might make of them" (1). This interest in objects is an interest in materiality, the physicality of all our lives - the organs and organic matter we require for base survival, for bodily functions - rather than the abstract qualities shaping identities, thoughts, ideologies etc. Thammavongsa reduces human experience to this lowest common denominator - the physical body, differently marked as it can be by race, gender, sexuality, and ability. In doing so she raises this story, validates it - she brings the labouring body into view and, in doing so, reveals the terms hidden terms of inequality governing the contemporary market system. The body is not idealized or made into metaphor in this examination, however. It is, instead, stripped of tired metaphors, as

Thammavongsa "reframe [s] relatively standard tropes of lyric poetry in terms of (to 92 borrow again from Marx) their use-value... the maintenance of life" (Husain 2). As such,

Thammavongsa's decision to conclude Found with a remembered episode that does not appear in her father's scrapbook suggests that his violent handling of the pigeon has something crucial to tell us about the other objects documented in the volume.

Although Husain suggests that Thammavongsa resists narrativizing what she finds in her father's scrapbook, I would argue that Thammavongsa's inability to translate much of what is written in the text she finds is the reason why she cannot consistently narrativize it. This is not an act of resistance but rather one of recognition and acceptance of what she cannot know. The distinction is significant in that it establishes grounds on which to connect with a text - with the text-as-other - beyond language, relying on a literacy of another kind - one that is attentive to the body of the text itself, its markers.

The eventual disintegration of the text to a record of thick black lines is perhaps the clearest indication of this purpose - one which is featured prominently on the cover of this text's carefully thought-through design. Found presents another's act of reading a fragmented text, a 'scrap' book. It therefore highlights the act of reading as one of active assembly and encourages a reading that is attentive to more than what is written, what is voiced in words.

In her act of translation with the poem 'Na,' the poet asks the reader to consider the translation that occurs throughout the collection: NA: "We use/The same word/Place/Its second sound/In a different/Part/Of the mouth/To make/What it means/Change/ Na/Is a face/If you/Rope/The last sound/You make/To the back of/Your throat/Na/Is a deter -/Miner/If you/Lift up/The last/ Sound/Just/ As you leave/The first/.. .It is/A ricefield/If you keep/The last sound/You can/ Make/Going" (37-41). In this poem we begin to see that translation is always both a gap and a bond between poet and reader; it is imperfect and wonder-full at the same time. By bringing two languages into dialogue, Thammavongsa asks us to consider the value of an Other's words, their way of ordering the world. She also recreates for us the sense of alienation that accompanies migration, loading our tongues with the burden of shapes and movements unfamiliar and imprecise as we struggle to connect the meaning embedded in each subtle shift of sound, all that gets lost in translation. Thammavongsa's effort to read her father's scrapbook demands she speak its silences as well, not in language but in thick black lines that once crossed out calendar pages. When her father stops recording time, the impact of this gap shows the inadequacy of language: "SEPTEMBER, 1979/This/Is the first/Month/Left unmarked/The ones/After/Are/The same" (56). What follows is a heading for each month from October 1979 to December 1979 and a profound blank space beneath. Again, language cannot properly translate the visual impact of this silence. Thammavongsa's texts can therefore be read as a challenge to critics and readers, an invitation to attempt to speak of them, to find the language (as yet unformed) so urgently needed to bring these experiences into our public discourse. This silence is followed by a warning which closes the work.

In the poem "Ideal Proportions, Male" the image of a labeled diagram of the body is complicated by the presence beside each part of the body of "its name/its translation" as well as the explanation of "what/each part//of the body/did//bent/like the part//it was"

(27). In his act of labeling, Thammavongsa's father has also made a case for the translatable/universal quality of the body and its experiences: it may be differently named

- but "its name/its translation" can be mapped onto the same image of 'parts' which 94 performs the same task regardless of their name. Furthermore, her father's decision to record the function of each body part in a shape that mimics that part - "bent/like the part//it was" - reveals the accidental poetry of daily expression as well as the potential collapse of the divide between the sign and the signified; the manner in which he writes simultaneously reveals the function of language as well. The epigraph from Wittgenstein makes clear that the volume is not one of mere documentation but rather the work of a philosopher, "assembling reminders for a particular purpose" (11). While the volume is dedicated to her parents, it is also taken from their bodies - "I took only/bone//built half/your face//left skull and rib" (13). The body as text also positions the act of writing as both productive and destructive. Indeed, to author a work is to "sculpt" a human face using "a knife" (24), to write is to "carv[e]/every letter" (25), and a work written according to that old cliche - 'from the heart' - would be one informed only by blood:

"nothing/can come/from here/but blood" (17). This violence informs the work as a whole and positions the body as vulnerable and the act of writing as a source of comfort and resistance, a means to ground the body in an otherwise uncertain existence. The scrapbook, informed by life in the Nong Khai refugee camp, documents her father's attempt to order and plan a life that has been reduced to survival - to the body. A body without citizenship has no national identity and therefore no 'home.' It belongs nowhere and so is put in a camp, a country left behind and a future home uncertain:

"set//between/two points// The point/water boils//The point/water freezes//This/is where// it lives/and how//Somewhere between/ two points" (15).

In this context, the body - "The Heart," "The Lung," - and its working and living conditions - under "The Sun" - are of the upmost importance. These poems introduce 95

Found, framing the contents of the scrapbook and suggesting Thammavongsa's desire to foreground her father's "doodles, addresses, postage stamps, maps, measurements" as evidence of a life lived in harsh conditions where the body was constantly vulnerable and violence was omnipresent. The formal quality of these three poems in the text - their appearance within the expanse of white page and each line of text cascading down the page - mirrors the labour of which they speak, the slow and steady flow and rhythm that the working body maintains, as well as the sense of pushing forward, of movement, of struggle perhaps to articulate the experiences of the body. This sequence of poems also stands out for their resonances with an admission made Thammavongsa in an interview about Small Arguments: "I thought about what my parents told me: that when Iwas born, they could see my lungs, my heart, all through a very thin layer of skin. How small I was, and how my father wrapped me up in his shirt, thinking a life this small wouldn't live.

But all those little parts of me kept working, kept keeping me here" (qtd. Peerbaye n.p.).

Her father's scrapbook is an archive of small arguments against the vulnerability of life, revealing his tentative and "delicate" dreams of a house, which he sketches, "Its black lines/thin//uneven/and delicate//a simple plan/for//windows/a roof// steps/an open door" (29). The graphic quality of this sketch - "thin/uneven" - contrasts with his handwriting which "carved/every letter//into/the sound//its/shape made" (25) -the difference suggests the courage required to pursue this dream. Indeed by tracking the shifts in Thammavongsa's description of the markings his hand makes on the page, it becomes possible to see how she understands his experiences in the camp that year.

While at first she views his record as a courageous testimony, a breaking of silence - with "every letter" taking a place "where nothing/stood" (25) - it also holds secrets she 96 cannot access - "each letter/wound//around itself/drawing//a small dark/hole" (26) - secrets that are both personal, relating to the content of her father's inscriptions, but that are also historical, relating to the larger narrative of Laos, a country she does not know and whose language she "can't read" (26), a country whose script resembles itself-

"tiny/and landlocked" (35). "Lao itself... is embedded in the closed circles or 'inner ear' that punctuates each letter of the script," Husain writes. "Here the graphology of language takes the place of the typically linguistic basis for metaphor" (3). I would suggest that Thammavongsa's insistence on the legibility of more than the language of an articulation is an argument for the broadening of reading practices, for the extension of this sort of literacy to the state and to daily interactions between citizens, when faced with one another or with media texts. Reading practices that are more attentive to the many ways in which we express ourselves foster opportunities for both dialogue and dissent - those hallmarks of democracy - where none existed before.

Thammavongsa's concern with the appearance of her father's writing is in part rooted in her inability to speak the language in which the text is written. When her father records "the exact address of/the International Rescue Committee," however, the "exact"- ness of this English record stuns her, as she realizes perhaps for the first time that he had planned to move his family to the United States, rather than Canada. His shift from

"pencil" to "pen" - from an erasable medium to a permanent one - signals the intensity and determination behind this plan, as does the box that he draws around it the second time. The exact address of the International Rescue Committee (IRC) is: International

Rescue Committee, Inc. 122 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10168-1289 USA. The IRC began working with refugees in Thailand in 1976. Today, the IRC continues to work in 97

Thailand, where they assist the estimated 140,000 Burmese refugees living in nine different camps along the Thai-Burma border. Robert DeVecchi, coordinator of the IRC's

Indochinese Refugee Resettlement Program reflected that because the IRC had no field offices at that time, "If [applicants] had any needs, they were to contact us in New York...

I came back ... and found a desk groaning with correspondence'" (qtd. Robinson 131).

This image, though not part of Thammavongsa's volume, reveals something about the nature of her father's waiting. It also contextualizes the two poems describing postage stamps: while "Postage Stamps, 2 Baht, Thailand" reflect unknown correspondence — perhaps from the government or between friends or other family members — these stamps also reaffirm the family's presence in Thailand, providing concrete proof of their temporary and perhaps surreal residence in the camp. "Postage Stamp, 33 cents, U.S.

Airmail" acts as a kind of response to "International Rescue Committee, Address" with correspondence arriving "only once" and therefore implying a negative response to her father's appeals to immigrate. The stamp also prominently features an image of a plane and "two worlds// turning/here, there" (36). This image ironically encompasses her father's desire to board a plane and to arrive in another world as it carries news of refusal.

The reality of "two worlds" separating the US from Thailand is also revealed by the inclusion of currency — with the gap between "2 Baht" and "33 cents" revealing the economic stratification of the globe and the economic basis for the status of many refugees as well as the immigration and asylum policies of migrant-receiving states.

The political or economic "explanations" that keep countries in the Global South under siege are not featured in Found, however. It is not important why bombs were dropped in Laos, only that they were. The poem titled "Laos" reads: 98

When bombs dropped here we buried the dead then took the metal for stilts to lift our homes above the ground (33)

This poem draws together a narrative of war, of loss, and of a community trying to continue in the face of these perils. Interestingly the poem breaks from the sequence of titles that emphasize the object of the poems first: in this case, the bombs. By naming this poem "Laos," Thammavongsa subtly equates the country with the metal of the bombs.

Laos is defined by both this violence and the resourcefulness of its people. The precarious and ominous position of 'homes' in Laos, balancing on top of remnants of war, sheds light on the violent description of home as both a "scar" and a wound-like

"opening" in the poem titled "Home."

"Home" is described as "a scar/just//below/the navel" (23). Unable to locate a stable geographical place to call home, Thammavongsa traces her belonging to its literal origins, to her mother's body, its marks and the histories they hold. In "My Mother, A

Portrait Of Thammavongsa writes "There are/no photographs// of/ my mother here// just/ her name// her/real name// Her/real name//looks like her// Quiet/and reaching/for my father's" (31-32). Given that she can see her mother's physicality in language, in her 99 name which resembles her, Thammavongsa's connection to poetry as a place of belonging is also established. This passage also reveals that Thammavongsa does not resist narrativizing when it is possible for her to assign a narrative built not from the

scraps she finds, necessarily, but rather from her own memories.

Her father's absent sense of home leads to a disconnect from language and eventually from time (as the pages are left blank). This silence builds towards the traumatic conclusion of the volume, an image of violent desperation torn not from the pages of the scrapbook but from Thammavongsa's own memory.

WARNING

My father took a pigeon broke its hard neck cut open its chest dug out a handful and threw back its body warning (60)

This poem dramatically brings together the small subjects of Small Arguments with her own father, a subject who we can know only in fragments. It is significant that this final poem does not come from the scrapbook; it draws the reader outside the discarded, uncertain record of her father. Of all the events in her father's life that she was witness to, that might provide insight into the pages he left empty, Thammavongsa offers only this warning. The "warning" suggests that the assembly of these scraps as "reminders for a particular purpose" has been in part a journey towards understanding on

Thammavongsa's part, a means of building a narrative to explain this troubling memory.

The title 'Warning,' however, speaks to the reader of Found- demands they take note, and that they learn from the text. The broken and dismembered body of the pigeon, like the eventual brokenness and dismemberment of the body of his text, is what is "thrown back" at the reader. The contents of its chest, however, are kept. The gesture confronts the tendency to view the refugee as a body, rather than an individual, to read only the outer markers of that body rather than seek out the contents of its chest.

In Passport Photos, Kumar argues "it is in language that all immigrants are defined and in which we all struggle for an identity... It is between different words that immigrants must choose to suggest who they are. And if these words, and their meanings, belong to others, then it is in a broken language that we must find refuge" (17).

Thammavongsa works with this broken language, making her choices between different words carefully to achieve an aesthetic of minimalism, of experience that is exposed and bare. "The language of Small Arguments is built of ugly and hard tools," Thammavongsa explains. "There is nothing elegant or delicate about them. They are small or poor. They work to direct readers to turn, or to shift, or to make leaps.. .1 think writing this way draws out choice, the consequence of choice. Everything relies so much on something else. It must hold up. It's about picking and choosing from very little" (qtd. Peerbaye).

Basile reads the impact of Thammavongsa's minimalism as "a weighty crystallization of affect around every single word" (Basile 56). The potential for poetry to build "solidarity with the doomed, the deprived, the victimized, the under-privileged" is one that Thammavongsa employs to expose the many hypocrisies and inequalities that currently determine the terrain of Canadian im/migration

(MacNamee 435). Poetry of this kind can be conceptualized as "a type of politics in that it is a motivated intervention through language into consciousness... an attempt to outgrow the existing political situation. The intervention into consciousness, in other words, is simply a more profound form of politics... the value of poetry as witness is not simply the act of witnessing, but the qualities of regeneration and redemption that poetry can bring to a situation of horror. The attempt to do justice to the situation requires the creation of a language that is equipped beyond the power of everyday speech, and this raising of language to a higher power is the introduction of the possibility of a higher consciousness" (MacNamee 437). Thammavongsa describes the gaze in her poems as humanizing: "the looking is human. The looking links these creatures or these things to being human. .. .There is a desire to understand this world in human terms because that is what we are and all we know" (qtd. Peerbaye). Her poetry therefore also assumes a reader that will approach the body of her work in the same way. This contract, between text and reader is the possibility for literature to serve an ethical agenda: "It is the singular encounter between reader and text-as-other, soliciting a singularly just response on the reader's part that is at stake in 'ethics and literature'" (Eskin qtd. Goldman 810). CHAPTER 4: "IN THE BELLY OF A RUSTING IMAGINATION" A NATION UNSETTLED IN WAYDE COMPTON'S PERFORMANCE BOND

While citizenship is a status granted by the state according to regulated constitutional and legislative standards, the granting institutions have little jurisdiction over the manner in which that citizenship is experienced or mobilized. Lianne Moyes has argued that

"serious inconsistencies, oversights, and injustices in the state regulation of citizenship leave subjects variously stateless, barred from certain states, moving constantly, existing without asylum or without hope of immigrating, living unauthorized within a state, living authorized but without equality, and risking their lives, often losing their lives, in the attempt to land" (111). The particular experiences of those "living authorized but without equality" inform this chapter. More specifically, it considers how Wayde Compton's

Performance Bond explores available means of challenging state discourse and examining the place that black Canadians hold in the national imaginary. Just as Moyes argues that "what is needed is a making visible of borders and of the lives at stake at borders" (122), Compton's Performance Bond captures, detains, and interrogates the national myths that, "if seen, implode" (44). In particular, the prevalence of cargo metaphors throughout the work is at once suggestive both of Compton's desire to reveal all that national narratives carry and conceal, and of his interest in consumerism and border controls, in the regulated movement of both goods and migrants. His desire to

"find the fissures in those [hegemonic] languages and systems of thought and bust them wide open, expose them and their assumptions" ("Self-Interview" 84) results in an explosive poetic that relies on a variety of mediums and forms.

Although Compton's works are often read as a commentary on race politics, he is adamant that "none of this has ever been about race.... Ultimately, I think I'm pretty humanist and multiculturalist, though not in Trudeau's official version of it. But multiculturalism as a kind of Utopian goal, a kind of final end point" ("Epic Moment"

145). Compton denies the possibility of a coherent discourse of nationality or citizenship and reveals the potential to imagine otherwise those dominant narratives of Canadian

(and in particular British Columbian) history and the place that "mixed-raced" Canadians have in the nation. Performance Bond "juggles narratives, generations and styles... [it] pulses with rhythms: schoolyard chants, a ship rolling on ocean waves, and the 'woom boom crack' soundtrack of a club dance floor. What's more, he's deft at mixing sparse verse with dense prose, at recontextualizing mythology, ... at skipping back-and-forth between narratives" (Martin n.p.) Compton finds the seemingly endless creative possibilities for reinvention and rearticulation offered by hip-hop to be one powerful manner of harnessing language and putting it to work. Part of that work, in fact, is the legitimization of black vernacular and the particular nuances of both personal and collective black history only it is equipped to express: "[A]t the same time that I was writing these poems about my father and black immigrants like him, I was also writing contemporary poems — poems about myself and my black and mulatto friends," Compton explains. "For these contemporary poems, I was also using black Englishes — though I think in a different way, and for different reasons. I was writing about the voices of those children of black migration born in B.C. in the 1970s, and about the ways that they both have and have not inherited oral traditions from other nations" ("On Blending" n.p.). This admission establishes an important connection between Compton's poetic experimentation and his complicated identity as the child of immigrants (but not an immigrant himself) and as a mixed-race Canadian (when "Canadian" is implicitly understood to figure whiteness). Navigating this difficult work therefore parallels to a certain extent the experiences of the poet moving through Canadian society, his body bearing many marks of difference and unintelligibility.

A critique of policy at its core, of the official word and organization of relations, of the system which turns out countless forms and methods for 'dealing' with and making

sense of the people within its borders, Performance Bond sets out to undermine the

seamless construct that is Canada, in particular to dislodge the assumption of whiteness as a common denominator of full membership. Compton argues that the authority invested in whiteness is rooted in its invisibility, its seeming neutrality — whiteness coded

as 'Canadian' "is because it is not" (45). The ambiguously racialized body of the

'mulatto' possesses an inherently unstable force that can disrupt the myth of the nation and make visible the privileging of whiteness. One of the crucial elements Compton addresses is the issue of how to identify Canadianness when mixed race Canadians must continue to fight "just for the victory/of being an agreed upon noun" ('Declaration of the

Halfrican Nation' 16). In encounters with the state, on official forms for example,

Compton finds "no justice, no peace... just the ether/ of 'Other: ,' the either/ and neither" (109). We are asked how to respond, how to fill in this form in a manner that could satisfy the state's desire to know our 'ethnic background' (as 'race' has been renamed for the sake of political correctness).

In his 'Self Interview' Compton defends the use of the word 'mulatto,' saying: "I want to reclaim it, dubious etymology and all, if only because it's so precise and economical. Without it, it's very difficult to identify my lived racialized experience.

There are things that happen to me not just because I'm black, as such, or some unspecified 'mixed-race' but exactly because I'm seen as a perplexing shade of black and white. ... Naming an oppression, or a response to it, is important. I'll keep the word, thanks" (83). This burden to define oneself is connected to the extent to which you are perceived to rightfully belong to the nation: "if only being yourself was a simple trick. / but we are dressed in borrowed finery, here in the land of promises" ("Performance

Bond" 47). His poetry charts a life lived in between, in the 7' that separates binary ways of ordering the worid. Yet Compton also adamantly refutes "the use of mixed-race people as tropes ~ for example, as images of binarism, or as metaphors, rather than as whole, complicated beings" ("Epic Moment" 135). In Performance Bondhe declares, "the mulatto will not be metaphorized" (102). A series of binary oppositions descend and collapse into identities that do not belong:

Lyrical/prosaic,

settler/native,

American/ North American,

Nationalism/ segregation,

Gold/pyrite,

Familiarity/contempt,

Ocean/borders,

Sub/urban,

Dispersal/determinacy,

Mulatto

Mestizo

Metis Cabra

Eurasian

Creole

Coloured

Colored

Split.

(105).

Compton determines to mix up and unsettle this catalogue, to "shake [the] meaning maker," harnessing poetry to "speak us/out of this mess, this unpassable test, this pattern' in which the body of the 'mulatto/mestizo/metis/cabra/eurasian/creole/coloured/colored'

- a body seeking wholeness - must always be violently "split" apart in order for the state to make sense of it (101).

In contrast, Rinaldo Walcott suggests in Black Like Who? that complex and intimate ties elsewhere produce a multiplicity in the black diasporic body that cannot be undone by the state's desire for easy categorization. Black cultural politics must always take into account the influence of diasporic sensibilities, according to Walcott, regardless of one's personal ancestral link to Africa. Compton concurs in Performance Bond, establishing a personal connection the extends to biblical times, claiming that the first escape from slavery by the Israelites, as told in the parable of the Red Sea, "bleeds into me" (101). While "multiplicities of blackness" exist, it is in Canada that these multiplicities "collide:" post-emancipation and post-national independence Caribbean migrants, continental African migrants, and African-Americans have all claimed Canada as their home (Walcott 40). The complexity of these experiences translates into an "ambivalent place" for blackness in the national imagination despite "a long and enduring presence in Canada" (Walcott 150). As Lily Cho points out, Walcott's view of black

Canadian culture as one that "reaches across national boundaries even as its reach is specific to the demands of blackness in Canada" suggests that much black Canadian literature might encourage the development of a similarly grounded but unbounded sense of belonging in this world ("Dreaming" 193). Walcott argues for "ethical belonging" - for the "reclaiming and rearticulation of subordinate and subaltern humanity as a site of strategic universalism" ("Against Institution" 22). Articulating an alternative history is part and parcel of this endeavor for Compton.

In On the Edge of Empire: Race, Gender and the Making of British Columbia

Adele Perry argues that the social policies of British Columbia have served as a cornerstone in the historical notion of Canada as a 'white' society. Hanging "precariously at the edge of Britain's literal and symbolic empire.... Racially plural, rough, and turbulent, British Columbia bore little resemblance to the orderly, respectable, white settler colony that imperial observers hoped it would become" (3). Well into the twentieth century, BC remained as a sort of colonial outpost, where "the brutalities of dispossession and disenfranchisement" took shape in policies such as the Head Tax, Asian Exclusion, and Japanese internment (Lowry n.p.). These sanctions against immigrants reveal the tendency to present colonization and immigration as separate processes; "their seemingly discrete character is a fiction of a confident colonizing project where settler dominance is assumed to be normal and inevitable. It is a powerful fiction that masks the fact that dispossession and resettlement were and are deeply and irreparably intertwined, and indeed they derive their social power from that connection" (Perry 19). Given this history, BC is a particularly important site for critical interrogation of Canada's colonial past. "The history of BC is the history of whiteness," Compton writes in "Performance

Bond" (43), as he documents the manner in which "race/ in BC/ is created" (43-44). The name 'British Columbia'' is an explicit reference to this colonial history. 'Columbia' refers to America itself, that is, to the geographical territory that has been recently named

America but was originally called 'Colombia,' after Christopher Columbus himself, who felt entitled to name the 'land' he discovered (as opposed to a 'nation,' 'country,' or even territory which is understood to be inhabited, 'land' is inhuman, empty and waiting to be staked, after all). Compton's list of possible hyphenated versions of this 'Columbia' reveals the logical claims to the land that could be made by multiple groups, in particular by First Nations. The list however predictably culminates in the status quo, "British

Columbia," whose motto - "beauty without end, splendor without diminishment" - is reimagined as 'scintillation without perimeter.' Scintillation here is figured as whiteness itself — the phenomena whereby a surface (in this case a territory) is distorted because it is so multi-faceted and light bounces off of it in multiple directions. The 'brilliance' of whiteness hides the many different faces of this 'Columbia,' presenting an image of

Columbia as British through and through, whiteness as "panorama" (44).

The geography of BC, largely of Vancouver, is therefore of particular importance in Performance Bond. The city's ports are personified in a manner that challenges the increasingly detached, technical construction of borders. In the poem "Inlet Holler," for example, Vancouver's Burrard Inlet is staged "bemoaning" its dismal past, "dread[ing] the ships that enter" (19). The majority of ships that arrive are the "titanics of industry," against which the Inlet "lashes" out (19). Within this inlet, labouring bodies work tying "the knots that keep the world from rolling away" (20). While protest and mobilization of workers here might achieve great publicity globally — "this inlet would take your voice out to the sea// lord, this inlet could carry words/out to the sea" (19) ~ the conditions of perpetual labour and sense of isolation translates into silence: "nobody/hollers here.

Nobody responds to me" (20). While the inlet appears from afar as a model for Canada as multicultural success story — "I see koreans, filipinos, Chinese greeks, arabs, russians/ coming to sup at the same trough as me" (20)-- the lived experience of multiculturalism beyond ports of entry is one of disempowerment: these "workers/ of the world//... never speak" (20). Furthermore the inlet's history holds repressed truths of the settler nation, because it knows it belongs to no one, despite the BC government's jurisdiction over its operations: "This inlet seems no more mine than yours/or the indians who sell us salmon in the strip bars" (21). The myth of 'laying claim' to a territory — the Burrard Inlet was so named by George Vancouver after all — necessitates the removal of its long-time inhabitants such as the Skwxwu7mesh or Squamish people, which in Salishan means

'people of the sacred water.' These sacred waters include the Burrard Inlet, as well as the

Indian Arm, False Creek, English Bay and Point Grey. All of the names of these waterways clearly reflect their assumed possession by colonial settlers. The area was also originally home to the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, also known as the Burrard Band. The government's claim on the land as a resource is revealed by the industry for which the inlet is now used ~ bringing goods, moving dollars: "it's the dollars we dream of/ the me they might buy" (21). But the "tug boats tug at the truth of this," revealing the fault lines in the nation, the destruction that settlement has raged on the land, "waking snakes of rainbow oil" in what were once treated as sacred waters (21). The Burrard Inlet also saw 110 the arrival of many boats other than the "titanics of industry," housing instead the victims of that that industry, of global capitalism. The arrival of the Fujianese immigrants in 1999 that Compton documents in "Illagelese: Floodgate dub" mirrors an earlier arrival, that of the Komagata Maru - a ship full of nearly four hundred Indian migrants which arrived from Calcutta in 1914 but was not allowed to dock: "the chorus that screeches 'back home!' is the drum and bass treble track alliteration of Koma-Koma-Komagatamaru and the stowaway that the border refused will be the head stone of the corner" (31). Compton criticizes the hypocrisy of a nation that "prides itself as peacekeeping but is still sleeping on the justice and compassion lacking in that/ back home/ back home/ back home" (31).

The careful attention to the histories embedded within one port of entry in

Vancouver reveals Compton's strong sense of connection to the city. Canadian critical urban studies scholar Jon Caulfield argues in his book City Lives and City Forms (1996) that the city is a "willed human construction" (4) and that "any given city is one of innumerable possible cities that might have been produced and ... [has] innumerable possible futures" (4). In Vancouver, the "grandkids of the bluesmen" seize the possibility of other futures by claiming the city as their own: "spray paint on trains, then// on windows of trains and then/ walls and walls and walls round cities and cities and cities// making non blankness, signing, singing, singeing" (147). Their graffiti is the script of

"plain, pseudonymous, acronymous, vertical, writers/ unholdable, purposeful" (147).

Peter Dickinson asks in "Cities and Classrooms, Bodies and Texts: Notes Towards a

Resident Reading (and Teaching) of Vancouver Writing" what it means "to be both a resident and reader of a particular place" (80). Compton seems to offer a reply, writing

"it's alchemical work, spinning/ meaning out of meandering... every time I drive/ Ill downtown, I go over/ the remains; I transform, /1 translate" (150). In "Rune" and "Lost and Found Landmarks of Vancouver," Compton pays particular attention to reading that which is no longer there: "the decay will speak for itself. Nothing/ in the city is older than space. Nothing/ closer than time..." (113). The poem itself is full of blank lines, paying due to histories that will never be fully known. "In my own work on Hogan's Alley,"

Compton explains, "I've repeatedly turned to the question of what is my own relationship to this neighbourhood that I never personally belonged to" ("Black Writers in Search" n.p.). The Hogan's Alley Memorial Project, in which Compton played a founding role, is just one example of the kind of active reimagining of space which prompts Compton to feel a certain measure of optimism about the direction that black artists are taking their work in BC: "I feel like I'm living in a unique time, because black be. seems on the verge of really creating a new way of being black. I think this is a time full of possibilities, because black be, more than many other ethnic positions, collectively wills itself to be a social force, and it now finally has the numbers to possibly make its intentions bear out"

("Epic Moment" 136).

All of Compton's published works to date are concerned with tracing the fractures in dominant versions of Canadian history, BC history in particular, and exposing the means by which voices of black culture have been rendered mute. His anthology

Bluesprint (2001) accounts for a 'phantom lineage' of black voices in British Columbia, while 49th Parallel Psalm (1999) presents that history as poetry, as epic. In the introduction to Bluesprint, Compton points to Kamau Braithwaite as his guide for this recharting of history. Braithwaite offers "a way of seeing history as a palimpsest, where generations overlap generations, and eras wash over eras like tides on a stretch of beach" 112

(17). This approach, Braithwaite's 'tidalectics,' has consequences for both an understanding of identity and for pursuits that recover marginalized histories:

"Repetition, whether in the form of ancestor worship or the poem-histories of the griot, informs black ontologies more than does the Europeanist drive for perpetual innovation

[...] In a European framework, the past is something to be gotten over [...] in tidalectics, we do not improve upon the past, but are ourselves versions of the past" (Compton,

Bluesprint 17). African notions of reincarnation and cyclicity "fascinate" Compton;

Braithwaite's "tidalectics" — his "scrambled neologism for a dialectic that does not move forward, but rather transforms statically" — offers the possibility of neither breaking from nor preserving the past, but rather to "celebrate repetitions" (Compton, "On Blending" n.p.). In "(Bottle) (Poems)" Compton writes, "take this as wave/glowing wave/enveloping fingers of light round the air in this wave/ of air enveloping wave/ fingers of light rolling wave outside/take this glowing as wave/orifice of wave/ round wave hold bending air/ wave that cracks wave/ over broken bright wave" (81). This seeming tribute to the motion informing Braithwaite's theory celebrates the repetitions and inevitable "mis-duplications" produced by remixing one's own work. The desire is not to achieve wholeness but to connect and accumulate deeper connections to your culture and your past.

The aesthetic of turntablism and jazz prove particularly useful to Compton when he breaks apart and rearticulates Canada's history in a multi-vocal, intertextual way. His approach exposes the 'limits' of literary criticism and the academy that he participates in as a professor, critic and editor of Commodore Books. He finds he must defend the

'theory' behind his work, saying: "hip hop is the black lingua franca. It's our 113 intercontinental cultural trade language. Our Esperanto. You can't really make cultural sense in the black community without it... Hip hop is theory, and the theory fucking applies, so deal with it" ("Self Interview" 82). A lingua franca is a language used between two people who do not share a mother tongue. For black people in the diaspora, the mother tongue is more often than not an unknowable and irretrievable loss. Within the diaspora, as a result of the multiple experiences of blackness it encompasses, individuals often do not have a common language with which to communicate. Hip hop,

Compton suggests, provides a means of translating all manner of black experience; like

Esperanto - the most widely spoken auxiliary language in the world meaning "one who hopes" ~ hip hop unites people across borders.

Before Compton learned to DJ, he used the DJ as a trope — "writing with those sensibilities in mind" (qtd. Martin n.p.). The process of reworking and revising existing texts is a valued aspect of hip-hop and turntablism. Each new track is constructed out of the accumulated readings and interpretations of previous works. As such, these texts are perhaps ideal models for social change since, as David Attridge writes, "it is only through the accumulation of individual acts of reading and responding, in fact, that large cultural shifts occur" (79). Hip-hop offers "the freedom to fragment prerecorded records... open[ing] up a new attitude, and a new emphasis toward so-called 'broken English'"

(Compton "On Blending" n.p.). The valorization of this kind of 'break-down' as a means of challenging the ideology of superiority informing colonial English is coupled in hip hop with the willingness to disassemble and remake elements of present and past cultures, a project that takes shape in Compton's "The Reinventing Wheel," which draws together "elements of ancient, non-literate, vestigial African culture... [that] could be 114 blended directly into textual poetry, and both could be blended back into hip hop. The back-and-forth reflection of forms and conditions seems evident in the very imagery of the "ones and twos": the cornerstones of hip hop, the DJ's materials — the left and the right turntable, two halves of a dichotomy. The poetry would arise through the cultural

"feedback" these loops would spark" (Compton "On Blending" n.p.).

Far from idealizing the form, however, Compton also notes the tone of "seething aggravation" which MC's have historically employed in their articulations - a tone that speaks to particular discontents and disenchantments felt by blacks in the post civil-rights era as both subtle and explicit forms of systemic racism continue to define their experiences. Pointing to the "uncoded starkness" of hip hop lyrics as an important move beyond the "furtive, masked complaints of the blues," Compton argues that in this aggravation there is also a detectable measure of collective confidence which is desperately needed to quell the "creeping nihilism in black expressive culture" ("On

Blending" n.p.). Hip hop is also a product of its time, necessarily reliant on the technology that contributes to its form; this means of reclaiming oral culture is

"ironically... never quite completely live." Furthermore ~ despite its emphasis on building a sense of belonging and place, of drawing black experiences in from the margins of history ~ hip hop is more often than not experienced by individuals in their homes who "plug into the vast media machine" to which hip hop also ironically owes at least part of its success (Compton "On Blending" n.p.).

While hip hop has been praised as a genre of "transformative creativity that is endlessly capable of altering the uses of technologies and space", and hip hop artists have been named "alternative cartographers" of their nations (Forman 201, 202), Compton has 115 expressed a wariness to align the work of black Canadians exploring hip hop forms with the popularized hip hop making waves in the United States. The growing cultural currency of hip hop among young back people in Vancouver is somewhat "disturbing," according to Compton: "it's really foreign to me and my sensibilities; it's not about here.

It's all created by conditions that are very different from the conditions of Western

Canada. So I'm kind of ambivalent about it that way" ("Epic Moment" 143). Nonetheless

Compton considers turntablism to be "a back postmodern art form" which can be put to work to "comment on the national and international dissemination of hip hop and, therefore, black culture" ("Epic Moment" 139). Performance Bond holds onto the hope that an articulatory poetics could have the power to "speak us/ out of this mess, this unpassable test, this pattern" (101). In the meantime, Compton is committed to his task,

"perpetually/beat juggling history and ethnicity" (102). This impulse to interrogate history is not one always taken lightly by the state. After all, bell hooks' book Black

Looks: Race and Representation, which shares Compton's interest in "suggesting alternative ways to look at blackness" (5), was one of countless texts detained by Canada

Customs at the border (EFC n.p.). Perhaps with this history of censorship in mind,

Compton reimagines Miguel de Unamuno's assertion that "the job of an object is to be contemplated" (47) by politicizing all objects, noting the possibility for some to be defined as "contraband:" "the job of contraband is to enter" (47). Thus, he represents his

"(Bottle) (Poems)" as "cargoed telling[s]" (59), stow-aways of sorts. They arrive through unconventional routes, bypassing customs officers who might mark them illicit.

Smaro Kamboureli argues that "literature functions as a sphere of public debates, but is never fully harmonized with them, thus registering the limits of cultural knowledge 116 and politics. Complicit, and compliant, literature is also purposefully defiant and joyfully insolent" ("Preface" viii). Indeed, the reading of works by black Canadians brings one up against the limitations of the CanLit field; its "feigned plentitude" is exposed, as is the longstanding "occlusion and repression" of certain texts by indigenous and diasporic writers (Kamboureli "Preface" ix). In Black Like Who? Rinaldo Walcott makes clear that

"writing blackness is still difficult work" (11). Walcott's project "was and remains an attempt to provide some grammars for thinking blackness in Canada" (13). The challenge of conceptualizing blackness in Canada is partly rooted in the heterogeneity that that category 'black' conceals. George Elliot Clarke's Odysseys Home (2002) for example, is an anthology of Clarke's criticism meant to provide a means of mapping African-

Canadian Literature and to "contest the erasure and silencing of black culture and history in Canada" (6). Where Clarke seeks to counter the metanarrative of "black inadequacy, inferiority, illegality" (8), Walcott takes issue with this approach, suggesting that the valorization and immortalization of various black figures and their contributions in the halls of history reduces cultural works by black artists to "merely national products," denying their origins in the "space of the in-between, vacillating between national borders and diasporic desires, ambitions, and disappointments" {Black Like Who? 26).

According to Walcott, projects like Odysseys Home produce only a "fiction" because they fail to acknowledge the inassimilable "massiveness... that is black Canada" (14).

With writers like Walcott in mind, Lily Cho argues that while minority writers with passports in hand are "obviously Canadian," they nevertheless challenge Canadian literature "as a concept and a canon," since they often produce a critique of Canadianness in their work ("Diasporic" 93). There is thus an "unresolved relation between minority and majority literatures in Canada and... between the competing demands of citizenship and the desires of the diaspora" ("Diasporic" 94). Any responsible reading of "minority literature" must be founded on an "engagement with long histories of dislocation both within and beyond the nation... an engagement with histories of dislocation that are differentially related" ("Diasporic" 97). The sense of dislocation within and beyond the nation increasingly renders many individuals homeless if not stateless in a crucial sense, feeling out of place everywhere in the world. Building on the popular trope of the nation as homeland, Nandita Sharma has focused her attention on how discursive borders can construct the nation as a site of homelessness for many who live within it. While Sharma examines the category of migrant workers in particular, her analysis is helpful more broadly to understand how membership to the nation is constructed around a naturalized process of exclusion. "Home, and the ways it helps to organize ideas of family, household, ethnic community, and nation," Sharma writes "is one of the most naturalized of concepts and therefore one of the most dangerous" (113). The idea of the homeland is based on what Anjelika Bammer calls "mythic narratives, stories the telling of which have the power to create the 'we who are engaged in telling them' as well as constructing

'the discursive right to a space... that is due to us'" (qtd. Sharma 114). Performance

Bond, then, might be read as an attempt to fashion an alternative mythic narrative, to lay down the foundations for a homestead and a sense of place in a nation that has resisted opening its arms in welcome. Nancy Fraser argues that, for all its talk of progress, freedom and rights, the modern capitalist liberal democratic state is in fact "premised on many layers of separations and exclusion" (Sharma 116). 118

When Canadian immigration policy was liberalized in 1967, anxieties quickly began to rise about the growing number of non-whites and the potential "irreparable damage that was being done to the 'character of Canadian society'" (Sharma 119). The government moved to resolve these anxieties, not by reducing immigration but by shifting the terms on which migrants from the global South could arrive; the dramatic decrease in the number granted the opportunity to resettle ushered in a new age of

'migrant workers.' In 1973, Canada introduced the Non-Immigrant Employment

Authorization Program (NIEAP) to bring in migrants to keep the economy running, welcoming these other, often colored bodies into the public but not the private sphere of the nation, into the capitalist but not the democratic realm of the state. These policies and parliamentary discursive practices have "reconstructed] the idea of nations as homes for some but not Others," essentially "organizing unfreedom" (Sharma 120). Sharma concludes that a crucial first step in rectifying these injustices is to acknowledge the gap between 'difference' and 'diversity,' to reevaluate Canada's commitment to diversity rather than difference: "Diversity is the tangible existence of heterogeneity and mutual reciprocity within nature and within that part of nature that is humanity. Differences, on the other hand, are socially organized inequalities between human beings and between humans and the rest of the planet. The social organization of difference is the effect of practices and beliefs founded upon hierarchies of different value and worth" (121).

The Canadian Multiculturalism Act is informed by the assumption "that ethnic subjectivity, understood and contained in collective terms, is always determined by reference to a distant and often dehistoricized past" (Kamboureli Scandalous Bodies

135). In 1994, Writing Thru Race, a three day conference held in Vancouver for First Nations writers and writers of colour, received much attention and accusations of

censorship and violation of individual rights because white writers were excluded. In response to this controversy, Myrna Kostash made the point that, "contrary to liberal

desire, we do not check our skin colour at the civic door" (qtd. Butling 233). As these early fault lines in the rhetoric of multiculturalism signaled, race and racism would continue to define actually existing multicultural (demographically-speaking) neighborhoods in Canada. "Common sorts of racism" continue despite (because of?) the official rhetoric of "tolerance" and equality, writes David Chariandry, who points to reports of racial profiling as one, by now notorious, indicator ("Spirits" 815). Indeed,

Crocker et al. find in their 2007 study of ethnic communities in Atlantic Canada that

"both the perception and practice of racial profiling were widely felt" (7). The ongoing racialization of bodies continues to make race and ethnicity a present and significant factor for many Canadians today: a fact that many would like to deny.

Confronting the history of race relations during "Black History Month" makes

February what Cecil Foster calls "an unforgiving month for Canadian multiculturalism - a period when the very identity of the country and its citizenship are openly questioned, intellectually dissected, and reassembled. This is when the country's most vaunted boast of being a tolerant multicultural country is put to the test, challenged, and even subverted from within its own borders" (345). Foster argues that the position of blacks in modern

Canada reflects the maintenance of a hierarchical power structure that employs race as

"the main criterion for deciding belonging and entitlement within the nation-state" (346).

For people who are part of an ethnic group called 'black' in Canada there is little opportunity for self-identification/defmition: "In the first place, this construction results in the attempted homogenization of people of African ancestry into a single ethnicity

with a manufactured essence - an essence that is imposed and at times accepted by those positioned as Black in Canada. Black is not based on a single ethnic consciousness.

Rather it is racial... with this construction comes a national marker, which is somatic, of

inferiority and social exclusion" (349). While Foster holds onto the ideal of multiculturalism as a necessary hope in an age of increasing violence and tensions, and

seeks to rehabilitate that sense of possibility in his work Where Race Does Not Matter, he also concedes that "in its current practice, multiculturalism still suffers from what I call a

dream deficit" (346).

While writers like Pico Iyer have famously championed Canada as a nation with

"something distinctive to give the world" (31), Iyer mistakenly assumes that all the

"customary talk" of Canada "as the country defined by its lack of definition" reflects lived conditions of openness and "unfinishedness" (50). In actuality, Canada is increasingly putting up new barriers and tightening its existing perimeter. It seeks to 'fix' the identity of newcomers upon arrival - as evidenced by the move towards biometrics — and to track closely the movements of those to whom it has already begrudgingly granted access. The "experimentation" which now occurs at the ministry of Citizenship and

Immigration and the Office of Public Safety involves testing the extent to which the rules around citizenship can be changed and restricted without causing public outcry. Under the leadership of Jason Kenney, the government has passed new restrictive laws meant to protect the 'prize' of Canadian citizenship that served as Iyer's misplaced muse.

In November 1999 Immigration and Citizenship minister Elinor Caplan stated:

"Canada is the place to be in the twenty-first century, the place where people will want to come and stay, and learn, to pursue opportunities, to raise children, to enjoy natural beauty, to open new frontiers, to set the standard for the world of a high quality of life, a

Canada that is a leader and an example to the world" (qtd. Foster 350). Just a few months earlier, four ships carrying 599 Fujianese people arrived on the West Coast. The government promptly incarcerated most and deported many. By April 2001, 11 were still in prison. Those deported to China are now in Chinese prisons. DAARE — the Direct

Action Against Refugee Exploitation ~ holds the position that "although

'undocumented,' these migrants are not 'illegal' in light of mobility rights pursuant to

Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which recognizes everyone's right to leave any country and Article 14 which recognizes that people have the right to seek asylum" (n.p.). For precisely these reasons, Dionne Brand writes, "Belonging does not interest me. I had once thought that it did. Until I examined its underpinnings. One is misled when one looks at the sails and majesty of tall ships instead of their cargo" {Map

85).Compton focuses his eye on the cargo in his poem "Illagalese: Floodgate Dub," which he dedicates to "the Chinese maroons.'" He writes: "if you arrive in the belly of a rusting imagination, there are grounds to outlaw you. But Canada is a remix B-side chorus in the globalization loop: a sampled track of'back' home'-desiring, 'old days'- admiring, democracy-dreaming, racism-reaping homesickness that even medicare can't cure" (31). Brand responds to the same incident in Map, recording newspaper reactions and the manner in which "all the accoutrement of outside" was employed "to regulate and choreograph their appearance both on the television screens and in newspaper photographs as well as the interior of the body politic" (64). Like Brand, Compton asks provocative questions, of 'all the accoutrement of outside': "if it was heroic for runaway slaves to seep into Canada, /why is it villifiable for Chinese migrants to hide in the belly of a dream/now? And when you want to draw the line or put your foot down/or formulate

'enough is enough is enough is enough,'/what colour is enough? what language does it speak? / and isn't that the real issue written between the bordered lines" (31-32).

DAARE points out that global poverty is an international human rights issue and that the Canadian government and its legitimate citizens are complicit for supporting and benefiting from "economic policies that exacerbate economic disparities" (n.p.). As

Citizenship and Immigration Canada churns out legislation that offers citizenship to the highest buyer, wealthy economic migrants are distinguished from destitute ones, termed

"bogus refugees," and turned away. Compton documents this hypocrisy in his poem

"Performance Bond:" "It's a crime/ to be poor, to be broke, to float, to colour/ outside/ the lines, to cross, to coast, to confound,/ the order, the entrance, the ocean, the border, to be / unrestrained, / uncontained" (43). Compton suggests, the seamless construction of the nation is achieved in part because "the cracks are filled/ with the bodies of those fallen through, / we walk on them, on through/ to the promised land: now" ("Performance

Bond" 43). Indeed Canada's Immigration legislation increasingly focuses on issues of security and detention, turning a blind eye to the needs and experiences of vulnerable, displaced people, and showing a disturbing lack of foresight in doing so: "Harsh immigration laws will only make migrants more vulnerable to smugglers and employers, raising the costs of smuggling even higher and force the smuggling syndicates to grow even more brutal and immune to government power'" (Kwong qtd. DAARE).

Because of the rigid demands placed on border guards to establish the identity of every foreign national or permanent resident, of every "stranger at our gate," as evidenced by the excerpt from the enforcement manual that ushers the reader into

Performance Bond, "those who have no history are doomed" to remain suspect outsiders

(105). For those in the diaspora, "desks are undoing us... / Or, more rightly, deskism. / they are writing us out of this part of the City; / they are reporting us away; they are bylawing us blank" ("To the Egress" 148). For those waiting at the border, "jurisdiction cuts the earth to the bone... without papers or definition, in quotations, 'refugee,' a penstroke from relief. Languishing in the languaged exile of illegalese" (31). The distinction between 'voluntary' and 'forced' migrants that puts the request for asylum by some refugee claimants "in quotations," distorts the complexities of migration today.

Terms like 'economic migrant' and 'bogus refugee' discredit migrants such as the

Fujianese, ignoring the violence inflicted by debt bondage, as well as the dignity and respect to which all people are entitled according to the UN Declaration of Human

Rights: "The reduction of multiple causes to the economic does not assist one to understand why migration is occurring and likely to increase in the future" (DAARE

"Who is a migrant?").

Nonetheless, the tendency to view im/migrants as a burden and a threat is articulated in metaphors of catastrophe and invasion. In an article published by the Globe and Mail in September of 2007, Paul Waldie reports that a "sudden flood of Mexican refugee claimants are pouring" into the country, leaving "local officials scrambling and raising fears about how many more might be on their way." Waldie goes on to indicate that the Mexican ambassador to Canada said he fears that "if the influx turns into a flood,

Ottawa will slap visa restrictions on all Mexicans visiting Canada." The image of the

'flood' has entrenched itself and become the normalized characterization of the movement of immigrants and refugees. The same representation holds true even for groups of refugees, traditionally granted more sympathy than other migrants. A quick search of the keyword "refugee" and "flood" yields immediate proof of the pervasiveness of the trope: "Pakistan's fear of refugee flood!" BBC News reports; "Egypt prepares for

Gaza refugee flood" announces ABC News; "Refugee flood swamps volunteers" and

"Refugee flood brings race tensions to Dublin" says the Independent; "Refugee flood overwhelms relief effort" according to the Washington Post, while the Daily World EU

News informs readers "Turkey braces for refugee flood." Since, as Brand reminds us, 'no language is neutral,' referring to migrants with metaphors that signal apocalypse, fear, disaster and irreparable damage has political outcomes in terms of their reception in the communities where they try to settle and make a home for themselves. For those who are refugee claimants, these metaphors have an impact on their treatment in court. As

Compton writes, there is no "hope of consistency in foreign and foreigner policy or obduracy of floodgate metaphors and death sentence deportations" ("Illagelese:

Floodgate dub" 31). The repetitious application of negative, inanimate metaphors to specific persons or groups, results gradually in their dehumanization. The 'flooding' imagery that pervades media representations of refugees effaces the individuality of each refugee claim, requiring the claimant to prove their integrity against much fiercer skepticism. Compton's insistence that "people are not a flood, borders are not God-given,

/lives are not dollars, and Canada is not the sum of its exclusions" (32) therefore demands that existing definitions and categories of migrants be reconsidered, that terms for asylum be brought in line with the radical changes that have occurred in the era of globalization since the Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees was authored in the altogether different world order of 1951. In recent years, 750,000 people a year have sought asylum worldwide: "Beyond these asylum seekers, the past decade has seen 10 million to 15 million refugees annually in camps, somewhere, with no possibility of seeking asylum.

The 30, 000 to 40, 000 people who make it to Canada in a record high year are truly a drop in this bucket" (Dauvergne "In fear" n.p.)

In light of statistics such as these, Compton's concise expression -- "I am a settler/I am uneasy" ('Inlet Holler' 21) - unsettles the reader, asks them to consider their own settled notions and the ease with which they dismiss the injustices that he records.

The majority of Canadians can choose to remain "in barricaded comfort, behind armchair palisades, / wielding remote control diplomacy like a wand... with children lullabied by Filipino nannies" (32). Daniel Coleman's interest in the construction of this apathetic white civility in Canada takes its inspiration from Rinaldo Walcott's recent anthology Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism. Walcott has cited

Clement Virgo's film Rude as the precursor to his own work, relaying how the film

"opened up the space for thinking differently about Canada as a racialized space" (qtd. in

Coleman 26). Walcott stages what he terms an "engaged insubordination with respect to official narrative discourses of the nation-state of Canada" (qtd. Coleman 26). This strategic use of insubordination takes aim at the myth of white civility in Canada, a concept that evolved from a colonial inheritance of white, British gentlemanliness. Given that civility is in some ways a valuable and necessary aspect of citizenship, Coleman seeks a "dynamic, self-questioning concept of civility" one that is 'wry' or 'critical' as opposed to the static, unexamined and ultimately racist version in circulation. Compton argues that the myth of Canadian civility preserves silence and secrecy around the rude reality of violence in the nation. In "Declaration of the Halfrican Nation" Compton asks if "the mention of bullets is too american?" (16), exposing the tendency to deny the violences that prosper on our side of the border. There are multiple fault lines in this carefully retold narrative of white Canadian civility and Compton points to one in the same poem, writing "oka. all/I halfta do is spell it and the settled snow shivers" (16). The instinct to turn away from this 'darker side of the nation' can have catastrophic consequences; Coleman links uncritical civility, for example, to the assumption "that everyone in Canada has equal access to clean drinking water" and then points to the

"evacuation in early November 2005 of over a quarter of the 1,900 Cree people from

Kaschechewan, Ontario, because of skin and intestinal ailments due to unsafe drinking water on the reserve ten kilometers upstream from James Bay. ... Nearly 100 reserves across Canada have boil-water advisories, and one, the Kwicksutaineuk First Nation on an island off the BC coast, has had one in effect for nine years" (27). In Coleman's view, literary scholarship must register these "uncivil" Canadian realities and scholars must recognize their work has historically been "deeply invested in the project of civility" (28).

"Self-insulating, and self-congratulatory civility" functions primarily as a means of reinforcing who belongs to the nation and who doesn't; the hospitality it prescribes — the courtesy and tolerance it mandates — establishes a relationship of charity and power, making clear who is the host/rightful resident and who is the guest/temporary visitor.

"The way we know who 'we' are," Coleman writes, "is by our civil interactions with these 'others'" (32). Taking his cue from Sherene Razack's Dark Threats and White

Knights, Coleman emphasizes the disturbing trend whereby "the icons of White Canadian civility become meaningful by means of their relation to needy, non-White, peripheral peripheral others" (33). The suffering and peripheral status of 'the rest' grants the West the opportunity to dole out 'humanitarian' aid. Secure in the comfort of their charity and civility, these humanitarians pursue little self reflexive thought into how the West might be partly responsible for the destitute conditions elsewhere: "In all cases, the trance of civility sedates us to the status quo assuring us that we have already reached the ideals to which we so proudly aspire. In the process, we disavow the incivilities and violences in our midst" (Coleman 36).

As part of a "much needed therapeutic remedy for the trance-like condition that has bedeviled the CanLit and CanCult critical institutions," Peter Dickinson suggests new keywords are needed, and that one such word is 'affect' ("Subtitling" 46). "It seems to me," Dickinson writes, "that a theory of affect can provide another avenue of inquiry into

... [one] defining feature of Canadian civility, namely its 'Britishness'" ("Subtitling" 49).

In Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject, the human body is a site of a "twisted braid of affects" which is crucial in prompting action and movement. Silvan Tompkins concurs that contrary to the Enlightenment notion that the mind and the body are two distinct and separate entities, a core set of human emotions actually "hardwire our conscious, expressive, and adaptive interactions and communications with others" (qtd. Dickinson

49). If the act of reading can draw out affective emotion in the reader or audience member, it can also prompt action and thereby have great consequence. According to

Teresa Brennan, affect is transmitted when one receives a physical impression or feeling from an encounter, as when a person comments that they were "moved" by a work of art.

Compton's call — "DJ/ speak with your hands; / address us" ~ encourages a form of communication that originates not in language but in the movements and impulses of the physical body of an other, the intimate bond his hands can offer — speaking to and of the experiences of his listeners, but also locating them with this address which breaks the hegemonic silence surrounding them (44). Compton's project then is to act as witness, to unearth all that the nation would have its citizens forget: "Everybody's a migrant/Every body gyrates/to the global big beat/It's sun/down in the Empire, and the time has done/gone by, /and multiculturalism can't arrive by forgetting, but remembering/every hectare taken, every anti-Asian defamation, /because those who don't remember/repeat"

(42 'Performance Bond').

As a remedy to the collective amnesia from which Canadians seems to suffer,

Compton offers an alternative historiography in Performance Bond. In 'Declaration of the Halfrican Nation' Compton writes: "Feels like history got me/ by the throat" (16).

Compton's work seeks to rectify this situation in a manner which recalls a line from

Ralph Ellison's' Invisible Man: "they were outside the groove of history and it was my job to get them in" (433) The unnamed narrator "move[s] with the crowd... listening to the growing sound of a record shop loudspeaker blaring a languid blues" and wonders:

"Was this the only true history of the times, a mood blared by trumpets, trombones, saxophones and drums, a song with turgid, inadequate words?" The 'groove' of

Compton's prose presents history as a construct, as non-linear and multi-vocal. Black feminist critic Elsa Barkley Brown proposed a multivocal notion of history modeled after jazz, a method that could acknowledge "histories exist simultaneously, in dialogue with each other, [a fact that] is seldom apparent [...] the overwhelming tendency is to acknowledge and then ignore differences"(276). Brown says that we live in an

"asymmetrical world" and therefore linear or symmetrical methods of politics and history will not do (281). In a 'Self-Interview' for Side/lines: A New Canadian Poetics, Compton reveals that the rhythms of jazz have inspired his own work. He points to Ishmael Reed's

Mumbo Jumbo as a work that had a great impact on his early writing, a work that he felt inclined to read out loud, sensing the rhythms and influences of jazz in how it had been scripted. Compton has also expressed his admiration for the recent work of Kamau

Brathwaite: "he still treats Caribbean dialect as his subject/form, but he's also been fucking around with concrete visuals, computer poems, inventing his own fonts, intentional typos, that kind of thing - trying to break free of the book, get up off the page.

I think he's trying to break out of standardized typography and the standardized colophon the same way he's trying to dislodge standard English. It can be part of the decolonization process, toggling the received forms, and the received avenues of paratextual dissemination" ("Self Interview" 84). Compton likewise challenges us in

Performance Bond- which quite literally 'gets up off the page' - in the audio CD that comes packaged with the text.

Compton's investment in performance - in "getting the words off the page" - is evident from the first beginning of Performance Bond: the "Acknowledgements" reveals that "Performance Bond" for example, was originally televised as "a montage of recitation and archival film and video footage" for the CBC's fiftieth anniversary, while

"(Bottle) (Poems)" originally appeared as a series of art objects — as fifty single-poem scrolls inserted into various glass bottles" (9). The 'Acknowledgements' also explain that "The Reinventing Wheel" existed first as a performance involving two turntables, two dub plates, and various pre-recorded vinyl. It has been mixed live at venues across

Canada. Each version has its own name and becomes a new piece in its own right. The original live performance version is the 'Cargo Cult Mix.' There is another version for live performance on four turntables arranged with Jason de Couto called the 'Rolling

Wave Mix.' The audio version included with Performance Bond is the 'Ouroboros Mix,' the image of a snake devouring its own tail - a symbol of cyclically, of perpetual recreation, which suggests the creative strength and vitality of the words being offered.

'Rune,' the reader is told, is based both on historical record and on "some factitious elements" (10). These acknowledgements are significant as well in that they emphasize the collaborative nature of the work's creation: the beats for the 'Ourboros Mix' created by Trevor Thompson, the track mastered by Paul Siczek, and the photographs and signs featured as part of the Lost and Found Landmarks shot by Robert Sherrin and designed by Mykol Knighton. This multiple authorship undermines logocentric, univocal narratives - loosening the grip of metanarrative and revealing the potential for creative relationships that often lead to activism and group mobilization. At an appearance with the KalmUnity Vibe Collective ~ a group of artists that performs live improv weekly at

Montreal's Sablo Cafe and invites spoken word artists to layer their words on top of their sounds ~ Compton revealed his shared sense that art can function as a tool of community building and activism. Jaggi Singh of No One is Illegal encouraged readers to check out

Compton's next appearance with Kalmunity, writing that the performance "gives voice to revolution!" Singh, an im/migrant rights activist, connects with Compton's sense of outrage over the treatment of 'Illegalese:' "You can't define human beings as illegal, as exploitable [or] as non-status" said Singh (qtd. Petrescu n.p.). When nearly 1,000 non­ status Algerians living mainly in Montreal faced deportation orders in 2002 at the same time as Canadians were being warned against travel to this war torn nation where 13.1 conditions remained unstable and dangerous, Singh argued that the "system of global apartheid" had been unveiled; "You have to prove that there is a gun to your head or there will be a gun to your head," he said.

From Compton's 'acknowledgements' and the collaboration and inventiveness they speak to, Performance Bond moves directly to the cold and clinical language of the state, providing an excerpt on "Detention" taken from a manual written by Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) to assist officers in enforcing the Immigration and

Refugee Protection Act (IRPA). In even a short excerpt, reference is made to a number of official coded documents that must be dutifully completed by the officer - the Review of

Detention by Officer Form (IMM1439E), the Authority to Release from Detention

(IMM5023B), the Security Deposit form (IMM0514B), the Performance Bond Form

(IMM 1230E) or the (IMM 1259E), and the Identity Information Form (IMM 5007B).

The officer is placed in the powerful position to authorize these forms and the story that will have significant impact on the life of the particular foreign national or permanent resident in question, and yet this power is carefully controlled by the state, as indicated by the variety of forms which serve to direct and limit the interpretive and creative reading practices the officer might otherwise bring to the subject of his reports.

Interestingly, while these forms will bear the name of a particular officer when completed, when left blank they are unauthored, for the state speaks in one, detached, body-less voice. Thus, it cannot be identified (or held accountable). Compton's focus on detention signals the desire to challenge the condition of being 'detained' as it finds expression in the lives of racialized citizens who move through the nation under surveillance and suspicion, conditions that render them unfree. The excerpt from the ENF 132 chapter reveals Compton's interest in the means by which the state establishes 'identity,' his determination to reveal that the criteria of prime importance remains race, and his certainty that the state would struggle to find the terms with which to identify a citizen like himself who defies its preference for rigid categorizations. The excerpt he chooses finishes with the line "the following are some steps that may be taken to establish a person's identity [...]" (12). Significantly, these steps are not mandated or regulated in any particular fashion but rather are "made according to local procedure" (12). The experience of a black man held in a British Columbia detention centre could therefore be very different than that of his counterpart in another province. Thus, the history of local and provincial race relations becomes profoundly relevant in the administration of justice.

Performance Bond does not list the "steps" proposed by the state; the poems serve as an alternative path that leads one away from the impulse to fix histories or identities all together. In contrast, the original manual goes on to state:

The following are some steps that may be taken to establish a person's identity: • photograph and fingerprint the person concerned... • search the CPIC system and the National Crime Information Centre (NCIC) • conduct a paper investigation to locate names and addresses of associates, employers or relatives; • ask for the opinion of an interpreter concerning the dialect employed by the person concerned, and for any observations the interpreter might make; • interview the person concerned on a regular basis; • interview the friends, relatives and co-workers of the person concerned; • have the person concerned interviewed by the embassy of the country of which an officer thinks the person is a citizen (does not apply to person asking for protection). ("ENF"21)

The state's interest in the associates, friends, relatives and co-workers of the suspect positions the multiple references to historical figures throughout Performance Bond as the poet's most relevant relations. The state's need to rely on an interpreter also puts into perspective Compton's deliberate confusion of the English he uses, his reliance on words and speech patterns that frustrate attempts at a 'sound' interpretation. In the end, despite the complicated and doubtful process of establishing someone's identity, officers are only expected to draw conclusions based on shadowy and indefinable "reasonable grounds," so long as they exercise 'sensitivity' and 'sound judgment' throughout ("ENF" 7).

From these dubious and disturbing beginnings in government documents,

Performance Bond arrives at a series of poems that are grouped and titled "Stations," a name that conjures arrivals, departure, transience, connections, but also radio stations - the disembodied voice as well as the voice of a community. "Declaration of the

Halfrican Nation," the first poem following the government word, argues for the courage one can show in the use of language — "my grammar teacher said a semi-/colon is just a gutless colon" (15) — but is concerned mainly with the task of identifying mixed race

Canadians: "one/friend said she's white except/for having this brown skin and some/times she forgets it until a mirror shatters/ that conclusion casting blackward glances" (15). While the gaze of the majority understands her black-ness as inferiority

(looking "blackward" at her), whiteness here is disconnected from skin color, shown to stand in for something other than race - to stand in for the dominant culture more generally. The seeming impossibility of belonging in the nation is revealed in the

"askance processions of belonging" (15) which pass by. Race is worn as an inescapable marker of difference, a mark signaling an 'other' homeland elsewhere, one reflected back to them in other citizens, in every encounter as "mirrors walk/on two legs too sometimes"

(15). Their blackness is reflected back to them as others see it, and in mainstream media misrepresentation which distorts and confuses reality: "there's so many on screen a white acquaintance of mine/ thought the us population was half/ black! / we numb/er a dozen percent, in fact, south/ of the border; in Canada, I really couldn't/ begin to guess our

numbers crunching" (15-16). The prevalence of media manipulated representations on

screen in the United States says little of the lived experience of blackness there, and even

less about the experience in Canada. Compton's assertion that the community lacks shape

or even knowledge of itself, that perhaps this lack of knowledge signals a certain apathy

or "numbness" also implies a weariness with the value of "number crunching" - one of the primary ways in which the state attempts to know or make sense of the community.

Instead of seeking this official record, Compton argues "surely something/ can be put together from the tracts, manifestoes, auto/biographies, ten-point programs, constitutions, and historical claims" (16). He implicitly questions why nothing has yet

come of the many declarations like the one he is staging in "Declaration of the Halfrican

Nation," why the Canadian nation is ushering in only the "latest stage in race management" for example. The many documents demanding or announcing a shift in power dynamics authored by those marginalized by the constitutions and manifestos

defining the hegemonic nation have not come to fruition. And yet, Compton insists that language has enough power to justify continuing the struggle; all that is needed is a new way to put these failed documents to use, to bring them into the public realm and make them heard- "surely something can be put together" - to mix and sample from them perhaps, and write something new, something possible. There are many who share his vision - "I know more than enough who've ex/pressed an interest in dying on the wire"

(16). This phrase - "dying on the wire" - conjures notions of battle lines, electric fences, and war zones. But it also highlights the many invisible barricades that exclude and confine mixed-race individuals within the Canadian nation. The battle and the personal losses these activists might bear would be worth "the victory/ of being an agreed-upon noun" (16). Here, the significance of language as it relates to identity and consciousness, as it names subjects in a manner that determines the legitimacy of their experiences within the nation, remains the focus of Compton's study - the need to locate new terms and means of thinking through complicated belonging and longings. Proper nouns are also the subject of the next poem in the collection, "Afro-Saxon."

The poem focuses its eye on a body with eyes kept lowered "under lids," and the ear pricked, tuned to "hear for fear" (17). The environment — colored in "mirror-smoke grey" — and the natural haze and blur produced by the "smoke/machine, emulating dry/ice" — mirrors the confusion that surrounds the 'afro-saxon' body in a culture that understands black and white as binaries. This body, so loaded with encountered fears of miscegenation, anticipates abuse and suffering: "dancing in the smoke... / eyes/ shut to shut out/ the black light, when you're Christ, / everything looks like a nail" (17). The absence of texts or icons that could address the mixed-race experience is clear in

Compton's reference to Beige Skins, Black Masks, a play on Frantz Fanon's Black Skin,

White Masks. The Afro-Saxon's ability to claim authentic blackness is made all the more difficult in the context of a commodity culture that quickly converts every political statement into the stuff of entertainment. Compton's quip that he needs to read it "before the movie comes out" allows him to explore the notion of the black body as entertainer and site of spectacle. Indeed, poems like 'To Poiter' considers the significance of figures like Sidney Poiter - star of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) ~ "dark, nappy and representative,/ fluent and fine,/ were all of us at once; his, hers, theirs, ours, and mine...// You came to dinner and ate your fill.... You came, they saw, and we got to move to the suburbs" (36). If Compton is a "creation of the Guess Who's Coming to

Dinner? generation/of the post-first-on-screen-interracial-kiss baby boom..../ the

offspring of those flickering images" (36), then his limited sense of belonging in the nation, suggests that while certain black entertainers may have been successful at crossing symbolic thresholds, entering that sacred space of the white American homestead, sitting at the tables of the cherished nuclear family, and — it is implied — also entering the body of whiteness itself through that most cherished emblem of the race, the white woman, - these scenes of civility and hospitality achieve only so much.

In the poem 'Afro-Saxon' Compton also invokes Grace Jones - a model, actress, and singer originally from Jamaica whose height and androgynous style of dress made her body the site of much speculation as to her sexual orientation - signaling the complicated representation and perverse fascination with the black body in mainstream culture. In a photo shoot with Chris Cunningham in the Fall of 2008 for Dazed &

Confused magazine, sixty-year-old Jones posed in the nude for images which

Cunningham then digitally altered, presenting her muscular black body as distorted and unknowable - traits it already carried but that were made explicit with alteration.

According to the tag on the cover of the magazine edition, the shoot was meant to reveal

"the Devil Inside," although where the devil is located - in the viewer that distorts or the body itself — remains unclear. One image registers immediately as a body (hands and a scalp are visible and unmistakable) just as it ceases to be a recognizable body (the majority of the pane is filled with what appears to be at least four backs merged together, the muscles bulging in a monstrous fashion). Running along the border a quotation reads: "I'm part of the darkness. It's hard to get out of it" (Jones n.p.) Another accompanying quotation reads: "I'm still battling against the perception that I'm the devil." Jones' few roles in film signal that her body has been marked as a site of strangeness and fantasy for some time. She played Zula, the Amazon in the 1984 film Conan the Destroyer for example, as well as a vampiric exotic dancer in Vamp (1986) and a transvestite in the film Wolf Girl (2001) who was part of a circus freak show. Compton's reference to Jones and her limited film roles raise questions about the black body as a site of spectacle, the manner in which it is more often than not constructed and read as a threat.

Compton demands a new way of reading in the poem that follows, "[lnx," where the text is buried within and must be carefully extracted from a seemingly unintelligible code. Compton suggests one possible way to read the code as "equilibri/um of white noise to black vinyl" (24). These symbols can be understood to represent the "white noise" that surrounds and often drowns out genuine black utterances, such as those that can sometimes find expression through musical forms on "black vinyl." The symbols can also be read as a nod towards graffiti writing, since they do at times take on a legible resemblance to English script, if the reader has a certain willingness to stretch the imagination. Since "the words of the prophets are written in graf' (106), deciphering

"[lnx" holds a particular promise of enlightenment. This sort of reading practice - whether it involves retuning the ear to locate black expression silenced by the hegemony of white narratives or adjusting the eye to recognize in other scripts the potential for meaning-making - is in either case liberatory. For example: "_T here is n o £ A 2 E ?

%oX>i_U'M6 + |-|er/U[kauf|-jen$i9|fY>" (24). A careful reading of this line reveals the possibility to draw out a phrase: "There is no mother fucking authenticity." Ironically, the tentative act and unsure 'translation' of these symbols confirms the truth of the statement that surfaces and yet the pleasure in locating this reading undermines the desirability of locating any static or sure statement of authenticity. In place of critical reading practices that value ambiguities and complexities, black writing has been misread and misappropriated - for example, by "the white DJ [who] handles/ fondles b/lack English (feelin that)" (24). Here, the word

'fondles' suggests abuse and violation that is somehow casual, trivializing, and even disinterested. This offhanded assault on black English empties it of meaning, renders it lacking - as indicated by the line break disrupting "b/lack." The reference to 'feelin that' in the brackets calls up a familiar phrase spoken by DJ's during performances - a call to the crowd that, in theory, establishes a connection between the DJ, the music, and the audience - the sense of physical participation and feeling the music is meant to engender.

In this context, however, the feeling elicited in those black audience members is one of having been violated. Nonetheless, the poem witnesses the emergence of black utterance through the press of white noise, via a parable where "G/od was bored and decided he would fuck with H/is old school partner Jazz Itself: ...... 'Yo,' God said, 'Jazz It/self, you think you're so cool, but what do you / think you'd do if I made it so that there were n/o instruments left in the world except the bag/ pipes? You think you so bad, but what would yo/u do if I did you like that?'" In response, "Jazz Itself s Children spoke up....

'That's no kid of question, God,' said one oft/he Children, 'Jazz Itself would know exactly w/hat to do' ... And that child answered plain, right up in/ God's face, 'We'd just shift its name around... And then they/ did let loose with many new names for the bag/pipes, so that verily the names multiplied and/ were abundant" (25-26). As the children of Jazz Itself— read as contemporary hip hop artists who have inherited this culture and its expressive forms ~ start to exercise their creativity and inventiveness, making up their own language and ways of working with what is already in circulation, they reclaim the power to name from the dominant culture, talking back and challenging existing scripts, authored by whiteness, by the author-God. As such, the code starts to disappear. In fact, by the end there are eleven uninterrupted lines of intelligible script.

Performance Bondpresents the bodies of racialized citizens and im/migrants for examination, exposing the state's desire to own the means of representation, the desire to fix identities of 'others.' These poems question the authority of state officials to exercise

'common sense' and identify others as welcome or suspect, the authority to detain.

Compton's work stands as another way of imagining a performance bond - one that alternatively brings into being a bond between reader and text, between settler and other, between migrant and official but just as frequently one that denies any chance of such a smooth execution of 'justice' that the ENF Chapter 20 proposes when it describes the performance bond as an alternative to detention. The question of who can be legitimate co-signers of such a bond is raised, for example, of which hand/signature is deemed to have more integrity than the suspect hand of the foreign national or permanent resident.

Larissa Lai has argued that minority writers have a new kind of silence to break in an era of globalization: "The question becomes how the racialized writer can break the silence of the past without empowering the media machine to replicate the same trope in a new, more virulent (because sanctioned by the stamp of authenticity) form. The deep infiltration of capital in the problematic of representation puts more pressure than ever on the question of strategy" ("Global Spillage" n.p.). While Compton's work has been well received, he has acknowledged the potential for tokenism in the Can Lit reading community, the possibility for his work to be drained of its radical potential, by tellingly beginning his self- interview with the question, "So how do you like being an ethnic writer?" Compton replies: "It's all right. I mean, the up side is every body wants to know what's going on inside the ethnic head, you know, like what's the word from the subaltern, so to speak" (80). Performance Bond refuses to provide easily consumable catch phrases; instead, the reader enters a genre-bending and shape-shifting text that draws attention to the desire for recognizable token black figures. In "Backlight

Compensation Blues," Compton worries about the "Uhura factor" - referring to the figure Nyota Uhura played by Nichelle Nichols on Star Trek, the only black character on the show. Citing the "Franklin Doctrine," in relation to "the black-faces-in-high-places policy," Compton questions whether official commitment to "tolerance" such as that championed by Benjamin Franklin translates into more than surface level representations.

This tokenism is part of the commodification of black culture, the manner in which hip hop has become "black Canada's CNN," disseminating suspect narratives in support of state-sanctioned definitions of blackness (102) and black slang has become

"the new cash crop" (102). As an artist operating in a world where "every impulse or idea undergoes an instantaneous conversion into merchandise" (Henighan 10) and where the post-colonial cultural and literary Other "appears very marketable" (Maver 2),

Compton confronts the commodification of black culture, reminding readers "of the ways in which capitalism infiltrates and bonds us all to various non-human qualities masquerading as human existence" (Walcott "Against Institution" 22). The possibility that hard-won rights for equality during the 60s could be eclipsed by the 'tolerance' of black culture only for its entertainment value — "swivel Rights/ (the Great Pelvic Shift),/ channeling: awopbopaloobop/alopbamboom" (39) — leads Compton to warn his peers,

"we have to watch ourselves... the ventriloquist act. The limbo. Zombification. / Dancing in the low ceilinged cargo hold" (106).

Always mindful of the "infiltration of capital," Compton writes, "I shake my rattle to the global click track: product/ product/ metronomic/ ethnic nationalist manna crackles/ out of satellites like/ prestidigitation. All my fellow postsufferers/ at sea in the new lingua franca, the stutter: we are a cargo cult/ of reception" (110). Globalization and commodification has rendered 'the stutter' the common trade language - a half articulated struggle to make oneself understood. With this loss comes "the packaging of our trauma, blood, / our bastardizing of the scripts from the metropole, the black ones; / these are the ready-made blues in the backwoods, backwards" (110).

If an utterance from a voice long silenced is understood to have political weight and consequence, it is useful to imagine the literal unsettling of space that that utterance creates, the actual sound waves sent vibrating through the air. Spoken word, spells, incantations, speeches, story telling - these performances have a different impact according to the theory of performative language, a different potential to unsettle and disrupt, to push for social change. The privileging of logocentrism in Western philosophy has meant the trivialization of orature, which was never considered a worthy opponent against the written word, the inscribed record. When Compton therefore set out to compile his anthology Bluesprint, his choice to gather together black literature and orature was political and pointed. Compton's own sense of the power of voice is clear from his many commitments to live performances, and his choice to include an audio compact disc along with the published text of Performance Bond. The means by which this audio recording was made and the reason for its inclusion becomes the subject of a poem in "Rune" entitled "Veve" where Analogue and Digital are staged in conversation on a bench in Vancouver. Even a cursory understanding of the differences between analog and digital recording reveals that the shift from analog to digital acts as complex metaphor for the way in which dominant historical accounts are recorded and the way that identity is defined by the state. The difference between these methods also signals something of the desire behind Compton's inclusion of an audio recording of one of many existing and possible versions of the "The Reinventing Wheel."

An analog recording is made when the unique quality of the impression made by the sound wave is captured in the physical recording by a transducer like a microphone which converts the air pressure variations into an electrical signal where the current is directly representational of the variations in air pressure caused by the original utterance.

This electrical current is then converted once more into a physical imprint, a 'record' of the sound that is analogous to the speech act that created it. In contrast, the development of digital recording technology converted the physical properties of the sound into a sequence of numbers which can be stored and read back time and again for ease of reproduction. The sound is broken down into a collection of discrete parts. Whereas an analog recording exists on an infinite number of levels with an infinite possibility for fluctuation and change, digital signals are quantized - they have a precise and limited number of possible values with no room in between these values for slight variations

(because they are rounded off). Digital recordings arc preferred for this very reason, to ensure a high quality recording with precise pitch and sound. And yet as a metaphor for the means in which a state attempts to locate and categorize individuals, to round their experiences into binaries and deny the 'grey' areas of variation is deeply problematic. As

Compton writes in "01001001" "the language of nation rounds/down. Take nation/ to its

last and the language will pass you in/ or out" (49). The reality of "Us// and them and the actual, meat-world/ cleaving of people: / prison; reservations; concentration; refugee.

When 'you're either//with us or against us' and nothing/ in between/ is real, then those/ in the seams/ between peoples are sealed/ in punctuationist ordnance/ and barbed wire

script" (49). The desire to produce uncomplicated readings of claimants ~ people that often carry complex histories and often very little imprinted on paper — results in the legislation of "barbed wire script" which criminalizes their complexity. The call for human rights is drowned out by the "chorus" chanting "You're either with us or against us" (50). The examination of "passports, status cards, ID, / and accents at the checkpoint" underscores the racialized reading of migrants as they pass (49). The movement of suspect migrants between "the border and the cell" "makes [full, rounded, complex, historicized] people [racialized and othered] bodies" (50). This is the very impulse "to mince biographies/ to some exact phrases, some exact and toxic genealogy" the Dionne

Brand confronts in Inventory (17). If history could be analogous to lived experience, it would be far messier — there might be "feedback" and certain parts that would ring out of tune. Each new recording would be subject to subtle variations and shifts. The truth would exist somewhere along a continuum of vibrating sounds -the space would be available for an infinite number of voices and so the number of voices would be amplified. It would be a cacophony of sound, wholly incomprehensible to our current way of listening. In spite of its fierce critique of Canadian immigration and multicultural policy,

Compton's Performance Bond ultimately proves to be work notable for its sense of possibility and hope. When Compton writes "so let it be written, so let it be spoke. / coming up with the we'll, spoking it down" (22), the homophone between "we'll" and

"wheel" suggests that the invention of the wheel as a means towards change and development is comparable to the potential for united action and determination, with the contracted "we will" standing as a declaration that moves the poem forward and brings people together: "coming to/gether. fresh. Pouring coils of water, flesh, come/ing together, and mesh/ing rupture. Coming and say/ing, 'oooooooo.'" (22). The poems do not seek the "promised land" but direct readers instead towards "the eye-to-eye: a level playing field/ as good as Utopia" ("Performance Bond" 47). Racialized bodies might move "unneautrally" through the national imaginary in pursuit of this goal, "but [they] move, still. Groove/ to the rhythm ruthlessly" ("Performance Bond" 45-46). Harnessing

Braithwaite's "tidalectics," "waves of molten/memory sing/out/side/in/to the whole hope of shattering" dominant narratives, and exposing "the improvising/ beneath calligraphy's myth" (85). While black artists may necessarily feel a certain disjuncture between their message and the medium (of English) — "You think the words inside our heads are a // part of us? Like the phantom limb, ghost bone, or breath chiasmus? And what's what, when the whole language is // versus us?" 934) — it is possible to accept the pain of this loss, this phantom limb, and to carve out a space for communication: "DJ, / speak with your hands; // address us" (34). Perhaps communication is key to this work — dialogue, rather than expression. The emphasis on collaboration in the "Acknowledgements" is mirrored in the "call and response" of jazz and hip hop forms. By connecting with "the griot in [his] bloodstream" (102), harnessing the abundance that black culture can offer -

"the Nile, / like the culture, / overflows" (101), Compton finds hope in the "immortality/ in the track. A snake/ chasing its tail. The groove/ moving the text" (103). The groove of the text moves the reader as well, out of her complacency and misconceptions of the nation. The project is not about rewriting history, it is not meant to fill in silences or uncover lost heroes. Rather it works to make visible the fact that history is not static, that the world is always changing. As Geraldine Diamond explains in Compton's fictive ethnography: "I never balked at the idea of the whole world changing. In fact, have you ever held a piece of mercury in your hand? That's the whole world right there. Slippery like that. You will never altogether have it, but there it is, in your hands, the whole world.

You can try to hold it or you can wonder at its motion. I'd like to think I've always chosen wondering over holding" ("Rune" 143). CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION

The title of my thesis — "Jam a settler/I am uneasy:" Rethinking Citizenship, the Nation and the 'Good' of Contemporary Canadian Poetry — speaks to the measure of anxiety I feel towards my own Canadian citizenship (especially in light of disturbing policy trends taking shape since 9/11) while also revealing the defensive impulse that directed this research in part, a desire to 'make a case' for a literary education against the widespread skepticism and even blatant devaluation of literary study that I have encountered from representatives of other faculties throughout my career as an undergraduate and graduate student. This thesis took up 'the nation' and 'citizenship' as two keywords of considerable consequence and put forth one important answer to Northrop Frye's question: "What good is the study of literature?" I argued that literature — and poetry in particular, where "the distance between the reader and the text is much shorter" (Brand,

"Notes on a Poem") — has a unique capacity to affect and provoke the reader, fostering a sense of "literary citizenship" and building the "critical citizenry" necessary to counter increasingly ambiguous and even vexed conceptualizations of the responsibilities and limitations attendant on national citizenship. In "Art and the Teaching of Love" (2005)

Didier Maleuvre writes that "the sort of education fostered by art... is less concerned with delivering information about the world than teaching us about how to stand in relation to it, how to find our place in it, and live with it: through art we do not seek to master the world so much as become its denizens. It is a teaching of love" (77-78).

While the poetry of Brand, Thammavongsa and Compton and the political contexts it calls upon portray a rather bleak portrait of the contemporary global capitalist order — the experience of reading this poetry ultimately proves to be a hopeful endeavor, "a teaching of love." There is a sense of possibility embedded in the shifting of sense

experience, which is facilitated by these poets and their attentive representations of often-

overlooked subjects. Stewart writes in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002) that

"[t]he task of aesthetic production and reception in general is to make visible, tangible, and audible the figures of persons, whether such persons are expressing the particulars of

sense impressions or the abstractions of reason or the many ways such particulars and abstractions enter into relations with one another. As metered language, language that retains and projects the force of individual sense experience and yet reaches toward intersubjective meaning, poetry sustains and transforms the threshold between individual

and social existence" (1-2). It is this potential for intimate understanding that is desperately needed in a world where we are "so suspended, defenseless" {Inventory 10).

In Land to Light On, Dionne Brand writes of those who have survived "the death of [their] politics;" she attributes this loss to the perceived gap between literary study and the 'real politic' existing outside the hallowed halls of the university (15). In her disillusionment, she addresses "all the independents who wasted time arguing and being

superior pulling out dictionaries and referred journals" and declares: "let me say that all the classrooms should be burned/and all this paper abandoned" (15). Like Compton, who turns away from those academics and policy makers who sit "in barricaded comfort, behind armchair palisades" {Performance 32), Brand expresses anxiety about the value of literature and the ethics of literary study in this 'ravaged' world: "We are not revolutionaries... [We] jump around the world in our brains... all the wars we've pried open and run our tongues over like dangerous tin cans" {Land to Light On 23). And yet,

Fred Wah remains confident that the imaginative efforts of writers and literary critics are absolutely crucial insofar as they can work in opposition to nationalist discourse that

"continually attempts to expropriate difference into its own consuming narrative" (qtd.

Wiens 81). In her recent study of Canadian poetry and what she calls "literary activism"

Pauline Butling asks, "What is an activist poetics?" (244). CanLit remains a site of struggle and contestation, as contemporary poets "interrogate seamless definitions of both national and ethnic identity... the complexities of cultural difference" and explore "the ambiguities of identity within a broader Canadian framework" (Saul 5, 6).

For these reasons, Cynthia Sugars understands an arts education to be an

"intellectual enterprise of consequence in the world" (15). As my own research makes evident, literary analysis can facilitate a discussion and reevaluation of citizenship in today's transnational world. Brydon argues for the potential of literary analysis to "forge international connections beyond those associated with older notions of 'universalism' and new notions of 'globalization,'" employing Zygmunt Bauman's understanding of globalization as "what is happening to us all" rather than what "we wish or hope to do"

("Cross Talk" 60). Seeking a means of reclaiming agency — "a reclamation that can no longer be claimed at the national level alone" — Brydon calls upon Spivak's "critical intimacy" as an "empathetic mode" of transnational literacy which must be "directed to the task of understanding new modes of globalizing power" ("Cross Talk" 61-62).

In his work "Poetics and the Politics of Globalization" (2007) Imre Szeman asks,

What possibilities does globalization open up for literary studies, and more specifically, for our understanding of the politics of the literary today? Is it possible to still imagine a social function for literary studies in an era dominated by visual spectacle, the triumph of the private, and the apparent dissolution of the public sphere? To speak of the opening up of new possibilities and even new political functions for literary criticism and poetics today might seem quixotic at best... But if we attend carefully to globalization and consider how the practice of literary criticism figures into the contemporary social and political landscape, it seems to me that some unexpected political possibilities emerge. (148)

The unexpected political import of literature is rooted in the fact that globalization is "on one level 'real' and has 'real' effects, [but] it is also decisively and importantly rhetorical, metaphoric, and even fictional - reality given a narrative shape and logic" (Szeman 150).

While no "global style or global form" of literature or poetry has emerged (Szeman 151), this apparent disconnect between globalization and the aesthetic reveals a significant misnomer about globalization ~ that it has had an even and homogenizing impact across the globe. If globalization now defines the "shape of the present and the future," then it also determines "the role played by culture in this future" (Szeman 153). This thesis concerns itself foremost with the role of literary works as protest, literary works as events, "something many have acknowledged, but the implications of which few have pursued" (Attridge 2).

The poets I have studied in this thesis "leap into new territory" by "manipulating

... familiar materials" (Attridge 20): Brand employs the stuff of a nightly television news report; Thammavongsa chooses a scrapbook, insects, fruits, and natural elements;

Compton reworks existing documents, genres, geography, and historical landmarks. All three poets "exploit their discontinuities, press at their limits, and extend their capacities," finding, as a result of their efforts, works of "startling newness emerging" (Attridge 20).

Most important are the new conceptualizations of human relations and human rights that emerge from these poems. Judith Butler articulates in compelling terms the promise of critical reading practices that can

return us to the human where we do not expect to find it, in its frailty and at the limits of its capacity to make sense. We would have to interrogate the emergence and vanishing of the human at the limits of what we can know, what we can hear, what we can see, and what we can sense. This might prompt us, affectively, to reinvigorate the intellectual projects of critique, of questioning, of coming to understand the difficulties and demands of cultural translation and dissent, and to create a sense of the public in which oppositional voices are not feared, degraded or dismissed, but valued for the instigation to a sensate democracy they occasionally perform. (151)

While Canadian immigration policymakers continue to "stress the pivotal role of cultural

citizenship in social integration - not across national borders, but within them" (Stone et

al. 108), what is needed is a means to promote models of "intercultural competence"

(Stone et al. 115) or what Butler calls "coming to understand the difficulties and demands

of cultural translation and dissent" (151). While official multiculturalism has proven inept

at meeting this task, an "articulatory poetics" can reveal "how discourses and social

formations are themselves articulated" (Derksen 94). The study of poetry, the reading practices it demands and teaches, can destabilize the accepted hierarchy of multiple

citizenship statuses in Canada and provoke a rethinking and refashioning of this

increasingly significant and challenging concept. 151

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