Shawinigan Handshake

            On Tuesday morning I finished re-memorizing Serge Gainsbourg's “Poupée de Sire, Poupée de Son”, which is one of the first Gainsbourg songs I learned. I was surprised at how easy it was to get the lyrics back into my head after a few years, so good on my memory, though the song was probably hanging around in there in the shadows anyway.

            I had an appointment that afternoon with George Elliot Clarke so I took an early siesta. I got to University College about fifteen minutes early. I stood outside the Senior Commons Room and the building was stifling hot, so I opened the side door and leaned on it to cool off until 15:15. When George arrived he was only one minute late but he thought he was later than that and apologized.

            I showed him my last two essays and asked him to point out the writing flaws that caused me to drop to a B+ from an A- on the latest paper. He assured me that my writing was good and that I almost had an A- but that there were just a few more peccadilloes and that if I'd had more commas in place I would have gotten an A-. He said that to get better than an A- I should just keep doing what I'm doing. He liked my phrase, “ … moitié-moitié melange of Black and White …” I told him that learning to write essays is like getting used to dancing in a very tight suit. He laughed and told me he liked that comparison.

            I've been watching the Leonard Cohen documentary, “Bird on a Wire”, which was shot during his 1972 tour of Israel and Europe. It shows Cohen in a much darker light because he was going through a personal crisis at that time. I recommended it to George. I assume it’s available in some video stores.

            We talked about the last class next week and he told me that he was going to allow any poets that wanted to read one poem. I said that I might read my translation of “Un Canadien Errant” which I’d brought in for the second class but hadn’t read because we were behind in time. I suggested that I could bring my guitar and he threw open his arms enthusiastically and told me to by all means bring my guitar. That means I definitely can’t come late to the last class like I have for all the other paper hand-in dates. George stood up to shake my hand when I left.

            It was way too early to go to the classroom and since I was in a good mood and had a fair amount of energy I decided to ride to the bank, to the Freshco in my neighbourhood and then drop the groceries off at my place before heading for class. That would save me from having to do all of that on the way home after school.

            On the way home I passed the big construction site at Peter and Queen where for decades all the venders sold their crafts. It’s definitely dug a big hole into the character of Queen West.

            On my way into the supermarket, a guy standing outside called my name. He looked familiar but I couldn’t quite place him until he told me his name. It was David Fontaine, one of my daughter’s teachers when she was in Grade 2. We chatted for a while about my efforts to learn French and his to learn Spanish. We also talked about French songwriters. He was already familiar with Serge Gainsbourg but hadn’t heard of Boris Vian, so he said he’d look him up.

            I bought grapes, oranges, tomatoes, avocados, cucumbers, sun dried tomatoes and two jugs of juice. On the way out, someone else called out my name. It was Margaret, one of my fairly regular yoga students at PARC from three years ago. The first thing she told me is that she didn’t know what I was doing but my energy is amazing right now. She asked if I was still teaching the class and I told her that I’d stopped after two months of no one coming at all. She shared that she went back to visit Portugal a while ago and had a great visit. Since she uses a walker I wondered how she got around while she was there. She explained that she has walking poles and so she was able to go to cafes and socialize but the time was way too short before she had to return to Canada. We chatted for a good ten minutes but then I hugged her and left.

            Because of all of the conversations I’d had, after putting my groceries away I only had three minutes to spare before it was time to leave again for class. I had a lot less energy climbing Brock Avenue than I did coming home on Queen Street. Because of riding downtown, home again, back downtown and finally home, this day would have the most bike riding I’d done all winter.

            I spent more than half an hour with my laptop writing about my earlier meeting with George until he showed up to begin our last formal class. George announced that for our final class next week everyone was invited to bring one poem to read and that after each person reads he would read one of his own and then we’d have a movie.

            He also stated that if we wanted our essays or projects back we needed to provide an SASE, that is a self addressed, stamped envelope, which he pronounces “Sassy!” because the office no longer holds onto our papers. Since he’s encountered students in the last few years that have never sent anything by mail, he drew a diagram so they would know how to address and stamp an envelope. He added that if any of us couldn’t get an envelope in time then if we would just give him our address then he would pay for the envelope and postage.

            Our final book of the course was “Tell: poems for a girlhood” by Soraya Peerbaye (pronounced Sare eye ah Peer bye yay). George said that it’s easily comparable to the other books we’ve studied in the second half.

            Soraya speaks both French and English but her mother tongue is French and George wanted us to guess what countries other than Canada have both French and English as the official language. I guessed the Congo but he said no and I see now that the official language of both the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo is French only. George said that Cameroon’s two official languages are French and English, but the other, where Soraya was born, is Mauritius, where also was once found the dodo bird. Many Canadian embassies are staffed by Mauritians because they are fluent in both of our official languages. English is the official language of government, French is the cultural language and the language of the marketplace is Creole. The country flies a rainbow flag that symbolizes its diverse culture. When the British conquered the island they did not suppress the French language and since a couple of decades after that they abolished slavery they needed cheap labour to work the plantations so they brought in a lot of people from India. A student piped in that there is also a significant Chinese population there. George added that Mauritius has the highest number of Miss Universe winners, suggesting that this is because of the multiracial mixture in their genes, but my later research could not find a single Mauritian having been crowned Miss Universe. I offered that there must have been an indigenous Mauritian language but George informed me that it was totally unpopulated when the first Europeans arrived. George told us the dodo bird became extinct because it was delicious and stupid. According to Wikipedia though, humans only indirectly killed off the dodo by destroying their habitat and by introducing dogs, cats and pigs to the island.

            Soraya writes about not feeling racialized until arriving in Canada when she was a teenager. She was othered and a victim of othering. A section of her book entitled “Who You Were” may be autobiographical and has several poems about a suicide attempt.

            Somehow George got associatively sidetracked to talking about the FBI warnings against copying at the beginnings of US videos and challenged, that if they tried to cross the border to arrest us the RCMP would stop them. I reminded him that the CIA did cross the border to experiment on Canadians with LSD, but George argued that was before our current prime minister was in power.

            Most of Perrbaye’s book has poems about the murder of Reena Virk in 1997 in Saanich, British Columbia and of the subsequent trial of her teenage killers. Eight kids participated and even more looked on. There were four trials and Soraya’s book uses realism and creativity with the trial language.

            George mentioned that there was also a book about the event, called “The Lynching of Reena Virk” by Tessa Chakrabarty. What I found is that it’s actually an article entitled “Reckless Eyeballing: Being Reena in Canada” by Tess Chakkalakal, which declares that Reena’s murder was a lynching. I was surprised by this because I’d always though that lynching referred specifically to hanging. George corrected me that a lynching is any mob killing as punishment. I see now that the word comes from an American Revolutionary named Charles Lynch, who served as an unofficial judge against loyalists.

            George said that “Tell” is also a kind of “Types of Canadian Women” with a racial element addressed. This is poetry that seeks the truth like Dirksen and Riccio. Trials are searches for the truth and the whole book is a kind of victim impact statement on behalf of Reena. Some of the descriptions are visceral and grisly. In the suicide poems she is specifically channelling Sylvia Plath. The poet is called to witness.

            For the third time in a row, George made his argument for putting George Bush and Tony Blair on trial at the Hague for war crimes and repeated that all he’d need to testify against them is a stack of Globe and Mail newspapers. He affirmed again that he would like to see them behind bars for the rest of their lives because he’s against the death penalty, though an argument could be made for it in this case.

                Crime shows the fault lines of society by magnifying class on social dysfunctions. He cited members of the Sûreté du Quebec raping indigenous women in the north. Crime is how we learn about power and how the underclass gets it. Sometimes only a criminal trial can dredge up social information as to how and why a crime happens.

                George told us that when he was in Brazil he was robbed by a Black, Brown and White trio that yanked his gold chain from his neck and ran away. He ran after them shouting “Cowards!” but he was glad they didn’t come back and beat him up.

            The Marquis de Sade wrote that crime should be permitted because it was a way for the poor to acquire property.

            In the 1980s a Canadian senator went to the police to make a complaint and was arrested for disturbing the peace.

            “Judge a society by its prisons.” – Dostoyevsky. George has visited prisoners in Kingston.

            The book uses random patterns of lines, showing the influence of Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” as well as TISH and the Black Mountain Poets. There is also imagism.

            The first poem we looked at was “Autopsy”. The entire book is an autopsy on the martyrdom of Reena Virk. Martyr is Greek for witness. Reena also fits the definition of a scapegoat, which takes on the sins of the community that killed her. Someone pointed out that Reena was also a Jehovah’s Witness.

            During the break I told George about being arrested at the age of eighteen when Toronto police officers planted drugs on me. He asked if I disputed it in court and I answered that my lawyer assured me that I would go to jail unless I pleaded guilty. I had a good job and a girlfriend that I was living with and I didn’t want to lose that so I lied and said that I was guilty.

            We talked about the legalization of pot next year. George said that he’d tried some marijuana muffins once but nothing happened. I told him that one has to build up sensitivity to pot.

            After the break we returned to “Autopsy”. There is an interplay between the poet’s descriptions and the court reports that is very Canadian. Peerbaye found poetry in the prosaic. I affirmed that I found the attempts to make poems with the technical language of the Reena Virk case to be contrived and distant but that the poems in the section, “Who We Were” are actually quite beautiful and tactile because it feels like the poet is writing from her own experience. Neither George nor anyone else agreed, with some arguing that the coldness and contrivedness of the language was necessary for effect.

            George said the book channels various cases of drowning in literature such as the death of Ophelia in Hamlet. There is also Li Po, who drowned after drinking too much nice rice wine and then tried to embrace the moon in the water. As they would say in the deep south of the United States, “Po’ Li Po!” Another literary drowning is the suicide of Virginia Woolf. Milton’s “Lycidas” and T. S. Eliot’s “Death by Water” from “The Wasteland”. George mentioned Delmore Schwartz as well, but I found out he died of a heart attack. He additionally brought up James Dickey’s poem, “Falling”, which is an elegy to a flight attendant who was sucked out of a plane in flight and fell to her death. “Tell” is also an elegy.

            He got sidetracked again to tell us about participating in the Canadian Geographical Society national bird debate. He said that since he is not an expert on birds he had to bring his poetic powers to play. He defended the black-capped chickadee and attacked the loon as being a psychotic viper and a tormented tarantula. I asked what bird won and George claimed it was the whiskey jack, but the website says it was the grey jay.

            Peerbaye’s descriptions are cinematic. Some of it is almost unpoetic. There are certain points where she adds French to stand as a counterpoint to testimony.

George helped her with the editing and asked her to read “Introduction to the Introduction to Wang Wei”, which uses deconstructionism mixed with several other diverse literary techniques and forms. She modulates between registers of speech and when she brings in French it is implicitly autobiographical, and a violent bilingualism. 

We looked at “Tendre la Gorge” which is partially a found poem.

Perhaps the word “gorge”, which means “throat” reminded George of former Prime Minister Chretien’s “Shawinigan handshake” when he grabbed a protester by the throat and threw him to the ground. I had gotten that incident mixed up with the home invasion at the prime minister’s residence in which a mentally ill man decided to try to assassinate Chretien. They locked themselves in the bedroom while brandishing an Inuit sculpture of a loon with which to hit him if he broke through. Of the handshake, George said that Chretien’s explanation to the press was an example of unintended free verse: “Some people came my way … and I had to go, so if you’re in my way …” George added that it helped that he had dark glasses on when he did it, which added to the cinematic effect.

We looked at the section “Who You Were”, which is prosaic, expository and giving of evidence. In the poem, “Skin”, the prose moves plainly forward. The image of the word “Paki” spelled in the snow compels the narrator to perfect the English oppressors in order to fit in. The irony is that she was probably richer than those that tried to treat her as third class.

George told us that when he was studying for his PHD in Kingston he wrote his thesis in one month. I don’t know much about it, but that sounds pretty impressive. He was on his way to the A&P one day when a black car slowed down and the guys inside shouted “Nigger!” He ran after them with a rock and threw it, but he was glad he missed because they probably would have beaten him up. George is one of the few people from his community in Nova Scotia to have earned a doctorate.

I read the poem, “Safety”. The line, “Nothing, I didn’t, I’m not” in response to questions about an attempted suicide are self-annihilations in themselves.

I thought George said that the word “tell” is Arabic in origin but it’s Germanic.

As we were packing up, George asked to clarify that I was bringing my guitar next time and he seemed glad that I was. Of course, he hasn’t heard me play.