A Really Good Brown Girl

by Marilyn Dumont

  making a late night phone call

  from a closing Greyhound station

  seven years ago you were accused

  of stealing dark glasses;

  you always were lean and hungry

  a tall thin Indian going nowhere

  it was when you thought

  you could beat your way through hell,

  instead you escaped

  down a braided bedsheet

  and never stopped letting go

  WHITE NOISE

  * * *

  HALF HUMAN / HALF DEVIL (HALFBREED) MUSE

  shutting off

  a dripping faucet so there is no

  leak, no leak, not a drop

  my eyes want to push out, out

  through mind-skin, arms and legs are propelled

  through numb air, words writhe, wrists flare escaping

  numbness, no sound, no sound

  no movement, stuck, a blank

  wound in a rope ball, tight, hard

  spun, a drill bit piercing

  earth, whir of steel exhaling rock

  dust, drill bit biting, dog

  gnawing bone, gripping ivory

  hankering down on, grinding

  giving up to giving over

  lurch, lurching laconic

  dance, drum rattle

  gangly movement, offbeat, arm

  bent over head, leg

  straight out, head twisted and shift

  of body to next feral contortion

  animal skin taut, blood

  paint, ochre skin, ash smell

  pebbles encased trapped

  in sound, pebbles rasp

  against thin dry skin

  a herd of rattles overtakes me

  LETTER TO SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD

  Dear John: I’m still here and halfbreed,

  after all these years

  you’re dead, funny thing,

  that railway you wanted so badly,

  there was talk a year ago

  of shutting it down

  and part of it was shut down,

  the dayliner at least,

  ‘from sea to shining sea,’

  and you know, John,

  after all that shuffling us around to suit the settlers,

  we’re still here and Métis.

  We’re still here

  after Meech Lake and

  one no-good-for-nothin-Indian

  holdin-up-the-train,

  stalling the ‘Cabin syllables / Nouns of settlement,

  /. . . steel syntax [ and ] / The long sentence of its exploitation’1

  and John, that goddamned railroad never made this a great nation,

  cause the railway shut down

  and this country is still quarreling over unity,

  and Riel is dead

  but he just keeps coming back

  in all the Bill Wilsons yet to speak out of turn or favour

  because you know as well as I

  that we were railroaded

  by some steel tracks that didn’t last

  and some settlers who wouldn’t settle

  and it’s funny we’re still here and callin ourselves halfbreed.

  * * *

  1 F. R. Scott, “Laurentian Shield.”

  STILL UNSAVED SOUL

  If I hear one more word

  about your Christian God

  I’m gonna howl

  I’m gonna crawl outta my ‘heathen’

  skin and trick you

  into believing I am the Virgin

  Mary and take you bed.

  If I hear one more line

  about your white church

  I’m gonna start sitting and dancing

  with all my ‘false gods’

  in a giveaway dance and honour

  you with all the ‘unclean’ sheets from my bed.

  If I hear one more blessed thought

  or witness one more holy act

  I’m gonna throw up

  thirty-five years of communion hosts

  from this still unsaved soul.

  FIREFLIES

  1. I have since reconsidered Eliot

  and the Great White Way of writing English

  standard that is

  the Great White Way

  has measured, judged and assessed me all my life

  by its

  lily-white words

  its picket-fence sentences

  and manicured paragraphs

  one wrong sound and you’re shelved in the Native Literature section

  resistance writing

  a mad Indian

  unpredictable

  on the war path

  native ethnic protest

  the Great White Way could silence us all

  if we let it

  it’s had its hand over my mouth since my first day of school

  since Dick and Jane, ABCs and fingernail checks

  syntactic laws: use the wrong order or

  register and you’re a dumb Indian

  dumb, drunk or violent

  my father doesn’t read or write

  the King’s English says he’s

  dumb but he speaks Cree

  how many of you speak Cree?

  correct Cree not correct English

  grammatically correct Cree

  is there one?

  2. is there a Received Pronunciation of Cree, is there

  a Modern Cree Usage?

  the Chief’s Cree not the King’s English

  as if violating God the Father and standard English

  is like talking back(wards)

  as if speaking the devil’s language is

  talking back

  back(words)

  back to your mother’s sound, your mother’s tongue, your mother’s language

  back to that clearing in the bush

  in the tall black spruce

  3. near the sound of horses and wind

  where you sat on her knee in a canvas tent

  and she fed you bannock and tea

  and syllables

  that echo in your mind now, now

  that you can’t make the sound

  of that voice that rocks you and sings you to sleep

  in the devil’s language.

  FOR BRUCE, THE NIGHT WE SAT STUDYING CREE

  Cree Language Structures and Common Errors in English bookend

  my life. From somewhere between the two, I take a book down;

  it opens graciously inviting me to, ‘take my shoes off and

  come in for tea.’

  I am an unexpected guest but I stay for supper and

  as the evening lengthens I am offered the sofa but

  “ahhh,” I say, “I’d feel displaced tomorrow if I stayed, but

  thank you.”

  We fill the awkward air for one another, using

  the leftover Scrabble pieces of conversation,

  cover the grocery list of conventional partings and

  orchestrate the last agreed upon “bye.”

  I close the book jacket and

  slip it back into its empty space on the shelf.

  CIRCLE THE WAGONS

  There it is again, the circle, that goddamned circle, as if we thought in circles, judged things on the merit of their circularity, as if all we ate was bologna and bannock, drank Tetley tea, so many times ‘we are’ the circle, the medicine wheel, the moon, the womb, and sacred hoops, you’d think we were one big tribe, is there nothing more than the circle in the deep structure of native literature? Are my eyes circles yet? Yet I feel compelled to incorporate something circular into the text, plot, or narrative structure because if it’s linear then that proves that I’m a ghost and that native culture really has vanished and what is all this fuss about appropriation anyway? Are my eyes round yet? There are times when I feel that if I don’t have a circle or the number four or legend in my poetry, I am lost, just a fading urban Indian caught in all the trappings of Doc Martens, cappuccinos and foreign fi
lms but there it is again orbiting, lunar, hoops encompassing your thoughts and canonizing mine, there it is again, circle the wagons . . .

  LEATHER AND NAUGHAHYDE

  So, I’m having coffee with this treaty guy from up North and we’re laughing at how crazy ‘the mooniyaw’ are in the city and the conversation comes around to where I’m from, as it does in underground languages, in the oblique way it does to find out someone’s status without actually asking, and knowing this, I say I’m Métis like it’s an apology and he says, “mmh,” like he forgives me, like he’s got a big heart and mine’s pumping diluted blood and his voice has sounded well-fed up till this point, but now it goes thin like he’s across the room taking another look and when he returns he’s got ‘this look’ that says he’s leather and I’m naughahyde.

  IT CROSSES MY MIND

  It crosses my mind to wonder where we fit in this ‘vertical mosaic,’ this colour colony; the urban pariah, the displaced and surrendered to apartment blocks, shopping malls, superstores and giant screens, are we distinct ‘survivors of white noise,’ or merely hostages in the enemy camp and the job application asks if I am a Canadian citizen and am I expected to mindlessly check ‘yes,’ indifferent to skin colour and the deaths of 1885, or am I actually free to check ‘no,’ like the true north strong and free and what will I know of my own kin in my old age, will they still welcome me, share their stew and tea, pass me the bannock like it’s mine, will they continue to greet me in the old way, hand me their babies as my own and send me away with gifts when I leave and what name will I know them by in these multicultural intentions, how will I know other than by shape of nose and cheekbone, colour of eyes and hair, and will it matter that we call ourselves Métis, Métisse, Mixed Blood or Aboriginal, will sovereignty matter or will we just slide off the level playing field turned on its side while the provincial flags slap confidently before me, echoing their self-absorbed anthem in the wind, and what is this game we’ve played long enough, finders keepers / losers weepers, so how loud and how long can the losers weep and the white noise infiltrates my day as easily as the alarm, headlines and ‘Morningside’ but ‘Are you a Canadian citizen?’ I sometimes think to answer, yes, by coercion, yes, but no . . . there’s more, but no space provided to write my historical interpretation here, that yes but no, really only means yes because there are no lines for the stories between yes and no and what of the future of my eight-year-old niece, whose mother is Métis but only half as Métis as her grandmother, what will she name herself and will there come a time and can it be measured or predicted when she will stop naming herself and crossing her own mind.

  THE SOUND OF ONE HAND DRUMMING

  ‘It is not the end of all being. Just a small stunting of a road in you,’¹ but

  you will branch out into all directions of this country,

  this nation-state inside of you waiting to come of age,

  cede, or claim independence from the founding fathers of confederation

  or thought

  and all your tributaries will flow into the great dam of existence,

  the watershed of doubt and creation

  of your soul and others in this land of no returning

  this fountain of youth and sorrow, and

  print-dressed women will greet you and say, “kayas,”²

  and kiss you on the cheek

  call you relative,

  call you to them for everlasting life

  and who knows what will come of reading this bible

  of technology in your soul,

  if you have one that isn’t digitized yet,

  the soul you pray with every new dawn of your life before

  stepping into the headlines

  of thought or waving goodbye

  to good fellows who trod off to loftier things

  in the big house of knowing,

  peeling back words from spines

  that vault into theories as ornate as rococo

  and as cluttered as a bad relationship

  with oneself or anyone else within reach

  of those words that flow like milkweed from Philosophers while

  the small single words

  of brown women hang on

  clotheslines stiff in winter and

  thaw only in early spring but

  no one takes them off the line because

  no one wants last year’s clothes,

  they’re the wrong colour and out of fashion and

  if dead white men stopped writing for one thousand years and

  only brown women wrote

  that wouldn’t be enough

  time for all the Indian youth to say what they had to

  or enough for me and those of my kind,

  the sharp-toned-and-tongued kind

  who keep railing on about this stuff

  when all well-mannered and sophisticated Indian types

  would have reasonably dropped it long ago

  because it’s just rhetoric,

  guilt-provoking

  and sounds like a broken record of an Indian beating a drum

  or like an Indian beating a drum with a broken record,

  or like an Indian breaking a record,

  or like an Indian breaking a drum over a record

  whose sound is digitized, on CD-ROM

  complete with video and CD-quality sound.

  * * *

  1 “Thirst,” Robert Priest.

  2 kayas: Cree for ‘it’s been a long time.’

  MADE OF WATER

  * * *

  LIQUID PRAIRIE

  I miss the North Saskatchewan that runs through

  those trees that shoot up black and grand

  from its cool hips,

  I miss those spruce that

  defy the flatness,

  gloat at the pressing-palm sky, the

  loaded-rifle earth and

  grow anyway.

  I sit on this thin coast

  but haven’t yet been on that belly of water

  they call the ocean.

  THE GEESE ARE NOT WELCOME

  the grass is puny here,

  its threads stretch

  to fill an oblivious sky,

  a child’s arms strain

  to be silk scarves in a prairie wind and

  there is no wind here,

  hardly,

  no wind at all

  no rolling wheat waves,

  no grass dance or

  bowing willow partners,

  no floor to dance on

  or prairie light to dance under,

  there is no sky here,

  just eroding

  canvas cover

  no weather here either,

  to give me a piece of its mind when

  I step outside;

  no light that waltzes into town,

  no light here,

  hardly,

  no light at all,

  no filmmaker’s palette,

  no simple equation of earth under sky,

  just bossy cedars,

  obnoxious ornamentals,

  maudlin vines and

  roses that flaunt

  their breasts over fences,

  leaves that wear out their welcome and

  grass that never lets up growing green,

  and no geese to haunt my winter clock.

  there are no geese here; they are not welcome

  INSTALLATION PIECE

  When I arrived you were the first

  one I met, as open as

  a window in a storm,

  as real as childbirth but

  over time you grew

  as dark as

  a cellar and as lewd as

  a bitter drunk and besides

  I found that I came looking for

  happily-ever-afters folded

  in big trunks, transported

  dovetailed in the back of a pickup

  prayed them over Hell’s Gate

  to your door but

  my Saratoga
trunks were too heavy, together

  we couldn’t lift them, you said

  you just couldn’t carry

  any more. So

  I hired two moving men and

  divided my things into

  red carry-ons,

  turquoise overnighters,

  orange Pullmans and black Gladstones, stacked

  them one on top of the other

  like lovers, piled them

  high and wide,

  relocated romance

  myself.

  FIREFLIES

  With half a headlight shining in my face I listen and go on without knowing the road ahead, all the corners and hills, knowing too well the road behind and the rest stops in between now and forever and all the faces, those ones I’ve chosen beforehand, look too familiar, familiar as the roads behind me only this time I listen and hear only the tapping of my heart, or is it my head which asks me to do something before it’s too late and now I recognize what’s shining in my face is the sun blinding me as I drive into it, and the west grabs me as any purse snatcher would out of the hands of my grandmothers who keep asking when I will find a man.

  When will I find a man to oil these dry noisy bones, when will I plant a garden and grow children straight and tall, their sunflower heads heavy with dreams. “When,” they ask (with that old brown woman’s glint in their eye), “will the firefly finally catch me looking back” and lead me into my hottest flame, to warm the marrow in these bones, when my bed won’t hold me anymore, grown weary of my requests to wrap these joints that creak and groan with the weight of my own choices.

  The old women cup their hankies in their sinewy hands and giggle and tease like mosquitoes buzzing around my head and they ask “What does he eat in winter?” I look blank faced and earnest and say “I don’t know,” and they slap their knees and burst into laughter, talking in Cree. I feel lost between their playful banter and the Cree syllables that summon me from long ago, syllables that know me but I don’t know them. They talk fast, banter and stifle their cackles and ask “whether he has teeth and which ones are left,” and they snort into their hands like insufferable children and one of them tells a story and they all shake like fools with laughter and straighten their scarves on their heads and pull their skirts over their knees that bob like ducks in water. They make more tea and laugh and I know that they do this because they know better and because they have met more fireflies.