‘Talking to the Diaspora’ by Lee Maracle

Reviewed by Phoebe Wang

Certain First Nations stories, beliefs and values are now familiar to us, the Canadian reader, such as the trope of the Trickster, the importance of oral literatures and the sense of stewardship of the Earth. This is thanks in part to writers such as Lee Maracle. In her most recent collection of poems, Talking to the Diaspora, she invites readers to learn more about what it means to embody the “bone songs” and “symphony stories” that convey both her personal and ancestral beliefs. Her poems ask us to broaden our simplistic notions about First Nations cultures. She generously gives us a vision of the holistic, complex and fluid relationships between her peoples’ history, their traumas, memories, bodies, songs, spirits, dreams and lives. “I want to know that fronds of cedar waving hello to old songs/ still hear me and understand me when I talk sparrow-talk/to them,” she writes.

The book’s unconventional and striking design, which alternates between black text on white and white text on a black background, lets us know that Talking to the Diaspora is not like other collections of poetry. The unnumbered pages contain full-page images of textured stone surfaces and grassland that serve as a reminder of the transitory nature of our words and songs.

Maracle has throughout her prolific career circumvented conventions, especially Western ideas of what literature should be. In a 2004 interview in Canadian Literature, Maracle said that she would like to bring emotionality and change to the English language. As a colonized subject, she speaks of the conundrum of acquiescing, in some way or other, to “the Western knowledge system” and it is her aim to “find a way to alter the language to suit my own Salish sensibility.” Maracle does this in a number of ways in Talking to the Diaspora.

It’s a full, varied and energetic collection that ranges over a lifetime’s worth of experience and engagement with the world. Maracle’s main concern is of course the ongoing and long-lasting traumas of colonization on the First Nations peoples. Yet she also addresses the globalized condition of the oppressed in poems such as “December 6th,” “On the 20^th Anniversary of Martin Luther King’s Death” and “Remembering Mahmoud 1976.” In “9   1   1,” Maracle questions how “the imagination of the world” can respond to massacre and the “new aggressive dynamic.” In Maracle’s view, and in the view of Mother Nature, meaningless death offends the earth, as does murder, “complacency     apathy     complicity” that makes her mother’s skin cringe. “All life is sacred” may be a simple message, but for some reason, it’s one that modern capitalist society can’t quite seem to internalize.

In the book’s title poem, Maracle meditates on why people cannot accept culpability for acts of violence, for their “bloodless decision making” and “paragraphs of descretion,” and soon comes to her conclusions: they are too fixated on progress, they have forgotten their sense of interconnectedness with all living things and their toxic language leads to toxic values:

Corporate myth inspires global toxicity

Its mythology is omniscient

Sockeye, cedar, even raven prefer death

to challenging its legendary omnipresence

Maracle’s lines condemn the “recent memory,” “corporate superstition” and songlessness of progress. The language is at times polemical and heavy-handed. However, these poems are not meant merely to be read, but also to be lived. They are elegies, memorials, mediations, protest songs, calls–to-action, and ultimately, invocations:

From the summit of mountain ranges

words fall through the Diaspora’s moral sky holes

In their descent they scrape meaning from cliffs

words blend with the chaotic rhythm of crushed rock

bind them to the plastic saran-wrapped food

perverted oil fuel Styrofoam-insulated buildings

Maracle’s unified vision repeatedly stresses the interconnection between environmental, moral, political and personal choices. She delivers her mantra fervently and with a great sense of consequences. Violent language leads to violent acts committed against communities, who then carry those acts in their very bodies; corporate culture that leads to exploitative policies causes environmental degradations and pollutions which in turn seep into our bones and cells, and so on. The poems capture the violent rhythms of this death song, her lines circling and trailing like a chorus: “My pathway here is strewn with stones,/ singing confusing songs of yearning./ My bones, my personal stones,/ sing back songs of yearning—/ Tsuniquid’s yearning.” Yet Maracle offers a powerful message of transformation: “I watch myself highstep my way to this language/ this pen/ this paper/ this place.” What to do if language inscribes toxicity onto people’s lives and communities? Change the channel. Find a way to insert First Nations visions of interconnectedness into the crisis of modernity:

Suquamish voices are everywhere here.

I am so totally old and so completely new here.

I pull fragments from old file cabinets,

splinters of memory,

bind them together to re-shape my world.

Talking to the Diaspora is a rallying cry from a poet who draws from a “from a pool of ancient meaning” to lead us to regeneration and renewal.

ARP Books | 120 pages | $16.95 | paper | ISBN# 978-1894037655