A Conversation with Métis Poet Marilyn Dumont,
Mon. Mar. 26, 2018
A Conversation with Métis Poet Marilyn Dumont,
During Winnipeg's World Poetry Week, March 2018
by Di Brandt (Winnipeg’s inaugural Poet Laureate and UW Creative Writing professor)
How wonderful that the great Canadian Métis poet Marilyn Dumont is joining us in Winnipeg this week, for Prairie Fire's World Poetry Day celebration, and related events. I asked Marilyn Dumont a few questions about her visit and her poetry, and her connection to World Poetry Day.
DB: Many contemporary Canadian poets seem reluctant to assume a public and oratorical voice, preferring to stay with personal lyricism and/or aesthetic experimentation. Your poetry, on the other hand, has always struck a fine and interesting balance between personal and public concerns and gestures. Can you talk a bit about that, whether you keep choosing this consciously or whether poetry just comes to you that way, or?
MD: This is a very interesting and insightful question to respond to. You have just now made me aware of this aspect of my poetry. Now that I think about it, poetry is conceived by me as a form of resistance, when I consider the poets who I most admire: Joy Harjo, Sharon Olds, Louise Halfe, Katherena Vermette, Connie Fife, Joanne Arnott, Rosanna Deerchild to name a few. Whether a poet’s treatment of subject is “quietly” protesting a different but vilified way of being in the world such as celebrating a non-binary gender, articulating the sacred, examining and being critical of familial nostalgia, calling for social justice for those marginalized, naming abuse.
I’m not sure precisely where this motivation to “fight” comes from, but it likely has to do with being Métis and the resistant act of identifying as Métis in a country that has consistently left the Métis out of treaty, “wreckonciliation,” reparation for the Sixties Scoop, etc. It is a resistant act to identify. Métis identification has become more acceptable since the Powley and Daniels cases, and it now the erroneous identification from individuals who believe being Métis consists of racial mixedness who are muddying the waters, and reinvigorating the question of Métisness in the public eye. This is frustrating for people with the lived experience of Scrip, and the memory of living on road allowances, and just trying to survive as a group and as individual people in Canada.
DB: Fighting is also in your personal family heritage, as a descendant of the famed warrior Gabriel Dumont, isn't it? But you are many other things in your poetry besides a resister. You have written also as a lover, a daughter, a bead artist, and a sensuous woman in love with the wild prairie, lamenting the diminishment of the mighty bison who once covered the prairie in great thundering herds. I've always known you as a stylish, well-travelled, cosmopolitan urban woman. Your poetry, on the other hand, is filled with images of the wild prairie, spirited horses, darting jackrabbits and chattering chickadees and crows, silver wolf willow and cranberry bushes and fireweed and dark purple saskatoons. Are you drawing on ancestral and family memories, or do you spend a lot of time in the country, close to these kinds of natural riches?
MD: My most early years were spent in logging camps, sometimes living in trapper tents in the bush with my parents and these images are part of my body-imagination. Those times really were the formation of image for me. I always return to them as a place of what really exists in the world, beyond anything else I experience in life, be that international travel, etc.
My sense of style comes from the Métis. My father loved style and so did my mother in a different way, but the Métis historically have been known to “present in public” to draw attention in this way just as we did to get the attention of voyageurs looking for a spot to camp on the river. This is where the display of our dance originated. This “flair” was written about historically and it still exists. One historical reference I recall from reading is that the “Métis of Lac Ste. Anne were always finely dressed when they attend Mass or a public function.” It’s a sense of pride in our identity.
DB: Well, and a joy to look at, and to be in the presence of! On the other hand, in that tongued belonging you describe the poet's role as similar to that of a "bag lady" pushing her cart of belongings down the street. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, or whether to radically revise my understanding of both poets and bag ladies! Can you comment?
MD: Well, I lived for twenty years freelancing so I could write my poetry and it was always a daunting task to make a living. After doing this for several years, I began to feel that I was a bag lady or destined to be one because there was no ready way to make a living. All economic avenues to existing as a poet were grueling, whether writing mind-numbing reports for some organization or government, editing manuscripts or teaching sessional courses. All seemed too much work for little pay and it seemed like the world was trying to dissuade me from actually producing poetry. So, at times, I felt beaten down hauling around my scraps of paper that no one gave a shit about but me, until a book was produced. Only then was the activity valued. The creative process is not valued, only the product.
DB: Perhaps we need to value bag ladies more as well, as the creative scavengers and die hard survivalists they are! A question about your book that tongued belonging: what did you mean when you described memory as "this place we can mend over and over"?
MD: When I think of the times in my life when I was wounded by familial or worldly circumstance, those memories do not completely disappear, I just relive them in less intense and less immobilizing ways. They remain a part of me, so I can always go back and re-vision them in ways that are either self destructive or self healing.
DB: Yes, there is definitely a sense of remediation, regeneration, re-vision in your poetry; that is one of its powerful, and inspirational, aspects. Your first book A Really Good Brown Girl continues to generate a lot of discussion among readers, both academic and general. I haven't seen much commentary, though, on your striking use of the term "brown" in the title. As you know, the experience of being brown has been recently theorized in a popular book by Kamal Al-Solaylee, called Brown: What Being Brown in the World Today Means (to Everyone) (2016). The term, generally speaking, seems to have gained cachét in recent years as a social identifier. I'm wondering how you feel about that, do you feel the specificity of the Métis experience gets lost in the global context of "being brown" or do you delight in its newly chic - and hugely populous - profile? You surely had something to do with that.
MD: I had nothing to do with the cachét of “being brown"! I just know that I was one of the “brown” ones in my family. Métis family members present a variety of skin colouration, eye colour, and I learned early from family and the public that “brown” was not “good," that “brown” cast me in the dangerous classes that could be avoided if one was less brown. I have come to love and appreciate this vilified part of me because I know now how racism, sexism, and classism works. I wrote about “brown” as a way to learn how to resist negative images of myself. It helped me have some inner resources to accept and love myself. That is all I was doing in writing about “brown” - whether others were theorizing it or not.
DB: Hey, you never know, you may have influenced people on this point, as on so many others, more than you realize! World Poetry Day was invented by UNESCO in 1999 as a heritage languages and poetries preservation project, and is celebrated globally each March. You're here this week as a guest of World Poetry Day events in Winnipeg. What does World Poetry Day mean to you, and what does it mean to position yourself on the global stage as a poet of the world?
MD: World Poetry Day. Wow, never thought I'd be part of such a global event! I humbly see myself in the tradition of poets from around the world. Thank goodness poets have existed a long time, ever since the early Sumerian female poet who created her own chapbook to disseminate her work. Over the years many extraordinary poets have influenced and nurtured me, like you, Di Brandt, and your collection questions i asked my mother, to Ngugi, who decided to not write in the colonizer's language, but to write in his own language, to Rumi who crafted such deeply spiritual poems, to Rilke who did something similar closer to our time. Poets from all over the world have influenced by work, so I am honoured to read poetry on this day.