Annharte plays a lot with her name. She began her career as “Marie Annharte Baker,” and by 2001 had become “Annharte” and/or “Marie Annharte.” Publishers feared that readers might get confused. As a result she has earned the acronym — usually reserved for notorious figures — “AKA,” as in “Annharte AKA Marie Annharte Baker AKA Marie Annharte.” The title of her collection of critical prose, AKA Inendagosekwe (2013), riffs on this identity-play. In this brief profile, I locate the formal expression of a struggle to speak the truth of identity and sexual violence in a syntactical pattern that is characteristic of Annharte’s poetry.
In an interview with Pauline Butling, Annharte reflects on the trajectory of the silences in her work. Speaking about her first book, Being on the Moon (1990),1 she says, “the silences intrigued me.”2 In her next book, Exercises in Lip Pointing (2003),3 she made “an attempt to go to some of those places and give them more voice than [she] had done before.”4 This attempt to give voice is about healing, “healing in the sense of being able to contain something for a while, give it a voice, and therefore face your fears about it [. . .] Once you begin to voice your reaction to it, or start to have a dialogue with that pain, you’re in a much better place.”5 In her essays, Annharte links writing-as-healing to the broader struggle for decolonization through her interest in Frantz Fanon, who came to this struggle through his psychiatric practice. Following Fanon, Annharte is interested in the way mental illness for colonized people is a response to the structural oppressions and ongoing trauma of colonialism. The struggle to speak of sexual violence and its effects is recorded in “Cherries Could Be a Girl’s Best.” In the passage below, the poet is praying for the courage or strength to write:
I coax back cherry babe flames
Please come back tonight show sparks
None of the withdrawal — keep me hot stoked
Stay for as long words take to fossilize on page
Release at the count of three
Scary hips held down
I don’t want to hold out hold back hold in
Cherry scream defiant silence
Stop movement inside I might tear
Jump out of my skin
Don’t don’t do that
Don’t don’t do that6
The “skin” that she wants to jump out of here is also the silence to be overcome, the silence around the embodied experience of identities that do not conform to colonial categories. Such bodies are troublesome because they might “speak the truth / of their identity might say something / different unusual unbelievable.”7 Annharte says, “[I]t’s a painful thing. You’re always made to feel like you are somehow inadequate. You’re considered inauthentic. Somehow the racial thing is supposed to give validity to who you are.”8 The difficulty of feeling “at home” in her own mixed-race skin is compounded by her experience of sexual violence. Andrea Smith traces this intersection of sexual violence and the dynamics of identity in the settler-colonial state, arguing that “sexual violence is a tool by which certain peoples become marked as inherently ‘rapable.’ These peoples are then violated, not only through direct or sexual assault, but through a wide variety of state policies.”9
Some of the clearest examples of these state policies are the ever-changing sections of the Indian Act that determine “status.” Annharte’s status, in fact, was “granted” by the state through the provisions of Bill C-31: “I am a Bill C-31 reinstated Anishinabekwe but [my emphasis] I live off the reserve [i.e. outside its geographical boundaries]. My mother lost her status when she married a non-Indian according to the Indian Act. I was reinstated.”10 For some in her Indigenous community, however, this kind of “status” doesn’t mean much; at the same time, Annharte explains that “because I don’t speak the language or am just a student learner I am called moniakwe or whitewoman.”11 Identified by non-Indigenous people as “Indian” and therefore “inherently rapable,” and yet also denied Indian identity and status by the settler-state and other Indians . . . The patriarchal and paternalistic management of Indigenous identity through the Indian Act has been a powerful tool for the state to divide and conquer Indigenous communities. This is the conflict Annharte refers to in the closing lines of “In The Picture I Don’t See”:
I don’t want to fight for exteriors
Fight for home fight for sanctuary
A right to being indian
Is not a pretty picture
An identity made questionable
By invasion or evasion12
I emphasize the “but” in the quote above because it is a syntactic register of category and exception: Annharte can claim the identity “Bill C-31 reinstated Anishinabekwe” but it is a “highly negotiable” status because, in this case, she lives “off the reserve.”13 Annharte implicitly refers here to Indian Act rules that prohibit Indigenous people who live off-reserve from receiving certain benefits.14 A categorical statement can be made, but: there is always the potential for its negation by some other category. Her body appears and disappears from the category “Indian” according to whichever discursive regime is in effect.
Two poems from Indigena Awry (2012), “Silence Sad Tuba” and “Squaw Guide,” make particular use of the syntax of category and exception. “Silence Sad Tuba” is a narrative of a girl called Silence. “Silence is a girl who once was in Winnipeg,” writes Annharte — “once was” because the poem is set in the 1950s, and “is” because Silence is still present. The poem draws together the silences of an identity and experiences of sexual violence that can’t (yet) be spoken. Silence’s physical size provides occasion for the use of the syntax of category and exception: “She got very tall but kept being a timid girl”; “Silence even with big girl looks wanted a momma heart.”15 Silence’s size belies her vulnerability, but is also an expression of it: Silence is grown large.
Annharte’s Winnipeg is a “half-breed” space, in which “footwear was canvas tennis shoes with sparkles on the soles. Not beaded moccasins but close enough.” Also, “Apartheid was common in South Africa except one summer she got a good job integrating city hall.”16 The sudden replacement of South Africa for Winnipeg opens another frame for understanding the racial discourses in which Silence is (not) located. Racial segregation is the rule, and Silence is the exception to it. Silence is that which cannot be integrated, in the role of integrator. Racial segregation, categories of whites and Indians, canvas tennis shoes and beaded moccasins, are the Spoken. She can be, at best, “close enough” to one or another category by adapting the materials offered by the urban landscape. In her subaltern role as vanishing mediator, Silence “works” to, and beyond, the requirements of the job: “incoming calls kept on hold gave her intense pleasure. She shared her heritage of waiting for silence to be heard.”17 This racial segregation is also gendered:
No hopes to move up in the world. Not that
she could fall in or out of a crack in the system.
She was too modest to even notice her own crack.
Anyway, she turned out multi cultured and multi
coloured without trying too hard.18
“Falling through a crack in the system” cannot be an explanation for hopelessness because “the system” is not organized to valorize bodies like hers. Or, bodies like hers are captured by exclusion, by being an exception with no place in the social order. In fact, the social order needs to expel such bodies because they undermine the racial categories it is founded on. Silence, a mixed-race white/Indigenous woman, is the crack in the colonial system. The meaning of her “modesty” in this context is given some elaboration:
Silence took her sweet time to heal injuries sustained
in the game of love. She had a scream that never
made it past her big front teeth. Slurred words were
not silence even if hard to understand. Drunk words
did not fall down on the city sidewalk. Choked words
and cramped intestine made her gutsy yet way more
than soft spoken bitch.19
The sentimental quality of “injuries sustained in the game of love” seems at odds with the stifled scream in the next sentence — a scream I take to be the same as the one in “Cherries Could Be a Girl’s Best,” above. But the vulnerability of “injuries sustained in the game of love” does go with the “modesty” of the girl who won’t notice her own crack. The struggle to speak out of a negative social existence — the prohibition against speaking the truth about gendered violence and the racist social order — is given in the “slurred words,” “choked words,” and “cramped intestine.” These are “speech,” even if “hard to understand.” Painfully embodied speech. Somatic. Even excessive, “way more than.” But why is she who is “soft spoken” a “bitch”? Does “soft spoken” align with the vulnerable and the modest? Soft-spoken, in this instance, suggests the articulation of internalized shame, the speech performance of the girl whose shyness is judged under patriarchy as a sign of her goodness. Is the soft-spoken posture so harshly repudiated because it is regarded as a betrayal of the deeper, more dangerous rumbling of the guts? Are slur, choke, and cramp more truthful than the possibly manipulative speech of the soft-spoken?
In “Squaw Guide,” silence and invisibility are the consequence of an exception, articulated as an extremity, which pushes the body out of potential categorical identifications. As in “Silence Sad Tuba,” size contrasts and conflates with silence, but this time is turned inside out, into invisibility. The speaker is hailed as “squaw” by “a white hosehead,” a “Canadian.” Her response to the hail is to become “semi-invisible”:
. . . it was hard to be a big squaw
big public squaw
I was too invisible to laugh out loud20
Invisibility is a condition of silence. The semantics of these lines suggest that the more visible one is, the easier it is to “speak.” And as in “Silence Sad Tuba” the “speech” is (or would be) somatic, the bodily convulsion of laughter. The contrast is between one’s visibility within the racial imaginary and one’s visibility as an autonomous singularity. An Indigenous woman is visible in the “system” as “squaw.” But the “I,” in her difference and individuality, is invisible in this racial schema, “too invisible” to challenge it. The refusal here, however, is not only abject. Though the speaker can’t give the response that would make her visible in her autonomy and as a self-determining agent, she also refuses to acknowledge her interpellation as squaw: “no not me — didn’t look around — not me.”21
Another option is to “defer” the challenge: “I wasn’t Tonto or tough enough / to defer say kemosabe.”22 To play the “Tonto,” the sidekick, the good Indian, according to Annharte here, is only to “defer” colonial violence, in the sense of “put off until another time” or “except (or accept) temporarily.” But it is an ambiguous gesture. It requires toughness to strategically, for the moment, accept a humiliating role. To defer in this way is to become visible in the racist imaginary in a different, perhaps slightly less harmful way — a harm-reduction strategy for negotiating racialization. The speech of this gesture of deferral — “say kemosabe” — is also gendered: the Tonto-figure is the male equivalent of the squaw, and in the racist imaginary “kemosabe” indicates a brotherly, if still subservient and inferior, relationship. But as a woman, even a “big” one, the speaker is excepted from this opportunity to escape the category “squaw.”
There is a great deal of ambivalence in the way Annharte speaks out on these issues. “Silence Sad Tuba” ends with a last instance of somatic speech, and it’s a fart:
Silence had a rowdy next door neighbour. His noise was a
bother. Going to sleep was rough [. . .] The sound of a sad
tuba drifted through the window one hangover a Saturday
morning ago. Not a familiar tune she knew. Yeah, right!
Just a pinched off fart coming out of a pinhole asshole.23
The sad tuba of the poem’s title, then, is this fart. The attempt to make it musical or meaningful is dismissed with “Yeah, right!” We are forced to reconsider the title: is the whole poem being dismissed as a lot of hot air, as gas? This is typical of Annharte’s work. Lines near the close of “Squaw Guide” give this ambivalence in her syntax of category and exception: “should feminism makes me too shy / to joke around much.”24 The category “feminism” is qualified by a conditional, “should” — that is, feminism might make her “too shy too joke around much.” What kind of feminism might this be? A feminism that demands, perhaps, the posture of victim, and apparently excludes the possibility of “joking around much.” But how does this joking around square with the serious, healing, and decolonizing work Annharte is also committed to? An answer is given in her interview with Pauline Butling, in which she responds to the question, “What is the appeal of humour for you?”:
Anger is a tag that’s always put on First Nations
writing. I feel it’s often a way to dismiss it because it
just means that the person is hearing with the ears
of a white person. If you listen from the perspective
of a First Nations person you may hear anger but
you definitely go for the humour. It’s not because the
anger is so uncomfortable, it’s just that it seems to be
part of the whole “Indian Act.”25
This is one important way that Annharte’s poetry is decolonizing: she refuses to acquiesce to the expectations of the “Indian Act.” We might also say that, in the same way that hearing only anger in Indigenous writing is a way to mis-hear it, not hearing the humour in feminism is to hear it with the ears of patriarchy. In fact, Annharte prefers the “drunken squaw,” who she deems “aggressive best,”26 to the “political correct squaw,” dismissed as “boring”:27
saw some young women doing some reverse
squaw baiting
they were sitting in a bus shelter
whenever a guy would go by
one of them would say
HEY HUN-NAY
intimidating voice all husky
BOO JOO HUN-NAY28
Annharte might be accused of reinscribing the reactionary clichés of “humourless feminist” and “political correctness.” But I think she is making a class critique of what she might regard as “academic” feminism: these “drunken squaws” are instances of the many resistant women that Annharte valorizes throughout her work. Hearing the voices of such women, in fact, sets her on the writer’s path:
In becoming a writer, I opened myself up to an ancestral
voice which now informs any or all creative efforts and
experience. Involvement with the street scene fine-tuned
perceptions which inform my work. From this place,
I first heard the voices of women singing to me. They
were sitting on the riverbank passing a jug in a brown
paper bag. I wrote down the chanting that I heard. It
took the form of verse. I sang and chanted out loud what
I heard. I knew they had taken pity on me. I first thought
they saw me as one who would listen. I was not afraid
because when they spoke to me as in this inner vision
they asked me not to despair because they had horrific
stories too. They encouraged me not to feel sorry for
myself because of what happened to them.29
These figures relate to Annharte’s own mother, a residential-school survivor who disappeared when Annharte was nine years old, and who she assumes was murdered. Annharte’s public performances are remarkable, even shocking, for the way she moves from the serious to the funny. These categories do not exclude each other, but combine in an unapologetic performance of truth-telling. I’ve often felt that there is something almost phobic about Annharte’s reactions to dishonesty, pretentiousness, or affectation. No wonder, given the historical consequences of lying and silence. But she’s tough enough.
1 Being on the Moon (Vancouver: Polestar, 1990, Richmond, BC: Raincoast Books, 2000).
2 AKA Inendagosekwe (Vancouver: CUE Books, 2013), 21.
3 Exercises in Lip Pointing (Vancouver: New Star, 2003).
4 Inendagosekwe, 21.
5 Ibid., 20.
6 Exercises, 10.
7 Ibid., 15.
8 Inendagosekwe, 21.
9 Andrea Smith, Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide (Cambridge: South End Press, 2005), 3.
10 Inendagosekwe, 21.
11 Ibid.
12 Exercises, 15.
13 Inendagosekwe, 1.
14 On January 8, 2013, the Federal Court in Ontario ruled that Metis and Indigenous people living off-reserve should be granted “status.” See http://www.documentcloud.org/documents/552136-federal-court-ruling-harry-daniels-et-al-v-queen.html.
15 Indigena Awry (Vancouver: New Star: 2012), 5.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 13.
21 Ibid., 12.
22 Ibid., 13.
23 Ibid., 6.
24 Ibid., 15.
25 Inendagosekwe, 8
26 Indigena, 15
27 Ibid., 14.
28 Ibid., 15.
29 Inendagosekwe, 206.