MASCULINIDANS-12

2 February 2011

Telephone conversation between Louise Halfe in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and Sam McKegney in Kingston, Ontario.

Born in Two Hills, Alberta, LOUISE HALFE (Cree) was raised on Saddle Lake Indian Reserve and attended Blue Quills Residential School. Leaving residential school of her own volition at the age of sixteen, she completed her studies at St. Paul’s regional high school. She is a social worker and counselor and has served as writer in residence at multiple institutions. She was Saskatchewan’s Poet Laureate for 2005-2006 and she received an honorary doctoral degree from Wilfrid Laurier University in 2012. Her collections of poetry include Bear Bones & Feathers (Coteau Books, 1994), Blue Marrow (McClelland & Stewart, 1998), and The Crooked Good (Coteau Books, 2007).

SAM MCKEGNEY: At the Trent University conference on Indigenous poetics in Peterborough in October 2010, I noticed a profound affirmation by younger poets of those they referred to as their “foremothers.” I recall Rosanna Deerchild and Christine Sy and Natasha Beeds and Gregory Scofield all speaking about the earlier generation of women writers who have supported their work and created a lineage that allows them to do what they do. And I was conscious of the conspicuous absence of “forefathers” in their discussion. It made me think of that wonderful section at the beginning of Blue Marrow, where prayer is interspersed with the names of hundreds of women. And I guess I want to ask you why there appears to be an absence of male figures in the background of Indigenous poetics in Canada and what the consequences of this absence might be.

LOUISE HALFE: When I wrote Blue Marrow, I was very conscious of the absence of historical women in Canadian literature. In particular, Aboriginal women, of course. And if they were mentioned, they were never mentioned by name, they were nameless. It was as if we never played a role in men’s lives—the chiefs, the white fur traders, even Governor Simpson with his wife. Also, when I was growing up, my grandmothers made a huge impact in my life. My grandmothers were the matriarchs. The grandfathers hardly said a word. They were very silent, so I never knew them. They worked in the field, they sat with the grandmothers, they looked after the sweat lodges, but they stayed very much in the background.

The other factor is my female chauvinism. This country is celebrated by white men and Native men; where are our Native women in the forefront? They are coming out now, especially in the last five—at the most ten—years where we now are having chiefs, we’re having women in Parliament, but it’s taken a long time, and frankly I wasn’t going to give men the satisfaction of appearing with a larger voice in my print. A part of the reason for that is they have a large voice already in a public forum. They take over our sweat lodges as if they are sole proprietors of spirituality, and there’s a lot of chauvinism around that. Women, again, get pushed out of the picture.

SM: Do you worry about such things as menstrual taboos being used not to honour women's power but rather to control and exclude women?

LH: Oh, absolutely. But the exclusion is also valid. And it’s not just because of the menstrual cycles themselves. It’s because the older men realize the incredible power we possess as women during that period of our lives. And it’s not only a spiritual prowess, because we’re really creative during that time, we’re really fierce. I used to be really fierce during my pre-menstrual cycle. If I didn’t have my seclusion where I could meet my creative energies, watch out.

We have the capacity to abuse our sexual powers. It becomes a sick thing. The healthy men know that what is between our legs can devour them. And that’s not to say in an unhealthy way, it just is.

SM: I find it so interesting the way that’s framed, “to devour.” Because having studied a lot of Western philosophy and literary criticism, sexual relations between male and female are all too frequently framed solely as “penetrative.” In other words, giving the power to male penis as opposed to an idea of “envelopment” or “devouring,” which places power within the female element of copulation.

LH: I have the capacity to abuse my power over my man and others. However, I have too much respect for my husband and I have to answer to my own integrity. That is not to say I have always had this awareness. In fact, I didn’t much earlier in my life. I abused my sexual prowess and disrespected myself and others.

SM: Your poetry often deals with how shame and stigma can be attached to the body—in particular, the female body, but also the male body. What factors have informed the injection of shame into women’s understandings of their physical selves?

LH: In Saskatoon we have a Brown Spoon Club, a bunch of Aboriginal women who get together once a month just to have fun. And it doesn’t matter what kind of fun: it can be a movie; it can be a potluck; it can be a cooking spree; it can be an exchange of old jewelry. And the idea of “spoon”—which, to my understanding, runs across Canada among the tribes—we understand it as our vagina because it’s shaped like a spoon. The term spoon has often been used in a derogatory way. So, I have used the word “spoon,” for myself and in particular in “Valentine Dialogue,” to turn it around in my public presentations, and to talk about not only the power of spoon but the community of spoon where people are nurtured from it, where we give feast to the people, they lick it, they eat it, they nurture themselves with it, and they give birth from it.

The other is that—now this is a historical understanding, and I’m not sure how accurate it is, it’s just down the line from various people that I’ve heard it—but before European contact, there was much more sexual freedom among the various tribes. And it was the woman who determined who would stay, if they would accept their husbands. Now in Blackfoot country, they were much more aggressive about an adulterous relationship; they would cut off the nose of the woman, for example. I have no recollection of reading about that in Indian Country. And I also understand that some of my grandmothers had white lovers. A few of them kicked out their husbands for their other lovers. But they had freedom of the mouth, so to speak, which makes me uncomfortable these days, but back then it was a playful thing to have sexual innuendo, joking in talking. These days, among my contemporary peers, they use it to put down and ridicule other women or men. And so that’s become a sick way of interaction, where it’s a shaming of the person rather than the sharing of a joke in a healthy manner.

SM: In my reading, “Valentine Dialogue” celebrates the community created between the two female speakers, at the same time that these women acknowledge all of the forces that try to make them feel badly about their desires and their physical selves. So the poem takes the reader through the physical ramifications of venereal disease to the potentially derogatory connotations of “brown spoon” and “brown tits,” as you just mentioned, through the Christian discourse of shame and contrition, to the father calling one of the women a “cheap tramp” and her mother a “slut.” Yet, at the poem’s end, there’s still an affirmation that desire is inevitable and necessary in the lines, “And my mouth / wants / to feel dair wet lips” (ll. 26–8). How can desire be treated as healthy, as normal, when there are all these different influences seeking to make it seem bad, to make it seem dirty, to make it seem contaminated?

LH: We have to take over ownership of the projection and presentation of our sensuality. And Hollywood doesn’t cut it because the observation I’ve made, and even of women my age, it’s like, tits and ass and the belly hanging out and it doesn’t matter what shape it is, you know, that Shania Twain belly. It’s as if Aboriginal women are being drawn to what they perceive as acceptable and the mainstream is dictating it to them.

I’ve been trying to find a photographer to do the central photography of Aboriginal women, but they don’t get it—nakedness is in itself beautiful. It is how it is projected that can be interpreted as cheap and sluttish. And some of our women still are into that. To me that’s just prostitution of the body and the soul and the spirit. One can project their sensuality without even having to expose their flesh. I think if I had an influence, I’d ask APTN to do something that projects healthy Aboriginal sexuality between men and women… You know one of my elders said, “Why do they always show us with our asses up in the air, fucking men in the movies?” It’s as if they have to show that degradation of an Aboriginal woman in a sexual act, as if they only know it doggy style. And so, we have to take ownership of that. I don’t know how it’s to be done; all I know is I carry myself, I hope, with dignity and a calm sensuality that I think I have. And that’s all one needs to do.

SM: In Peterborough, you discussed the importance of celebrating your own daughter’s coming into womanhood as a significant time in her life. The poem “First Moon” also emphasizes the need for ceremony around that development. Are there ways that awareness of the body can be nurtured in children to foster sexual well-being later in life?

LH: Yeah, well, I’ve done that with my daughter, in particular. I didn’t do it so much with my son because I felt my husband was in charge in that. But he’s a white man. So you know, white males don’t know how to do it. And now I’m sorry because I should have gone ahead and done it myself. But with my daughter, I started as soon as she was old enough to understand that there’s a difference between men and women. And it was a calm and simple and straightforward celebration of the first pubic hair, the first budding of her breasts, on and on until she got her menses, and then I took her home to my home community on the reserve, gathered all the Grandmothers, and we had the first ever Moon Ceremony on the rez. And we made it up because of the loss of the ceremony.

You know, she’s thirty years old this month, and she’s the most refined young woman I know, and that’s not because she’s my daughter. It’s because she’s quite aware of self-respect, and yet knows how to project herself in a sensuous manner. But that has to do with all the rituals that were in place in preparation for where she’s at now. And we have to start them young. There can’t be any bones about it, of having hang-ups about sexuality. I told my daughter, you don’t need a man to give you sexual satisfaction and to feel comfortable in masturbating. I couldn’t talk to my son that way because I didn’t reach him when he was young. Unfortunately, men have to go out and find their own framework about sexuality.

SM: In mainstream culture, although there are images of male power around sexuality, they seem at times overreactions to anxiety. Anxiety about inadequacy. I’m wondering about the relationship of shame to the male body. In the same poem, so back to “Valentine Dialogue,” there’s a line about how men “Dink day can hang dair / balls all over da place” (ll. 11–12), which seems connected to ideas of male sexual privilege, but also I think could connect to men’s anxieties about their own physical sexuality. And I’m wondering if shame and stigma attach to the male as well as to the female.

LH: Yeah, I suspect that they do just because, I mean, they poke fun at themselves all the time. There’s a “bragatory” way of talking when they “score.” And it’s as if they have notches on their sleeves. And if you’re a loose woman, word goes out really fast, and so, what happens with that is they’ll take you, regardless of whether or not you consent because you are perceived as a loose woman among men, even if you yourself have a liberal sense of sexuality. So, I mean, how can they feel good about that?

I don’t understand this idea of compartmentalization. Having studied it, when two souls come together in their physical form, there’s a mutual penetration. It’s hard to visualize spirit when it’s been abused through sexual violation.

I COULDN’T TALK TO MY SON THAT WAY BECAUSE I DIDN’T REACH HIM WHEN HE WAS YOUNG. UNFORTUNATELY, MEN HAVE TO GO OUT AND FIND THEIR OWN FRAMEWORK ABOUT SEXUALITY.

SM: In your poem “Nitotem,” there seems to be a connection between suffering in silence at residential school and eruptions of violence back in the community. The young boy in the poem is shown bleeding from his ears after a beating from Sister Superior, unable to hear and isolated by that experience. He is further isolated by sexual abuse depicted in the haunting lines: “inside his chest the breath burst / pain, pleasure, shame. Shame” (ll. 23–4). That shame ultimately seems a catalyst to the grown boy’s raping of women “on the reserve” (ll. 25). Would you comment on this relationship among silence, shame, and violence?

LH: Well, they don’t know how to love after a while, or their perception of sexuality is so askew that they don’t know how to go about it. A kind of sabotage takes place when they are given goodness because they feel that they’re undeserving. And that happens to females too. It’s so demoralizing to have been on the receiving end of the sexual abuse. I know of men who have been sexually abused by women, and it’s horrific. They don’t know how to love sexually with the tenderness that is required to have a fulfilling act. So I think that’s when the violence is like, “I’ll fix you for doing this to me, for fucking up my life.” I think the same dynamics happen with women who’ve been sexually abused by men. Sex becomes a tool for power, which is a form of sexual violence.

SM: How do you feel the residential school system has changed understandings of gender in Indigenous communities and in Cree communities specifically?

LH: They don’t understand it. Priests are still living in skirts and implementing celibacy, which is abnormal. I know there are people who choose celibacy just because they are asexual, they’re not interested, but very few people are. So, in my view, they haven’t come to terms with it. I mean, the Pope’s still preaching about procreation and putting his foot down on abortion. He doesn’t understand the woman’s physique or the woman’s psyche in terms of these choices.

When I was pregnant with my second child—and she taught me lots and lots of lessons—we ended up losing her. My husband and I were happily married, but he was starting medical school the day we lost her. And I struggled with the idea of aborting that child, and I didn’t share that with my husband. It was unspeakable, even to me. But in the end, I just decided I had to live with me and I couldn’t do it and I would just accept the consequences regardless of how the birth affected me. In the end, she chose to leave us and die shortly after birth. She wasn’t full term. But how can a man understand that in a church when he probably hasn’t even talked to a woman about those circumstances?

SM: There are many examples of male violence in your poetry, often perpetrated by male parental figures against mothers in front of a female child. Why is it important to recognize the impact such violence has on both the mother and the child simultaneously?

BECAUSE OF THE HISTORICAL IMPACT OF SETTLEMENT, THEIR LIVELIHOOD IS TAKEN AWAY. THE IMPOSITION OF LAWS MAKES IT DIFFICULT FOR ABORIGINAL MEN TO GO HUNTING, ESPECIALLY IF YOU DON’T HAVE STATUS. SO WHERE CAN THEY PROJECT THAT RAGE?

LH: Back in my mother’s era, they had no resources. They didn’t have an Interval House; they weren’t taught the cycle of family violence. There was a conspiracy of silence in the community. There was shame attached to it. My mother, in her late nineties, recovered from it. The bitterness simply stayed.

And in terms of the child who’s witnessed that, there’s post-traumatic stress. The physical violence may not have been subjected to her, but certainly the post-traumatic stress, it almost takes a lifetime to recover from. And some women never do. They go right back into a relationship that subjects them to violence because that’s all they know. They don’t know how to go and get that clean loving.

And in terms of the men, because of the historical impact of settlement, their livelihood is taken away. The imposition of laws makes it difficult for Aboriginal men to go hunting, especially if you don’t have status. So where can they project that rage? They don’t have another livelihood or proper education to support their families, which was what happened to my father. And when they were being successful farmers, Indian Affairs took away their implements because they were in competition with white farmers. Again, where do they put that rage and where do they get the money to sustain what they’ve been trying to do, which is provide for their families and for themselves and to pick up a different lifestyle? So the rage accumulates and the closest place that they have to expel that rage is within their immediate family. It becomes internalized. That family violence becomes laterally projected within the community.

SM: There’s a section of Blue Marrow in which the speaker discusses her “Nameless papa”: “I can not name him. / Will not name him. My poor father. / He is many fathers” (80). The poem speaks from the child’s perspective to an elderly father, who has clearly been a source of great violence in the family, yet the grown child seeks to understand that father’s actions, working to—in the words of the poem—“bury your fist, my father, my tongue / a willow whipping your clenched hands. I cry / for a hundred blessings to wash your grimacing face” (84). It’s so much easier to have a villain figure. But in your poetry, there’s such attentiveness to the complex conditions from which violence erupts. In this section from Blue Marrow, the speaker has compassion for the father even as that father’s sense of dehumanization has informed his acts of violence toward the family.

LH: There needs to be an understanding and people need to differentiate this within themselves. They need to differentiate the person—which is the being, the human being—and the behaviour. Behaviour can be changed and the healthiness of that perception can be taken on. It can be different. And I know so. But it depends on how courageous that psyche is willing to be, to accept that they’ve already done damage. And part of the undoing of that damage is to honour it and say, “Yes, I did that and I beg to be forgiven.” And self-forgiveness has to occur as well as the recipient’s forgiveness. They might not get that, but self-forgiveness is ultimately a big thing, and that can only work if they don’t repeat that pattern. Hence self-respect is gained.

PART OF THE UNDOING OF THAT DAMAGE IS TO HONOUR IT AND SAY, “YES, I DID THAT AND I BEG TO BE FORGIVEN.” AND SELF-FORGIVENESS HAS TO OCCUR AS WELL AS THE RECIPIENT’S FORGIVENESS.

SM: In the words of acknowledgement and gratitude at the end of The Crooked Good, you write that you “offer this story as a way to go inward, so that one may go forward perhaps a little more intact. That is all” (135). How can poetry specifically and art more generally help an audience take an introspective look and thereby become more whole, more balanced, more well?

LH: Well, you study it. You’re astute. And this is what I expect good art and good writing to do for me. When I can see myself in a written work, then I say, “Aha, somebody’s able to articulate what I’ve been feeling and what I’ve been doing. Now that I can see it in print”—whether it’s in a photograph or a painting or a song—I say to myself, “Now I recognize the dynamic, what can I do about it?” So the research begins for me, whether it’s in book form, whether I’m talking to others, like it’s, “How did you do that? I recognize this, how did I do…?” And it’s very painful. And really good art is like a portal, where it’s an opening for you for recognition in order to take some self-responsibility and go, “Okay, I recognize this and I’m not alone and I know it’s happening to others. Now the question is how do I get to refining my own psyche to health?”

SM: Young Indigenous men, at this moment, tend to be a hard audience to reach with poetry. How can the principles of poetic introspection find that particular audience, an audience that is unlikely to gravitate toward a book of written poetry?

LH: One movie that really fine-tuned it for me and really showed how horrific it is and how we could reach people was Once Were Warriors. It demonstrated to me the community of violence, what it did to the people. And film can probably do it better than poetry.

Poetry only reaches those who are literate. I go in the community, so I’m able to talk to my poetry and, because of my background in social work and addictions and my own personal work, I can personalize it, and I can teach them how to read it and I can show them the way. But whether or not they choose the way is a different thing. And I just find they’re really a tough bunch, in particular on the reserves that I’ve been to, and it’s different from one reserve to another. I may have a respectful adolescent audience on one reserve and a downright degrading one on another. And it’s a good thing that I don’t internalize it and can give it back to them and show it to them because I know how to do that. I’m a bit of a coyote. But a person who’s not prepared for that… I mean, I know a lot of unhealthy poets and a lot of unhealthy artists—it would destroy them because art doesn’t heal you. It’s your own action and process and insight and willingness that heals you. I mean, there’s great artists all over the world and ancient artists that have died of alcoholism or self-inflicted wounds or some sort of suicide. Their art never healed them. It was their process. Like Patrick Lane in his last book, There is a Season, it was in the garden, the retrospection, the willingness to face his demons that showed him the recovery back to art. It wasn’t art itself that healed him.

ART DOESN’T HEAL YOU. IT’S YOUR OWN ACTION AND PROCESS AND INSIGHT AND WILLINGNESS THAT HEALS YOU.

SM: That’s powerful. And it’s almost stopping me in my tracks because that’s a central issue that I’m trying to consider in this whole project: what is the connection among the artistic process, the art object, the audience, and ultimately, I guess, healthier ways of being. And what occurs after engagement with the art object seems to be key.

LH: I had an excellent psychiatrist and I had an excellent psychologist and I was privileged to work with fine elders. They worked me really hard, and so I expect that of others. Like, don’t give me that “I’m healed” bullshit. You know, I hear a lot of that and I’m going, “Oh yeah, yeah.” I can say that I am relatively healed, but, boy, I can get suckered too. And so I know that I still have issues, and thank God I do otherwise I’d quit growing.