MASCULINIDANS-28

15 September 2011

Conversation between Joanne Arnott and Sam McKegney at Sam’s home in Kingston, Ontario.

JOANNE ARNOTT (Métis) is a poet, essayist, and arts/community organizer originally from Manitoba who has resided in Vancouver for over two decades. She is a founding member of the Aboriginal Writers’ Collective West Coast and The Aunties’ Collective, and she is mother to six children, all born at home. Her collections of poetry include Wiles of Girlhood (Press Gang Publishers, 1991), My Grass Cradle (Press Gang Publishers, 1992), Steepy Mountain Love Poetry (Kegedonce Press, 2004), Mother Time: New and Selected (Ronsdale Press, 2007), A Night for the Lady (Ronsdale Press, 2013) and Halfling Spring (Kegedonce Press, 2014). Her non-fiction works include Breasting the Waves: On Writing and Healing (Press Gang Publishers, 1995).

SAM MCKEGNEY: Your collection of poetry, Mother Time, not only tracks the relationship between parent and children but it also recognizes the difficulties of growing up. I wonder if you could reflect on how poetry, throughout your career, has allowed you to investigate growing up, what growing up means.

JOANNE ARNOTT: I’m very strongly opinionated and also extremely shy—or I have been. And so, poetry and other kinds of writing have been a really necessary outlet for me. And as a poor person and not much in the academy, I need an outlet to express my level of thinking and my need to process intellectually what I see around me. If I’m living in a rooming house and everybody else is alcoholic and in the hole, and pursuit of life is getting the next cigarette, then writing becomes a lifeline, a way for me to be fully myself no matter what my outer circumstances. So I associate my writing with my ability to maintain my freedom as a human being, whatever or however adverse the circumstances. I think it’s a really stabilizing thread in my life.

I have this idea of poetic information, that there’s a kind of a multidimensionality that humans have, we interact on many levels at once. Poetry is a way, like a vehicle, to capture many more dimensions of a person’s experience, and share those in the absence of the other. So then when you pick up my poetry and you read it, then you’re able to access me in a multidimensional way. So what I mean by that is, how I feel in my body, what my emotions are, what my thoughts are, what my perspective is. I think that all of that can be captured and delivered. And there’s also a lot of spirit in that as well.

SM: And how has that vehicle allowed you to explore your own process of growth?

JA: Of course, my primary experience of violence and being not safe is my family. And throughout my parenting years this has been a challenge, and a path of discovery. I started off going, you know, “I’m not gonna do what they did. I’m gonna be way better and smarter and so on,” but there’s this idea of blueprinting. It’s like you can only know what you know and so I didn’t, of course, in my twenties, have great insight into how my parents’ lovely ideal wish for a great family, how that faltered. And so, despite all my best intentions and my snobbery, I ended up in a very similar situation, because I didn’t understand how they got there. All of us had been growing up and coping in a stripped community, or denuded way, and this is one result of the diasporic push. Then I came to a point when I looked around and saw, “Okay, well, my kids are afraid of me. Now what do I do?” ’Cause this was not how it was supposed to be, right? Then accessing community in a different way, learning how to do that, and what the benefits might be.

It’s like this: in where I was and am living there’s a lot of resources for First Nations families in crisis. So, I just threw myself upon those resources and learned a lot, and through those connections and through some of my writing friends and allies, I was able to, on the one hand, grieve the disaster, and on the other hand, continue to hold on to this insight: that my children have a right to be mothered by me, and I have a right and a responsibility to mother them, and not give in to this huge push to separate “inadequate” parents from their children. Because the reality is, the move is to take all the little babies from these “fucked-up” people and give them to, you know, white Christian middle-class families. And so that does not interrupt that sense of denuding and destroying community. It just feeds right into it.

I also think it’s really depleting for people to hold on to some idealized version of reality and reject where we actually are. So, it’s kind of a balancing act between acceptance of what is and maintaining aspirations and hope and optimism and enjoyment and all those things that make life worthwhile.

THE PAST, IT HAS A STRONG INFLUENCE ON THE FUTURE, BUT IT DOESN’T OWN THE FUTURE.

SM: Your work demonstrates a real attraction to fantasy and magic, but always alongside a pull back to realities. Are there ways of ensuring a balance between a vision for something better and simultaneously recognition of what’s around us? Or can one become sort of unmoored?

JA: Speaking personally, it’s easy to become unmoored. What I vision, no matter how outlandish or different from where I’m at right now, it’s something that I can realize and what I have to honour is the distance... I have to build up earthwork underneath the dream until that dream is resting on the earth, and that’s the reality that we’ve come to. If I’m not happy with where I’m at right now, I still have this goal, I have this vision. And when I’ve accomplished something, it’s very good to look back and go, “Well, you know, a year ago or three years ago, this was an undreamed-of possibility. And then it became this wisp of a cool idea—and now, here I am!” And just to honour the journey that I and we are making in an ongoing way. There’s a lot of fatigue and a lot of heartbreak and discouragement that people can feel, which is legitimized by the reality, but it’s also not the whole story. The past, it has a strong influence on the future, but it doesn’t own the future.

SM: Do you feel that shame and stigma shape ideas about gender?

JA: Some of the very strong impressions that I have of my father are from a period of time when he was single parenting me and my younger siblings, and just this person so deeply weighted down with shame because nothing had worked out the way he thought it would. And he had a lot of anger-management problems and—what would you call it—a kind of a male arrogance, which he ended up having to pay a high price for in terms of losing a relationship that he valued very much. So he didn’t have the good teachings that he needed to be who he really is on a day-to-day level and be able to maintain and nourish the relationships that he really wanted to maintain and nourish. So that’s really tragic. And that is a fundamentally different way of looking at a “Capital ‘A’ Abuser” than is current in a lot of mainstream or settler analysis.

I was at a gathering in the early ’90s on Hecla Island in Manitoba, a woman’s gathering, and I arrived with some big questions that I needed answers for. I had been participating in a healing circle with this very lovely Cree man, very charismatic healer, and I had just found out that he was secretly sexually abusing some of the women who were coming to him for help within a ritual or spiritual healing context. He was using that context as a shelter for sexual abuse. Consult a white feminist about what I should do in this situation, and its like, “Speak back! Name him, shame him,” you know, “Get the name out there, and publicize all around!” And then talking to Chrystos, who was also at that time at the gathering, she had a completely different approach. Her insight was, “we’re all damaged.” So there has to be a more subtle approach to setting and maintaining healthy boundaries in a way that doesn’t increase the shame. If I feel ashamed of something I’ve done, that means that I’ve disappointed myself, I haven’t used my power to my own best advantage and to the best advantage of the people around me. And so rather than trying to separate this world into this false reality of “those are the bad guys and these are the good guys,” we need to find ways to cherish and nourish people and the relationships between people and, at the same time, to eliminate all the cruel ways that we’ve learned how to mistreat one another.

WHAT AM I BUT THIS LANDSCAPE OF DIFFERENT INFLUENCES AND ECHOES AND OPINIONS? AND THE STRENGTHS OF THE PEOPLE AROUND ME, THEIR INFLUENCE ON ME IS PROFOUND.

SM: That really relies on recognition of the complex interconnectedness among people—the inadequacy, I guess, of the radical discreteness of individualism.

JA: What am I but this landscape of different influences and echoes and opinions? And the strengths of the people around me, their influence on me is profound, so I have to work very hard to make shields between me and anybody who’s in my space—including the cat! I’m very sensitized to and connected with my environment and that includes all the forms of life—it’s indiscriminate. So, you and I are not related by blood and we’ve only known each other a couple of years, but if you’re in a room with me and my sister or my mother, you’re not less real to me, and I may understand where someone within my so-called nuclear family, where they’re coming from in a more predictive way just from longer exposure, but they don’t actually have an impact on me before you do. It’s all simultaneous, it’s all happening, it’s all in flow.

My mom was this working-class, white Catholic woman. She’s got this whole brood of kids and the Monsignor comes to town in Winnipeg and starts bad-mouthing all those poor Catholics, and it’s like, well, we’re not allowed to use birth control, we’re not allowed to do this, we’re not allowed to do that, and now you’re saying it’s our fault—so this kind of class shaming within that religious context. So she really changed her life under the influence of the different feminists, like Betty Friedan and these different voices in the late ’60s and early ’70s. So she really defined herself as an individual; she “reclaimed her power,” and completely, or incompletely, abandoned her role as a life-bearer, giver of life, and leader of her family. Because it wasn’t valued by those early feminist voices, it wasn’t valued at all. So she divested from this very frustrating, very debilitating role as an unloved mother of an unloved family in an unloving society to build up a sense of herself as a worker.

When I was a young woman, I wrote a play and I showed it to my mom, and she was quite indignant because I was reflecting my experience of violence at home in a very abstract piece that was basically, you know, “The Violent Man, The Violent Woman.” But my mom looked at this and she was horrified. She said, “It’s the man’s fault, violence is always the man’s fault.” So I have seen a lot of men walking with the burden of shame for all of the violence in families or in the world. You know, the light falls on it one way and you go, “Yeah! Yeah, that’s right.” And then the light falls on it the other way and you go, “Well, women are not powerless, women are not just the row of knick-knacks on the mantelpiece. We’re the ones that are raising the children or not, we’re the ones that are reproducing…” We reproduce culture whether we want to or not. And so if the culture, as happened to me, involves a lot of non-gentle treatment and non-respectful treatment, then that is going to recur no matter how clever I think I am. When the push comes to shove then of course I’m going to mistreat because that’s what I’ve learned, and if I don’t have a strong centre and a strong sense of safe place within myself, then that is going to come out in my own behaviour. So it really doesn’t work for me to be really judgmental about anybody for anything.

My father was the only adult in my life that I wasn’t separated from, he did not take off, he did not abandon me. But he also did not always treat me with the love and respect that I actually kinda woulda liked, [Laughter] if I may put it that way. So there’s that sense that’s left strong confusion around “What is love?” for me. So his first marriage ended as a disaster. I was one of the eight children who were from that first marriage and about half of us stayed with him and the others kind of went to different families, parts of the family, or became street kids or whatever. Eventually, just as I was leaving his household, he started a new relationship with the woman who became my stepmother and who’s the mother of my youngest brother. I wasn’t living with him in all of those years and there were unkind moments, challenges, but I see in the arc of his story a kind of a redemption narrative. My father died a couple years ago, and most of us gathered to be with him and, for the first time in most of our lives, to gather as a family within a community. I was able to have really intimate conversations with most of my siblings. And talking to my youngest brother, his experience of our dad was just so completely different than mine that they might as well have been two separate men. He said that our dad gave him a spanking once and he deserved it. And it’s like, this is the man who threw me up against the wall and threw my siblings up against the wall, kicking everybody, beating with straps, temper tantrums all over the place. When you see a small child having a temper tantrum—as an adult man, he was like that. But my brother saw none of that, right?

So my dad had this complete disaster, this nuclear family that went “Kaboom!” And then he regrouped and he had this second marriage. And I’m very very grateful for the second marriage because there was a lot of inappropriate, criminally inappropriate things going on, which stopped because of the arrival of my stepmother, because she saw him as a good man, she saw him as really sexy and handsome and a real catch and he wanted to live up to that. My stepmother spent the last ten years of her life in a nursing home—I think it was Alzheimer’s—so he spent the last ten years of her life going every day and feeding her and just this kind of a beautiful expression of loyalty. So in all the phases of his life, I associate my dad with loyalty. This is kind of a profound family man in that way. But how it was expressed in different ways at different times, it shows a learning arc.

SM: The first two stanzas of “Into Manhood” read:

Although it seems to me

when young men arrive

grown men turn away

and there is no hand

into which I can pass you

now you are come a man

except your own

(Mother Time 128)

Could you reflect on that poem and also just the struggles of coming into a sense of what appropriate manhood might be?

JA: That poem kind of reads like a prayer, but it’s also very literal. There was a period when my oldest son—I’m trying to think of the age, like fourteen, fifteen, in that age range—and time after time, both my son’s father and my then-husband, the boys would come and then the men would get up and leave. The men just didn’t have a way of being comfortable with men when they were young, and so they did not have a way of receiving the young men. And so they would literally get uncomfortable and they’d get up and they’d walk away. And through this period of I don’t know how many years, I kept going back and back to this.

And with my eldest son, his major challenge to be the person he can be… well, again, it’s a story of loyalty. It’s like he got into drugs and theft because of his loyalty to this little set of teenage boys, who are variously unhappy for various reasons, and they’re bonding. He described this wonderful place where he’d been staying, where it was just this kind of a co-operative dream and they all help each other out; if you need something, they’ll get it for you. And then a year or two down the road, it was like, “well, this is not such a great place!” And so it just depends, you can describe things in very different ways depending on how you’re looking at it and what’s important to you and what sides of it stand out to you. He had a year or so between when he was caught trying to rob someone and when he had to face the judge. So he used that time to withdraw from drugs and start to regain his health and start to find a way to be himself in a way he felt good about, right? But he got into trouble because he’s got a capacity to love. Because he’s got empathy for others.

So now he takes a lot of pride in being a worker guy, much like my dad. He works in demolition, strategic deconstruction. [Laughter] So anyways, for him, his brand or his path of masculinity is very, very worker-guy oriented. He’s happy using his body. He expresses his creativity through music and visual art and whatever, but he’s a highly social person, you know? And, like my dad, the defining part is the work, that’s the grounding meditation.

For my second son, he’s a much more feminine kind of a man. He’s Two-Spirited. And has struggles around that, for sure. Once my second son had moved out of the house, when I would go to the train station and if I thought I saw him—you know how your eye’s attracted to someone that you’re missing—the people that drew my eye as maybe him were all young Asian men. So there’s a way that has developed in popular culture—and this is West Coast, right?—through social and aesthetic cues around beautiful manliness that is quite urban, that my second son has been strongly attracted to and patterns himself on, whether he knows that or not.

So my third son is eighteen. In the moment, if you saw a picture of him, you would think “Creedence Clearwater Revival.” He looks like a southern rocker and tragically where he finds his joy is in performing as a poet. And I always say tragically because, to me, it’s like this vow of poverty. There’s some kind of mix-up in Catholicism where poverty equals goodness. It’s like, this is virtue. As my teeth come out, one by one, I resent that training more and more. It’s like, there’s got to be another way!

All of my kids are these creative dynamos, and I think, I think, they’re suffering much less than what I and my siblings experienced; you would have to ask them. Because even avoiding the obvious traps of alcoholism or battering relationships or those kinds of things, which I have for the most part avoided, there’s still so much intense, intense life force coming out. It’s like you need to be an open channel to this certain amount of energy that flows through you each day, and if you’re damming yourself up or dammed—doors are closed by others on your behalf—or you just learn the wrong ways of expressing that energy. I mean, I know they have all been marked, they all have experienced both depression and anxiety. And I don’t know how to magic-wand fix it for them. But I think that they all have, too, a real fundamental understanding of emotional literacy that their dad, my brothers, the men in my family never had. Or the women either.

In one of my later visits with my dad there was a moment there where the violence against women by men in our family, where I touched on that, and he seemed to be, like, “I don’t know what that could be.” Puzzled, like I was pointing out something unrecognizable. And so, there’s a way we have to have respect for real human limits. The image that I use is that there was a flat part to his brain, where he was not effectively taking in information. It’s not like you could condemn him for not dealing with reality when he just couldn’t process that. And that’s after a lifetime of both receiving and participating in and delivering traumatic anti-girl, anti-woman, and probably anti-him, anti-male, disrespect and violence—physically and psychically, abuse of different kinds and quantities. I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about is just the whole issue of trust. And for a person who has been many times traumatized and who has been raised by people many times traumatized, who were also raised by people many times traumatized, there is a feeling of, “How much can I bear? How much can I consciously know?” And you just have to have a feeling of generosity toward our human limits, that sometimes I just can’t know everything that I know.

SM: It appears from your descriptions like each of your sons has sought out ways of being creative that he can feel good about.

JA: I don’t want all my kids to end up on welfare because they’re too sensitized to spend eight hours with strangers, which has been a lot of my struggle, that need to be away from people because it’s just too psychically overwhelming to be out in the noise and the expectations. So I’m encouraging them to get out there and develop those psychic shields that will allow them to come and go, in public and in private spaces. And part of my challenge has been the fact that people have not always seen me and brought out their best behaviour, you know what I mean? So this whole caste thing, class and caste thing, shows the need for a strong counterbalancing community. As the boys are growing up, I’ve been able to have them have contact with men who are not abusive and who model Indigenous manhood. So I try not to reenact the extreme isolation that I grew up with. I wish it were easier.

PEOPLE HAVE NOT ALWAYS SEEN ME AND BROUGHT OUT THEIR BEST BEHAVIOUR, YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN? SO THIS WHOLE CASTE THING, CLASS AND CASTE THING, SHOWS THE NEED FOR A STRONG COUNTERBALANCING COMMUNITY.

SM: Thinking about Steepy Mountain Love Poetry, I want to ask about the importance of healthy forms of desire. Could you reflect on embodiment and sensuality?

JA: What you ask reminds me of something that I feel very good about, because we’ve talked a lot about what I’m not so happy about in terms of my… journey. One of the things that I’m quite unhappy about is that I was born in a hospital; my mom was drugged and I was bottle-fed. And that’s true of my siblings as well. And that my mother was born in a hospital and bottle-fed. And my brothers were circumcised. And so one of the very positive things that we’ve done, myself and my two ex-husbands, my team, has been to have support for me, in my childbearing, so that I would most of the time feel quite nourished rather than ignored or under attack. And a midwife’s nourishing support of childbearing at home. So there’s not heavy drugs, bright lights, this “the doctor delivers the baby.” Well, no, the doctor doesn’t deliver the baby! The baby and I have this kind of a dance and I deliver the baby or the baby decides to leave or it’s kind of a thunderstorm, right? An interpersonal thunderstorm. It’s like you can’t really say who decided what but we did this, right? And then none of the boys have been circumcised and neither has my daughter. Happily. I breastfed them for, I think, between twenty and thirty months each. So there was an attempt to vary how we live our life from what our immediate ancestors had done and what the prevailing culture really actively pressures you to conform to, and in a way that honours our bodies and honours our sons’ and daughters’ bodies so that, hopefully, ideally, they will be less fundamentally traumatized in those ways that you can’t ever put words to. It’s one thing to be held, to be a small body and be held by a benign large body, right?

SM: That space for safe intimacy, embodiment, and sensual connection is so important. I worry a lot now, for instance, about the fact that my kids are growing up in a generation in which many will learn about sexuality, in part, through Internet pornography.

JA: Yeah, that’s another of those ungovernables. It’s very delicate territory because I don’t think we’ve seen an end yet to the reality that young Aboriginal women walking down the street are seen as someone it’s safe to attack. That is just so. It permeates. I haven’t visited a region in Canada where that is not so. And that high level of permission to, like, “do your best,” you know? However oppressed you are as a man, if you’re not happy, just find one of these and “do your best.” So, I don’t know how any of us develop and maintain these good loving sensual, sexual relationships with men of our choosing without that being a factor—without the interference of having unwanted sex, without having extreme disrespect and extreme danger of a life-and-death scenario, having those things inflicted upon us. Whether we blame ourselves, you know—I shouldn’t have walked down that way, I should’ve… Well, too bad, I was too poor to buy a ticket, or whatever. So setting aside the question of who is to blame for any individual woman’s victimization, we could just sit back and say, “Holy fuck! That happens a lot, all across Canada, in every community.” And it happens systemically. And it happens that the repercussions are still not very much. And I think, within our lifetimes, that’s changed. But it still hasn’t changed dramatically.

SETTING ASIDE THE QUESTION OF WHO IS TO BLAME FOR ANY INDIVIDUAL WOMAN’S VICTIMIZATION, WE COULD JUST SIT BACK AND SAY, “HOLY FUCK! THAT HAPPENS A LOT, ALL ACROSS CANADA, IN EVERY COMMUNITY.” AND IT HAPPENS SYSTEMICALLY.

And because women and men are intimate—I remember a massage therapist telling me once that muscle and bone are intimate, and it’s true—and same with men and women. You know, it’s not like separate species. We grow in the same families. We’re berries cross-fertilizing. How do you measure the impact on my five-year-old son, his sense of masculinity, when I come into the house upset because my neighbour has threatened to cut me up and throw the pieces in the garbage? As a “joke”—and this was one of the good guys! A woman was murdered in our building and it was an Aboriginal woman and we think the murderer was an Aboriginal man. This was my neighbour’s way of handling the stress, through involving my son in some pretty menacing humour, targeting his mom. And so, all of us in this little community of people are profoundly affected by the death. We don’t have all the answers. And so, this particular guy, his way of dealing with that—I believe he may have been the person who found the woman’s body—so his way of kind of processing his visceral shock was to talk to my son about cutting me up and throwing the pieces in the garbage. To me it’s mind-numbing. It’s like, you could say, “Well, that was disrespectful.” But you know what? It’s a fuck of a lot more than disrespectful. The thing is every mother’s son has some part of the experience of the mother. Whether he has a conscious handle on what he’s witnessing or not, it’s all arriving, it’s a part of his life, too.

Anyway, back to your original question: happy sex is like a thunderstorm, and so is a temper tantrum. Two different ways to discharge all that life force, with different social consequences for everybody.