CIMOWINA1
my grandmother stories follow me,
spill out of their bulging suitcases
get left under beds,
hung on doorknobs
their underwear and love lives
sag on my bathroom towel racks
their Polident dentures in old cottage-cheese containers,
Absorbine Junior, Buckley’s and ‘rat toot’ take over my
bathroom counters
their bunioned shoes crowd my doorway
their canes trip me
and their Enquirers cover my coffee tables
their cold tea stains my cups and
teabags fill my garbage
their stories smell of Noxzema, mothballs and dried meat.
* * *
1 âcimowina: Cree for ‘everyday stories’
INSTRUCTIONS TO MY MOTHER
Never list the troubles of my eight brothers and sisters
before hearing mine.
Simply nod your head and say “uh huh,”
say “I hear you” a lot
and the rest of the time say nothing.
When I am sick,
don’t list your ailments
before I tell you mine. Instead
ask if I need a blanket and a book
and let me eat ice cream bars dipped in dark chocolate.
Never call
the names of all my sisters
before calling mine.
When I doubt my creativity,
avoid listing the talents of my siblings first.
Instead dig out my tenth-grade sketchbook and
homesick letters to you and
tell me they are remarkable and
that they make you cry.
And never tell me
I’m “getting grey,”
but that I am wise in skin,
sturdy-minded in bone and
beautywise in the ways of old women.
WHO KNEW THE MOONS WOULD REMEMBER
Who knew the moons
would line up in that order
on the fourth-night-dream.
Who knew times
named adult, named child
would collide and split
like wood under
memory’s heavy edge
the hatchet blade
cutting
then bone,
then flesh.
Three years old and
no memory of it but
the sharp side of mind
slices a woman into
trinity of
woman,
girl,
baby
the body-scarred, hard-skinned, grey-haired baby.
How could she ask to be cradled by her mother,
rocked to sleep,
suckled at her breast?
HE TAUGHT ME
to identify things outside myself:
the names of trees, animals, the weather
instead of his hand wedged inside of me,
the way he would prepare to fall
a tree.
only
the tree never was,
never grew beyond a sapling,
was never cut and limbed,
never skid over logging roads,
laid on the landing,
or hoisted onto a truck,
never travelled the raw road to the mill,
never seasoned in the yard, never
matured, or went through the peeler, or saw,
or the green chain,
or dryer, to end up as
someone’s rumpus-room wall.
he would never have suspected
that I’d find my way back
through clear-cuts, slash and burn,
along right-of-ways, cut-lines, nerve endings,
longitude and latitude,
along arteries, over skin plains,
and valleys of hair,
topographical features of flesh,
after surveying,
calibrating the fault lines.
he never would have guessed
that I’d become a forester of my own flesh.
YELLOW SUN DAYS OF LEAVING
yellowyellow sun, yellow sky your death, your going
on in my head like spruce falling in the bush or sun streaming through it
treestrees sun yellow heat open in this fall air reminds me of
all the leavings I’ve ever felt leaving sounds of songs that make me feel like
I’m looking in a mirror twenty years long
back into all the mirrors ever made
I miss you and all the love I wanted to come near I want to climb
other buried thoughts
let them drip sap-like from my body let them drip
bitter green and maple brown
crawl into the dry death of leaves, in you’re gone papa you’re gone
and I can’t believe you’re leaving leaving me with just your face your smell
of sweet and sour now that you’re so long in the leaving leaves
let go my grieving in those sun-yellow days of leaving
THE SKY IS PROMISING
Danny, come home
it’s sunny
the ponies are frisky,
the sawdust pile is high,
the spruce are whistling and
the day rolls out before us.
Danny come home to sky
the colour of juniper berries,
it’s summer and
time to twist binder twine
into long ropes to catch the ponies,
race them to the water trough,
listen for the sound of green
poplar leaves applauding
and dream of prizes,
hand-tooled saddles
big silver buckles and
our victories assure us
we have lived our sawdust days well.
Danny come home
the berries are ripe and we’ve collected
lard pails for picking. We’re driving
up the bench road to fill them
with sweet-smelling huckleberries.
We’ll meet for lunch, use the tailgate for a table,
dump our berries into buckets and
talk about the patch we found,
the deer we saw, the stream
we drank from or the bees’
nest almost stepped on.
Danny come home
the sawdust pile is high and
its slopes are sand
dunes we can slide down
at the bottom we can look
up and see only the crest
of sand and the promising sky.
Danny come home. The men
are riding skid horses into camp,
watering them at the trough,
we can get close, watch
their flared steaming nostrils
sink into the icy water,
see them chew the cool liquid,
teeth the size of our fingers,
throwing their heads back,
harness sounds rippling,
whinnying to the horses in the corral.
Danny come home we can
walk through the warm pine smells
to where the men are falling, we can
listen to them hollering orders
to the skid horses
whose heavy hind legs
lever the still logs
into a moving universe.
MADE OF WATER
I have carried your pain in metal buckets and
I still go for water every so often
and that water is so cold and hard
that it stings my hands, its weight makes me feel
my arms will break at the shoulders and yet
I go to that well and drink from it because
I am, as
you, made of water
AUTHOR’S AFTERWORD
* * *
Now, when I reflect on the poems generated and written throughout my thirties and gathered in A Really Good Brown Girl, I regard them with a sentiment like that of the Cree term, nitanis (“my girl”). My girl is kin. We survived the harsh experience of growing up native in rural small-town Alberta. Ideological repression, self-hatred, fear and anger are palpable in poems like “The White Judges” and “The Devil’s Language.” Naming the external forces that degrade self-worth has helped me – and continues to help me – survive.
Writing these poems not only provided a catharsis for me; they did so for many others who, after readings, approached me with pages of the collection dog-eared. They were often shy and hesitant but grateful that poems like “Leather and Naughahyde” made them feel affirmed in their experience of being Métis. I am humbled that the words I let bleed from me would strike another person who was also made to feel worthless, that the words would buoy someone else’s sense of self. Many of these poems were written in the mid ’80s, when I was reading Leslie Marmon Silko, Joy Harjo, Jeannette Armstrong, Lee Maracle, Louise Erdrich, James Welch and many other writers from Indigenous North and South America, from Africa, and from all over the colonized world, writers with whom I realized I had much in common. I was also keenly aware of African-American writers like bell hooks, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton and Zora Neale Hurston, who confirmed my sense of marginalization and isolation as an Indigenous woman. I felt comforted by their writing. Their candour and courage were the impetus for my title, A Really Good Brown Girl.
I have re-entered these poems many times, relived them through performances in bookstores, lecture theatres and at literary festivals across Canada, the United States, Aotearoa, Scotland and Italy. Because of their honesty they continue to sound and resound in me. In some of them is the bewildered, questioning voice of the little brown girl, while others embody the sly wise voice of the bossy older sister or auntie. In “Leather and Naughahyde,” nitanis is fearless; she embodies the voice of a younger, less wise but more confident poet. Articulating many of the expressions of confusion, sadness, hurt, anger and rage in poems such as “Memoirs of a Really Good Brown Girl” and “Squaw Poems” freed me to express other emotions and explore other longheld inhibiting beliefs. I recall hoping, when I was writing these poems, that if other Indigenous women read my work, they would feel safe enough to share how they were feeling and thinking.
I humbly review these younger poem-selves now, realizing that they will outlive me because they embody risks and are embedded in stories that readers can hear, taste, touch, smell and see; they have become a cache of family memory, of cultural oppression in small-town Alberta, of a time and place from which I’m amazed I got out alive.
I still write to live, and I hope through my writing and my teaching to give voice to many of the multiple Indigenous voices that are yet unheard.
Photo of Marilyn Dumont by Tara Nicholson
MARILYN DUMONT is the author of four collections of poems: A Really Good Brown Girl (winner of the 1997 Gerald Lampert Award), green girl dreams Mountains (winner of the Writer’s Guild of Alberta’s 2001 Stephan G. Stephansson Award), that tongued belonging (winner of the 2007 McNally Robinson Aboriginal Poetry Book of the Year and Aboriginal Book of the Year Award) and The Pemmican Eaters (published in 2015 by ECW Press). The original Brick Books edition of A Really Good Brown Girl was reprinted thirteen times, and selections from the book are widely anthologized in secondary and post-secondary texts. Marilyn has been Writer-in-Residence at the Edmonton Public Library and at numerous universities across Canada. In addition, she has been faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts’ Writing with Style and Wired Writing programs, as well as an advisor and mentor in their Indigenous Writers’ Program. She serves as a board member on the Public Lending Rights Commission of Canada, and freelances for a living.
LEE MARACLE is the author of numerous critically acclaimed works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, and is also the co-editor of numerous anthologies, including the award-winning My Home as I Remember. Her work has been anthologized worldwide. A mother of four and grandmother of seven, Maracle was born in North Vancouver and is a member of the Stó:Lō Nation. She is currently an instructor in both the Aboriginal Studies Program and the Centre for Indigenous Theatre at the University of Toronto, where she is also the Traditional Teacher for the First Nations House. A Distinguished Visiting Scholar and Writer-in-Residence at numerous institutions across Canada, Maracle’s achievements have been recognized with the Ontario Premier’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and an honorary doctorate from St. Thomas University. She has also been awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for her work promoting writing among Aboriginal youth.
BRICK BOOKS CLASSICS
1 Anne Carson, Short Talks
1 Introduction by Margaret Christakos
1 ISBN 978-1-77131-342-1 (January 2015)
2 John Steffler, The Grey Islands
2 Introduction by Adrian Fowler
2 ISBN 978-1-77131-343-8 (February 2015)
3 Dennis Lee, Riffs
3 Introduction by Paul Vermeersch
3 ISBN 978-1-77131-344-5 (March 2015)
4 Marilyn Dumont, A Really Good Brown Girl
4 Introduction by Lee Maracle
4 ISBN 978-1-77131-345-2 (August 2015)
5 Michael Crummey, Hard Light
5 Introduction by Lisa Moore
5 ISBN 978-1-77131-346-9 (September 2015)
6 Jan Zwicky, Wittgenstein Elegies
6 Introduction by Sue Sinclair
6 ISBN 978-1-77131-347-6 (October 2015)