Make It Innu
4 August 2015
'We are rare
we are rich
like the land
we dream.'
'Tshissinuatshitakana' / 'Message Sticks', Josephine Bacon
It's midnight in May and I'm floating in a swimming pool under palm trees and stars in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with Josephine Bacon, poet, lyricist and force of nature from the Innu First Nations people of Quebec, asking her what she'd like to see or do when she comes to Edinburgh in August.
'Trois choses, Rachelle! Les montagnes, les poets gaeliques et le Scotch!'
Why Haiti? That's rather a detour from the main story (but we'll come back to it). In keeping with this year's theme of 'Trading Stories', the Edinburgh International Book Festival, the Scottish Poetry Library and the Maison De La Poesie in Montreal have created a project: an invitation for Innu First Nation and Quebecois francophone writers, and Scotland based poets to work together, translating, interpreting and responding to one another's work. Three Innu writers, poets Josephine Bacon and Natasha Kanape Fontaine, novelist Naomi Fontaine and Montreal poets Jonathan Lamy-Beaupre and Samuel Mercier, and poets Anna Crowe, JL Williams and myself will be presenting two events at EIBF in August, followed by a visit to Montreal for the Festival De La Poesie in May 2016.
Preparing for this collaboration has entailed an attempted cramming about the issues First Nation culture, in Innu nomadism, in images of caribou and partridge, rivers and canoes, drums, leather straps, snow and the North. And also survival, preservation of the Innu way of life, for the fight for it to exist today, alongside Quebecois culture. I am becoming slowly aware of the history of First Nation politics: of the 'emancipation of the savage', of protests against hyrdroelectric dams in the Territoiries, of the horrors of residential schools and disappeared women.
The more I read, the more aware I am of how little I know. And I am also aware of the dangers of conflating poetry and anthropology. These are three very different women, and reading their words has to go far beyond ethnographic curiosity. Josephine has worked as a cultural guide between Innu and Quebecois culture before publishing her first book of poetry at the age of 62. Naomi's novel Kuessipan, published when she was 23, is an extraordinarily layered portrayal of Innu life, with, to me, a very real tension between the cultural life and the individual life, particularly around the issue of children. Natasha is a self described 'poete. Militante activitise, droits autochtones environnementaux' as well as slam poet, visual artist and winner of the poetry prize of the Society of Francophone Writers of America in 2013. These are indivuals, with indivdual concerns, passions, angers, joys and sadnesses, personal and raw. And while understanding the context is important, essential, the best and deepest and truest introduction to a series of issues in which history has been written, erased, scratched over and retold, is through these writings.
But for the moment, with all this talk of Arctic and snowshoes, of caribou hunting and frozen lakes, there is Haiti. And there is heat.
Josephine, Natasha and Naomi (and me, and around thirty other poets, artists, performers, musicians, academics and publishers) are here as part of 'Les Nuits Amerindiennes', a five day festival of poetry, performance and lectures organised by Memoire D'encrier. Memoire D'encrier is a Montreal based publishing house that specialises in First Nation literature – can even claim some credit for the rise in First Nation literature in Quebec over the past ten years. It's run by Rodney Saint-Eloi, a flamboyant and warm hearted bear of a man, and Camille Robitaille, quick and slight and constantly clutching laptop, clipboard or phone, trying to wrangle us to minibuses and pickup trucks to move from hotel to various venue. As the Festival unwinds, plans change, programmed events are delayed or cancelled, venues move. Port-au-Prince is a wreck of a city, rubble and middens on the streets, and people, street stalls, cars, bikes, tuk tuks everywhere. We learn to go with the flow.
One of the aims of the Edinburgh-Montreal-Innu project is to bring the experience of the non-anglophone literary world to Scotland. Here, in Haiti, I'm the stranger. I'm the only one from Europe. The rest of the party, bar one or two, are francophone, from Quebecois, Wendaki, Innu, Cree. Most people have some English, which is good, because my Belfast schoolgirl French is struggling to keep up with the Quebecois – never mind Creole – accent (I wonder a few times if it's what Dundonians may sound like to non-native English speakers). I can manage in basic, quotidan conversation – 'yes, I slept well, okay, I'll get in the bus, where are we going, what's next? My name is Rachel and I'm here to listen, to observe, to learn.' I can understand the first sentence or two of a reply but by the time my brain has translated that to English, formulated a reply and translated that back into French, I've missed the last 40 seconds of the conversation. In group situations, I'm lost, or laughing a beat after everyone else. I seem to have a developed a slightly panicked lemur-like expression which means 'I'm so sorry, please repeat'.
There are other ways to communicate. Smiles, kind, enquiring or generous eyes, inclusion. Sharing food, wine, cigarettes, dancing. The universal fact that any group of people – and particularly a bunch of performer poets – stuck in a hot minibus in traffic for long enough will inevitably form a band (A Tribe Called Sauge, touring globally 2016). Exasperation at waiting. Trickster spirits. A willingness to jump into the deep end of the pool, to get in the back of the pickup truck to drive through the night air of Port-au-Prince. Wondering at fresh mangoes and quick lizards, turquoise blue on walls and the neatness of school uniforms, rubble and midden in the streets. And politics and poetry and performance.
Yes, I have performance. I'm lucky in this (and stubborn, to a degree, and impatient to connect). I've watched the others perform and by the second day, venture to ask if I may present a poem, albeit in English. Camille enthusiastically agrees. It works. It cuts through formalities. We're together. We know how performance works, the risk and the nerves, and the desire to lay bare, and to connect. We got that. By the last day, one of the Montreal poets Jonathan Lamy-Beaupre has worked with me on a translation of one of my poems into French, and we perform together at the Parc de Martissant, and at Fokal, to a whooping audience under a huge roof, and open at the sides to the night.
Are the Kids Alright/Est-ce que les enfants vont bien?
La ville est brisée
et nous ne savons pas quoi faire.
The city is broken
and we do not know what to do.
La ville est brisée
et nous nous cachons derrières les larmes chaudes de frustration
d’un enfant dont les jouets
ont été arrachés tout à coup.
The city is broken
and we hide behind the hot frustrated tears
of a child whose toys
have been snatched without warning.
La ville est brisée
et nous ne savons pas quoi faire.
Nous ne parlons pas votre langue.
Et n’avons pas entendu votre histoire.
The city is broken
and we do not know what to do.
We do not speak your language
and we have not heard your story.
(poème de Rachel McCrum, 2012; traduit de l’anglais par Jonathan Lamy, mai 2015)
For a full list of Rachel's performances during August and over the various Festivals, click here.
Innu Poetry From The Canadian Tundra
EIBF, Charlotte Square
Saturday, 29 August, 11am, & Monday, 31 August, 3.45pm
£10 (£8)
