Monday, Oct 04, 1999
The Making of a Poem
- Uma Parameswaran |
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We are New Canadians
Come from faraway places,
The Alps and the Andes,
Essequibo and the Ganges,
Our memories, our faces
chiselled by ancient cultures
Whose race had been half run
long ere Cartier's had begun.
Canada's fields are sown with gold,
Some said, and so it is...
What we were not told, never guessed,
Is written on our children's faces
Furrowed with tears because of our race
Or colour, or tongue that stumbles
Over words so alien to the many places
from which we've come.
Will doors shut on them as on us?
Landlords', employers', neighbours'?
Have we come from the Niger and Luzon,
From the Antilles and Hongkong
To these vast empty spaces
Only to see our young ones' faces
Slapped by unthinking scorn,
Unfeeling barbs,
From closed fists and closed hearts?
(copyright)
A friend, Melody Doherty, who was working at the Immigrant Women's Association of Manitoba at the time, told me she was organizing a display of photographs and asked if I could write a poem that was about the theme of the exhibition which was "From Faraway Places." I wrote a poem "Under a sky more vast than any I've seen"; she liked it but said she wanted the words "from faraway places" in the poem. So I wrote "We are New Canadians." I see them as parallel poems, and at my readings I use the two as the envelope for a sequence of poems I select for each reading, placing one first and the other last. Which poem I place last depends on whether I want to leave the audience with a note of optimism or of warning. "Under a sky" has been used several times at the citizenship ceremony of immigrants taking their oath of Canadian citizenship; "We are New Canadians" has been used in various anthologies, and the Manitoba Mental Health Association Newsletter used part of it as a banner for different parts of their issue on immigrant health care. The two poems were also part of selections used in a photographic exhibition, and its accompanying volume called "Us and Them," edited by June Callwood, a pioneer journalist. When Callwood wrote to me to contribute to the exhibition that was to celebrate Canadian pluralism, I wrote back to say that a line from what I hope would become a poem came to me on reading her letter- "our rainbow smiles arcing from sea to sea" ("from sea to sea" is part of the national Canadian crest). She wrote back to say she was giving that line as "a mantra" to the photographers as they set out on their work.
Today, I thought I'd like to write on the making of the poem, "We are New Canadians." What appears above are parts of the poem, not the whole. The seed of a poem often comes easily, but to sow it, tend it, clear off the weeds, prune it with the care demanded by a bonsai - all that takes talent, craft and patience. By craft, I mean the work that goes into the conscious cultivation of artistic potential that results in a work of art.
Often a poem starts with a line that repeats itself in one's head; it is a combination of sound and meaning that makes it lodge in one's head and periodically come out like a cuckoo in a clock, demanding attention.
The line in this poem was "We are New Canadians," an assertion that we are Canadians and that Canada, entrenched in an old mould of "English-French" as founding cultures must have a place for New Canadians. So the line is hammered out as a beat to the poem, a backbone that holds it up.
"Come from far away places" is of course Melody's theme phrase.
Then came "Ganges", a word that I reflexively felt had to be there. Next came the search for other words around "Ganges." "Andes" came easily enough as something that rhymes with Ganges, and Alps is an obvious choice, since assonance is one of the tools of poetry-making. Then I knew I wanted a South American river. Poetry-making involves homework, not just gut feelings. I went to an atlas. I rejected Amazon because of its associations limiting it with a certain kind of woman. There were several rivers that sounded good - Orinoco,Gudrico, Capanoparo - but I chose Essequibo because it sounded just right with its sibilant esses and visual 'qui'. It was a serendipitous choice for it has resonance for many black Canadians, as Ganges has for Indians.
"Whose race had been half run," is a point that all non-whites need to make because Eurocentric consciousness often assumes that there were no civilizations outside Europe.
Then came the search for the name of a Canadian pioneer. Le Verendrye and Lagimodiere sounded great but are a bit of a mouthful - something a poet needs to take into account when
choosing words. Cartier sounded just right, with its French-Canadian associations.
When I read it at an Immigrant Association meeting (I was on the Board of IWAM for some years) an Italian friend asked why I had not chosen Cabot instead; and when I said it did not sound right, she said didn't I know it was Johann Cabot, to rhyme with Rimbeau? I said I would have used Cabot had I known it was pronounced Cabeaux, but on further thinking, decided I would not have used it because most readers would pronounce it to rhyme with rabbit or robot and I wouldn't be there to tell them the correct pronunciation. One has to take to into account the average reader's limitations, especially when dealing with the written rather than the
oral medium.
I could go on with the other stanzas, but I guess you get my drift - that poetry-making is like tending a bonsai, and one needs to be sensitive to sense and sound, and to be familiar with the subtle effects of denotation and connotation.
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