Extras for Episode #24

As mentioned in Episode #24, here are the referenced poems by Al Purdy and Margaret Atwood, as well as the image that I showed Mackenzy that racialized an epidemic in no uncertain terms! Fun times!

Caricature of cholera coming into the ports of Canada

“Disembarking at Quebec” by Margaret Atwood (in ‘The Journals of Susanna Moodie’)

Is it my clothes, my way of walking,
the things I carry in my hand
– a book, a bag with knitting –
the incongruous pink of my shawl

this space I cannot hear

or is it my lack
of conviction which makes
these vistas of desolation,
long hills, the swamps, the barren sand, the glare
of sun on the bone-white
driftlogs, omens of winter,
the moon alien in day –
time a thin refusal

The others leap, shout

Freedom!

The moving water will not show me
my reflection.

The rocks ignore.

I am a word
in a foreign language.

“Further Arrivals” by Margaret Atwood (in ‘The Journals of Susanna Moodie’)

After we had crossed the long illness
that was the ocean, we sailed up-river

On the first island
the immigrants threw off their clothes
and danced like sandflies

We left behind one by one
the cities rotting with cholera,
one by one our civilized
distinctions

and entered a large darkness.

It was our own
ignorance we entered

I have not come out yet

My brain gropes nervous
tentacles in the night, sends out
fears hairy as bears,
demands lamps; or waiting

for my shadowy husband, hears
malice in the trees’ whispers.

I need wolf’s eyes to see
the truth.

I refuse to look in the mirror.

Whether the wilderness is
real or not
depends on who lives there.

“Grosse Île” by Al Purdy (in ‘Naked With Summer in Your Mouth’)

Look, stranger, at this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers
– W.H. Auden

Look stranger
a diseased whale in the St. Lawrence
this other island than Auden’s
dull grey weather is dull grey
and an east wind brings rain
this Appalachian outcrop
a stone ship foundered in the river estuary

now in the care and keeping of Parks Canada
– a silence here like no mainland silence
at Cholera Bay where the dead bodies
awaited high tide and the rough kindness
of waves sweeping them into the dark –

Look stranger
at this other island
weedgrown graves in the thee cemeteries
be careful your clothes don’t get hooked
by wild raspberry canes and avoid poison ivy
– here children went mad with cholera fever
and raging with thirst they ran into the river
their parents following a little way
before they died themselves
– and don’t stumble over the tricycle
somehow overlooked at the last big cleanup
or perhaps left where it is for the tourists?

Look stranger
where the sea wind sweeps westward
down the estuary
this way the other strangers came
potato-famine Irish and Scotch crofters
refugees from the Highland clearances
and sailing ships waited here
to remove their corpses
and four million immigrants passed through
– now there’s talk of a Health Spa and Casino
we could situate our billboard
right under the granite cross by the river:
UNLIMITED INVESTMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Look stranger
see your own face reflected in the river
stumble up from the stinking hold
blinded by sunlight and into the leaky dinghy
only half-hearing the sailors taunting you
“Shanty Irish! Shanty Irish!”

gulp the freshening wind and pinch yourself
trying to understand if the world is a real place
stumble again and fall when you reach the shore
and bless this poisoned earth
but stranger no longer
for this is home