Griffin Poetry Prize contender tackles racism in westerns
TORONTO — While the western continues to fascinate modern-day storytellers and audiences, Jordan Abel is troubled by the trend.
“It’s something that I can’t ever be a part of because of how deeply problematic it is for indigenous peoples,” said the Nisga’a writer, who hails from Vancouver and lives in Castlegar.
“I think the difficulty for me with that was realizing this, but also seeing how other people are willing to look past that. They’re willing to fully embrace this genre that’s super-problematic, that’s super-racially charged and colonially charged. They have these positions where they never really think about why it might be difficult for indigenous peoples.”
Abel used an unconventional collaborative effort to explore the western in Injun (Talonbooks). The long poem about racism and the representation of indigenous peoples is nominated for the $65,000 Griffin Prize, to be awarded in Toronto tonight.
The painstaking creative process involved Abel constructing the text from 91 western novels in the public domain, from writers spanning the 17th to 20th centuries.
After assembling the novels into one mammoth file, he searched for the word “injun,” finding 509 results. He separated out the sentences, which he cut up and reassembled in varying ways to craft his poetic work.
“The main conceptual framework that ties it all together is appropriation,” said Abel, who is completing his PhD at Simon Fraser University with research focused on digital humanities and indigenous literary studies.
“The texts that I’m drawing from are appropriated. The book has my name on the cover, but it’s actually a multiauthored book that’s written by me and 20 other authors and contains those 91 novels. I think that the elements of appropriation in my book are meant to comment on how appropriation functions as a mechanism of colonialism, and I think it also responds to cultural appropriation. There’s a lot of layers there.”
The layers aren’t just metaphorical. Abel uses a linguistic concept known as a concordance line, in which sentences are arranged with the target word aligning in the middle. He makes use of this technique to highlight derogatory terms used to describe indigenous peoples.
“It’s very difficult to avoid the reaction because there’s so much hate behind all of that racism. It is difficult to read,” Abel said. “I think that’s why I did the project in the first place. It is really effective.
“Even though a bunch of those books were published a while ago, that kind of racism and that discourse hasn’t gone anywhere. The western is still just as present now, perhaps even more so, because people feel a real kind of nostalgia for that genre.
“I hope that it starts a conversation or a dialogue about, one, how racism is structured and deeply entrenched in our sense of identity and belonging to this land, and, two, about how indigenous peoples have been represented, both in historical and contemporary moments.”
Joining Abel among the Canadian contenders for the Griffin Poetry Prize are Saskatchewan-raised, Ottawa-based poet Sandra Ridley for Silvija (BookThug) and Violet Energy Ingots (Wave Books), by Toronto-based Hoa Nguyen.
There is a separate $65,000 prize for the international Griffin recipient. The finalists are Jane Mead for World of Made and Unmade, In Praise of Defeat by Abdellatif Laabi (translated from French by Donald Nicholson-Smith), Alice Oswald for Falling Awake and Denise Riley for Say Something Back.