A MOONLIT KNIFE
McClelland & StewartMarch 2020Selected by Jeremy Poynting
The Dyzgraphxst is not easy reading, and taking any extract from it fails to reveal its strengths as a collection, such as its carefully organised architecture across seven acts, each a distinctive contribution to the whole. Throughout the poem, the poetic “I”, the alter ego (Jejune), language, community, the contemporary world of climate disaster and the histories of imperial-capitalist rapacity that lie behind it are subjected to dismemberment and rememberment in challenging and revealing ways. If a good deal of Caribbean poetry has located itself and renewed the English tradition, poets such as Canisia Lubrin and Safia Sinclair, in the footsteps of Dionne Brand, explore the possibilities of a New World modernism in dynamic ways. — Jeremy Poynting
here – beginning the unbeginningowning nothing but that woundingsense of waking to speak as I would
after the floods, then, after women unlikeEve giving kind to the so-and-so, tryingto tell them it is time to be unnavigable,
after calling them back to whatthe tongue cuts speaking the thing ofthem rolled into stone
speaking I after all, after all theoriesof abandonment priced and displayed,the word was a moonlit knife
with those arrivantslifting their hems to dance, toelesswith the footless child they invent
(p. 17)
it is difficult to live in the dark, I knowsthe dark is difficult as abandoned artefactsabandoned artefacts like graveyards of ships
in the blueprint of wrecked wars, wrecked warsknown to Jejune as the eleven lost in DeepwaterHorizon, oil and gas, ignited for forty-eight hours
in sixty thousand gallons of the dark, permit an escapeto the engineers still alive and brave in this darkthen stop immediately, man, then hit I again
after eighty-four days a facsimile, be sure to offer milk thenask Jejune whether I will cry if you die, whether somethingof the pirates and all the ones they sold live (t)here still
de causa naturelle de causa nostra, lay I, now the younger one,bare in thoughts, bare in I-complicationsJejune does not want it paid in simple-tongue
but let I go, given the choice now to speakafter five hundred years of dysgraphialet I approach the witness stand in any chosen language,
let I bend into a touch of the supernatural, let that be allyou need to know, where the heart is bruised with unfeeling, to delay the organ’s devotion to devotion, is not belief, or it is
(p. 22)
refuse that entry into this collection,if all this sophistry is meaninglessspeech branching out of shipwreck
some altered sense, Jejune and I and i findthe highest point in the city, we rub our eyeswith Juniper and thought-of-states
merely recognizable by their vulnerable curvesinto nothing, or nothing of what was saidbefore survives, past a tug, not persuasive, but a tug
on exhausted neural membranescrossing streets, cutting a new ideogramfor volcanic jackdaws, all of the journey now
the fate of everything dubbed uncleanand we vote to enjoy the view that we know isindifferent to our love
Jejune, all these words are our dark twin anyway
(p. 41) ◉
Deepwater Horizon was a rig in the Gulf of Mexico. In 2010, an industrial accident caused the largest marine oil spill in history in which 11 workers on the rig were killed.
A deliberate misspelling of “jeune”, which means “young” in French, the name of Lubrin’s addressee “Jejune” plays with ideas of youth and identity.
The title of Lubrin’s book is inspired by academic Christina Sharpe’s concept of dysgraphia which refers to the narratives of pathology and criminology placed on Black people that are produced and spread by the media.