Celebrating Canada's 150th: March

This month's read focuses heavily on the reality of racism, both historically, and today: Injun by Jordan Abel.

Book Summary: Award-winning Nisga'a poet Jordan Abel's third collection, Injun, is a long poem about racism and the representation of indigenous peoples. Composed of text found in western novels published between 1840 and 1950 - the heyday of pulp publishing and a period of unfettered colonialism in North America -Injun then uses erasure, pastiche, and a focused poetics to create a visually striking response to the western genre.

After compiling the online text of 91 of these now public-domain novels into one gargantuan document, Abel used his word processor's Find" function to search for the word "injun." The 509 results were used as a study in context: How was this word deployed? What surrounded it? What was left over once that word was removed? Abel then cut up the sentences into clusters of three to five words and rearranged them into the long poem that is Injun. The book contains the poem as well as peripheral material that will help the reader to replicate, intuitively, some of the conceptual processes that went into composing the poem.

Though it has been phased out of use in our "post-racial" society, the word "injun" is peppered throughout pulp western novels. Injun retraces, defaces, and effaces the use of this word as a colonial and racial marker. While the subject matter of the source text is clearly problematic, the textual explorations in Injun help to destabilize the colonial image of the "Indian" in the source novels, the western genre as a whole, and the Western canon."
My Thoughts: I wouldn't really describe this book as a "fun" read, and I wouldn't recommend that you read it in a sitting.  Instead, this collection needs to be read in the context of Jordan Abel's exploration of language, and in bite-sized portions.  I got this book last October, and I've been dipping in and reading bits once a week or so since then.  Every time I visit this collection, I notice something new or I'm disturbed by something that I didn't see before.   Here's how the main poem "Injun" begins:

a)
he played injun in gods country
where boys proved themselves clean
dumb beasts who could cut fire
out of the whitest¹ sand
he played english across the trail
where girls turned plum wild
garlic and strained words
through the window of night
he spoke through numb lips and
breathed frontier²

In the second half of the collection, subtitled "Notes" Jordan Abel explores some of the other words that show up frequently in western novels.  He cuts out the line containing that word and lines up the sentences on the page so that the key word stands out.  When you read through the sentences, you get a strong sense of how that word is used, and what kind of meaning it holds.  In the case of the following example, you could easily replace the word "whitest" with "best" in the same way the word "injun" is often coupled with "dirty"

The neatest thing about reading this collection is imagining the writing of it - realizing that Abel is not writing in his own words, but that he's cutting apart novels and piecing them together in bits of his own... he literally deconstructs literature and recreates his own art from the ruins.  And what emerges is no longer the stereotyped "dead Injun" of western novels, but an alive, vibrant and rebellious nation of people who won't be defeated.

Although not really aimed at the average reader, I would recommend this challenging, "cutting" edge collection for those who don't mind some poetry that comes in impressions and big pictures, as opposed to poetry that can be analysed word by word.    I didn't understand this whole work, but that's ok - every time I go back to it, I'm challenged anew.