Cut to Fortress

Cut to Fortress, the debut collection by Tawahum Bige, a Łutselk’e Dene, Plains Cree poet, wrestles with topographies of colonization, both in Canada and within the speaker’s personal relationships, which often involves confronting and contradicting received knowledge from authority figures. In one poem, a writing professor considers colonization “too abstract,” so the speaker concretizes the idea:

Colonization is a two-man saw:
a signed-in-blood, written-in-English
contract atop a forest cut to stumps
called fortress […]

Indeed, colonization—and reactions to it—can assume many different forms, whether it’s the misguided caretaking of well-meaning family (it’s “the children’s book my Dene mother / reads to me at five: Cowboys and Indians”) or acts of rebellion by a speaker coming of age: “it’s burning my humanities / and English notebooks at thirteen.” But the most enduring legacy of colonization for Bige is that of the trees and forests of the Canadian northwest: “Colonization is forest cut to stumps.” This link between land and its inhabitants is critical for Bige, who spent time behind bars for his activist work protesting the expansion of the Kinder Morgan/Trans Mountain’s pipeline.

While Bige’s occasional stream of consciousness style distracts from the prevailing lyricism (“Where’s my bed? Where are my friends? / Is this story even interesting?”) and the poems’ frequent end rhymes quickly become formulaic (“I wouldn’t mourn the loss of imperial life, / you know the type, that’s kept control with strife / and combat knife”), the book’s probing considerations of how we are all implicated in these acts of colonization outshine any reliance on predictable techniques, as in a flashback where the speaker’s mother enforces gender stereotypes and affirms imperial military ambitions during one particularly panicked playdate:

            Play with the toy soldiers, Just

Play with the toy soldiers, Just

             in the sandbox tray.

             Careful—
             Mom screams

Play with the toy soldiers, Just
in the sandbox tray.

The speaker’s relationship to narratives of colonization is similarly complicated by his own complicity, and the aptly titled “return me” is tinged with a sense of guilt:

i tried to go back once
               to the sapling stories
               the spring rains
               and rich soil
               i now see ruins
               of this tree fort
               that i longed for